By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
I was at a restaurant recently, speaking to a woman who is married to Lieutenant Colonel Del Myrick of the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office. The Lieutenant Colonel had just been arrested, but his wife did not seem to be terribly troubled since he was only a few feet from our table, penned up behind a chain link fence that probably would have blown over if he sneezed. He was in “jail” to raise money for cancer prevention and set free after 30 minutes of hard time and raising $1,000.
While Myrick’s wife patiently waited for her husband’s release, she chatted with other friends at our table and seemed surprise to learn that I actually have a daytime job that is not related to being humor columnist. Her interest in conversation diminished considerably more when she learned that I’m an insurance claims adjuster and have been for 32 years. I tried desperately to convince her that water mitigation review can be as exciting as police work, and that it takes a trained professional like me to know that you only need two air movers in a room that measures 20x15.
She moved to another table.
It was yet another moment in my life where I realized that being the youngest violinist to ever play with the Reading Symphony Orchestra (c. 1975), or the goalie to allow the second most goals in a Berks County high school soccer game (c. 1987), was not enough to offset the mundanity of a career spent in insurance.
If I’d only become a lawyer instead….
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As an insurance claims adjuster, I have met and worked with a number of attorneys, not all of whom sucked as human beings. On numerous occasions, I was required to participate in stressful mediations that featured a phalanx of finely-tailored lawyers, a retired judge whose car service was picking them up at 4:30, and me having to wear long pants.
The attorney who handled many of these mediations with me and on behalf of our insureds referred to me as “the eye candy,” and even I knew that I was mere fluff in these proceedings—a lesser being because I didn’t practice law, which I naively thought would have required extra schooling and passing a bar exam that consisted of more than downing as many pints as possible at J. Brian’s happy hour.
Oh, how wrong I was, as President Trump’s blink-of-an-eye press secretary, Katherine Zacharia, recently demonstrated.
I do not mean to diminish Ms. Zacharia’s going to law school and graduating from Pepperdine, but just because I once took, and passed, a Renaissance music class at Mary Washington College does not mean that I can wear pantaloons or play the lute. To advertise oneself as an attorney, or a Renaissance musician, conveys a degree of achievement that doesn’t appear to have been accurate in the case of Ms. Zacharia. When asked by a reporter on one of her first days on the job where she’d passed the bar exam she said “China,” which was the middle school equivalent of coming back from summer break and telling your buddies that you now had an actual girlfriend, but you couldn’t introduce her to them because she lived in, uh, Canada.
When pressed a few days later, Ms. Zacharia clarified that she hadn’t heard the bar exam question properly due to the background noise from Air Force One and thought she’d been asked where she she’d gone after graduating from law school.
There are still a number of questions about Zacharia’s credibility, even though she’s no longer press secretary, as well as questions about government background checks. (Did they use the same company that does Trump’s cognitive exams? My wife had to go through a background check in Spotsylvania County just to run the concession stand at Chancellor High School.) But beyond the issues of Zacharia falsely claiming to being a licensed attorney, the bigger mystery is who goes to Shanghai to unwind on the heels of three grueling years of law school?
After my high school graduation, my friends and I went to a beach house in Ocean City, NJ for a week of underage drinking and to contemplate out futures. No one’s dream included becoming an insurance claims adjuster.
After my college graduation, I stayed at a waterside retreat for a few months to find myself. During that time of reflection—where my parents insisted on reminding me it was the house I’d grown up in and was not a waterside retreat just because there was a creek in the backyard—I learned that betting on fabled-prognosticator Chris Baker mounts at Penn National Race Course paid more than working for a weekly newspaper in Kutztown, and that the ability to interpret symbolism in Moby Dick was not considered a “life skill” by most employers.
My friend Drew Wine was once asked by a woman in a bar what he did for a living, and he said he was the operator of the Rebel Yell at Kings Dominion. It was a brilliant line, and one that I co-opted a few times with the added detail that I had only reached the competency level to run the roller coaster when it was moving forward.
I thought that was funny, but in hindsight it probably showed anyone listening that the man before them lacked ambition, not only in wanting to be a carny, but in his inability to be a Rebel Yell operator who could run a roller coaster both forward and backward.
I should have aspired to greater things. I should have said I was an attorney who took the bar exam in China.
That would have kept me in good standing—for at least five days.
***
FXBG Advance columnist Drew Gallagher’s book Funny for Nothing was released on July 28 by Long River Press. It’s available for sale in the Fredericksburg area at Novel Bookstore (212 William Street), Liberty Town Arts (916 Liberty Street), The Card Cellar (915 Caroline Street), Wren & Sparrow (807 Caroline Street), and Laudenbach Brewing in Stafford (45 Centreport Parkway, Unit 101). You can also buy it on Amazon.
