So, the other day, I was talking to John about his home, and he brought up to me the strangest idea. It seems that, on his planet, everyone goes to work so that they can get things. They don't do it for the collective good, they don't do it for the personal growth, they do it so that they can exchange their lives for meaningless objects. He also told me that, depending on what you did, you could get better objects for one thing than you could for another. I seem to understand that. Obviously, the person who designs a particular product should make more than the person who sells it, it only stands to reason.

But here's the funny part. It seems that the "two best paid" (John's words) types of people on his planet are the sales people and the sports people. He said, "Anyone can design anything, if you give them enough time and the materials to do it. But only a special type of person can make just about anyone want one, even if they don't need it." He said that because these people are the ones who generate money for the companies they work for, they get the most money. And I could sort of see that, although I still feel that the engineer did the more important work, and therefore should have the nicer things. I talked this over with my contact on earth - you've met him, he's the guy who runs this page, and he said that salespeople get paid more because they have to put up with the (and I know that my translator microbes screwed this up) cow manure of their customers. He said that even in his job, where he sells money to people, which, he said, on the surface sounds easy, it's a tremendous pain in the neck. (Although why dealing with people hurts his neck is beyond me.) After almost an arn of trying to explain to me why he should get paid better than some dumpy engineer, I asked him about sports people.

Both he and John are in total agreement on this one - it's cow feces. (JC tried to explain to me that it's somewhat similar to garbage, which, I guess explains why his planet is so polluted. He also said that I'm saying it wrong - it's supposed to be pronounced "bull shit", but that means even less to me.) He told me that these people get paid millions of dollars to do nothing more than what children do at play. Of course, I have no idea what millions of dollars are. He explained to me that, having gone to school for a grand total of 20 years to get his doctorate in theoretical physics, he was making about seventy thousand dollars as a scientist for IASA. He said that was enough to afford a halfway decent house, a comfortable vehicle, some entertainment, and feed himself. It offered nothing towards savings. He said that there was one salesman who, by the time Crichton left earth, had amassed ninety billion dollars - all to himself! However, he said this was not "bull shit", but "genius marketing strategies." I think that if someone went to school for 20 years to make less than one one-millionth of what another person makes, that's pretty much toadstools, (Which, upon comparing idiomatic usage, according to Crichton, means pretty much the same as his bull shit.), but humans have always struck me as being full of toadstools anyway. I digress.

The point is, he worked really hard almost his whole life to learn everything he could, and open up gateways to interstellar travel for humankind, improve their lot in life, their position in the universal food chain, and he gets paid dren. This "Michael Jordan", who he seems to have a lot of hostility for, got paid millions of dollars to throw a ball around. I see Crichton playing with a ball of rubber he picked up on the commerce planet. It doesn't particularly entertain me to watch, yet people pay this Jordan character what, according to JC, are extraordinary sums to do that very thing. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this?