Tag: dailyprompt-1930

Mayor for a Day

Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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There are a lot of jobs I would like to try for one day. The one I’m thinking of, however, is mayor of a small town. I think I could handle that job for about a day. I couldn’t do much damage in one day, I figure, even if I’m bad at it. I know there would be a lot of administrative decisions I would need to make, many routine. It would not be an exciting time. I’d still like to do it, just to say I did.

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

There are other jobs I would like to do for a day. Cat rescue. Journalist. Disaster case manager. Extra in a movie.

There are a lot of jobs I wouldn’t like to do because I don’t have the physical prowess or the mental know-how. I don’t want to be a stunt double, or a doctor, or a professional makeup artist. (I would like to try professional moulage artist if there’s on-job training, but making someone look beautiful is too hard.) Nor would I want to be a fashion designer, an actor, or an engineer.

Professional author? I would love that, because it would mean that I’ve been picked up by a publisher. I could do that for more than one day!

Working in a Test Kitchen

Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
View all responses

In my undergraduate years, my major was Foods in Business, a major designed to position people into the food industry. This was not what I ultimately did with my life, having discovered Family and Consumption Economics, and my life’s work, my junior year. But as an undergraduate, I wanted to work in a consumer affairs position, or even better, in a test kitchen.

I took a class my senior year called Food Science, where we spent the first half of the semester learning the chemical and physical properties of food, and the second half of the semester testing hypotheses about food. Mine was testing for substitutes for butter in baking poundcakes — margarine, butter flavored shortening, and regular shortening with butter buds flavoring. (Note: people preferred shortening over everything, including butter.) I fell in love with test kitchen work and, if it weren’t for the fact that I loved the thought of graduate school more, I might have gone into test kitchen work.

So, if I had a choice of any job to step into for a day, I would walk into a test kitchen. I think I remember the basics 40 years later — standardized recipes where one weighs all the ingredients on a scale (including a very sensitive one for small amounts like baking soda and seasoning), tasting rooms with good ventilation, white walls, and neutral lighting, testing of texture, crumb, and viscosity using simple and complicated testing. I think I can do it for a day with very little coaching.