Not For Everyone

I’m not sure what the worst job I’ve ever had actually was; I’ve worked some pretty bad gigs in my time, and many of them were bad in different ways. I’m not sure it’s fare to compare a job in which your boss is a total douche bag who makes your life miserable to a job where everybody is really nice, but the physical labor is unpleasant enough to make you wonder if permanent disability is really as bad as everyone says it is. By the same token, I saw an article on the wire this week that sounds like the worst job ever to me, but might seem like nice work (if you can get it) to someone who actually LIKES weddings…

A story being reported by Reuters tells the curious story of Office Agents, a Tokyo firm that rents out wedding guests to brides and grooms in Japan who would otherwise not have enough people (or too many of the same ones) at their weddings. That’s right; if you have no family or friends of your own, or if they’re all too cheap to travel to your wedding (or so flaky that you worry about them not showing up), this company will keep you from being embarrassed in front of your boss, your co-workers, and your new in-laws, by providing you will lots of clean-cut, well-dressed people to sit on your side of the aisle. For a small additional fee, they will even provide you with friends (or family) who can tell jokes, make speeches, or even give toasts…

Now, obviously, this kind of service has limited utility outside of Japan. In America, for example, there is much less pressure to invite your boss or your co-workers to your wedding in the first place, and unless you are unusually blessed, your in-laws will probably disapprove of you anyway, just because they’ve been conditioned by our dysfunctional culture to believe that this is how in-laws are supposed to behave. But similar firms do exist on this side of the Pacific as well; they’re more usually used to provide appreciative audiences at public events (product launches, sales meetings, franchising presentations, business conventions and so on), but they’re perfectly willing to furnish guests for social events if that’s what you want…

A much more interesting question, at least to me, would be how often people with perfectly good friends and family of their own hire professional guests just because their own guests would not look good enough in the wedding pictures. I know it’s a far-fetched suggestion, but I’ve met people who are easily that shallow; people for whom the wedding was more about looking good for posterity than it was about actually celebrating your (theoretically) most important relationship ever. I’ve never actually heard of a case where the marriage was shorter than the wedding reception, but growing up in Los Angeles I do remember a few cases where the marriage did not last until the end of the honeymoon…

In which case, maybe having some professional-grade pictures and video of yourself with a good-looking supporting cast wouldn’t be so bad. In any event, I’ll admit that getting paid about $200 USD plus food, drink and travel expenses doesn’t actually sound like a bad gig, especially for just a few hours work. But all things considered, if the pay was the same, I think I’d rather have a job delivering pizza than pretending to be somebody’s friend on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of their life…