Job Satisfaction

I gotta say it's nice to have a regular gig that lets me be around people who work for a living. OK, our job is not exactly backbreaking, in fact it's by most standards cushy. But it does involve work. Customer service, constant attention, responsibility for large amounts of money....and you get screamed at constantly for no good reason and have to take it with a smile.
...If I'd stayed with my old dotcom jobs, assuming I hadn't been downsized by now, I'd be sitting in front of a PC workstation all day, doing something totally mindless that involves parsing user queries or somesuch BS, checking my email every 20 seconds and watching the cool new Quicktime movie that's going around the office. Also I'd probably be getting paid a lot more than I am now, and would occasionally receive bonuses or stock incentives or free beers that would have litle to do with my productivity but more to do with "corporate culture" and the fluctuating perceived value of whatever useless service my company claims to provide. I'd be around people who, like me, are nerds, generally middle-class slackers with ironic collegiate senses of humor, chasing that really nice apartment in San Francisco with the pretty rock garden and the really cool home entertainment center.
...The folks I work with now come from a lot of different backgrounds. They're first-generation immigrants, they're artists and ex-accountants, they've served in the military and worked at Disneyland. Ours isn't quite a working-class job, but my point is I don't think a single one of us is a graphic designer. And more than the other jobs I've had we work as a team to look out for each other, because we somehow have to stay sane in the face of the clientele. The gamblers are either thoughtless leisure-class princesses who can't count to ten because no one has ever corrected them when they get it wrong, or people with real jobs who have an unfortunate addiction to throwing away their hard-earned paychecks in a way that makes them crazy and mean. Again, not a lot of Final Cut Pro editors in the bunch.
...This is not to sound prejudiced, I mean a job is a job, but it must be said that a lot of people in LA, myself included, are in pursuit of that ultimate dream job, which is to be paid ridiculously for doing very little, or doing something very badly, or doing something that you love artistically anyway so how can it really be work? So a lot of us are actors and editors and screenwriters and forced to maintain a constant smiley-face as well as a discreet competitiveness and self-obsession, all in order to maintain the image of ourselves as a professional part of the dream factory. That in itself, just pursuing it, is a job, but it's not a very good one.
...So even though I get to see a lot of people at their worst, I guess sometimes it's better than seeing people at their most numb. And even though my job doesn't benefit the world in any way, it offers better stories and life experience than working for that godforsaken search engine.