I’m at the age where a lot of my contemporaries have children just starting out, and despite every economic indication coming out of Hollywood, a lot of them want to work in show business. Every now and then, since I have been a writer and showrunner, I’m asked by friends if I’ll talk to their children about career possibilities in the entertainment industry.
Actually, I’ve been at that age for nearly a decade. Most of my friends started families in their early 30s, which means the children we celebrated and cheered years ago during soccer and Little League games, the children who forced us to sit through productions of Pippin and worse (if there is worse), and the children we sent graduation presents to — well, they’re in their late 20s now. Some are even in their early 30s. And a lot of them — maybe even most of them — are living at home, taking money from their parents.
So the appropriate time to ask Uncle Rob to sit down with them to talk about careers in show business has long since passed, but that’s how it is these days. Children take a long time to grow up. They used to say a person wasn’t really an adult until their first job. Now it’s more accurate to say no one really grows up until their parents are filing Chapter 11.
Sometimes, these adults have law degrees or MBAs or come to me from high-powered jobs in finance or consulting. Some have amassed thousands of dollars in student debt for degrees in things such as “The Poetics of the Environment” and “Bronze Age Gender Queer Societies.” But what all of them have in common is this: they are not prepared for the news, which I deliver to them with ferocious honesty, that their first job in the entertainment business will be making sure someone like me gets his lunch order. And not just gets his lunch order but gets it on time, on the bread type specified, and with extra whatever-was-ordered-extra-of and absolutely no whatever-was-ordered-absolutely-none-of.
The conversation always goes the same way. The young adult shrugs as if to say, No big deal, how hard is getting a lunch order right? And I have to repeat, in more emphatic tones, that this is a very important part of every show business career, and the people who take it seriously and ensure their boss is fed with timely accuracy are the ones who go on to become big shots in Hollywood. The ones that don’t end up … well, I have no idea what happens to them because they just disappear one day, swallowed up by the failure to get a turkey wrap exactly right.
The generation raised to think they’re super special creative lovelies who never left their parents’ adoring sightline — well, it’s no surprise they brush off the lunch order jeopardy. They’ve been told that life is basically easy and that everyone is allowed to make mistakes, which is exactly the wrong way to look at a career in the entertainment industry. Getting a lunch order should be easy, but for some reason — the chaos at the restaurant or the slapdash way orders are written and delivered — it’s actually pretty hard. It’s a job, in other words, that requires respect.
The bad news is, I have heard from many former recipients of the Uncle Rob Career Counseling Course that they weren’t up to this harder-than-it-looks trial by fire. An embarrassing number of my almost-proteges have ended up fired, dispirited, and back home. But there is some good news. I heard from a parent last weekend that the most recent graduate of my Get Lunch Right Seminar is thriving. He was promoted already, and his boss is already talking about promoting him again to a staff writing position on a TV series.
“This is great news,” I said. “I guess he made sure to get the lunch orders right.”
His mother nodded enthusiastically and then proudly told me how her bright, Ivy League-educated son cracked the Lunch Problem. When it was time to order lunch for the boss, he simply made sure he always ordered the same lunch for himself. Whatever the boss wanted, in other words, he always ordered a double. Her son simply made a statistical calculation based on probability theory and realized that the odds of both lunches being wrong were considerably different from the odds of a single order getting messed up.
“He is putting his Master’s Degree in Applied Mathematics to good use,” she said proudly. And since I wasn’t the one who paid for that degree, I nodded and smiled.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
