The Perfect Job
On the assumption that the job is fit for God or a god (hereafter and maybe in the hereafter, “God”, for short), it stands to reason and faith that it should have the following properties:
1. The job will be entirely self-imposed.This means that the perfect job should be a form of self-employment, since, if it were not, it would have to meet someone or something else’s independent, prior standards, expectations, etc., which would constitute a limitation on a perfectly unlimited Ultimate Being and an infringement on its self-causation, omnipotence and all-encompassing will. That would seriously compromises God’s self-sufficiency and the theology of Divine Perfection.
2. The job will be entirely self-designed. If the perfect job and job description were designed by anything or anyone other than whoever or whatever had the job, that condition would, here again, create a dependency incompatible with the self-sufficiency and perfection of God. The job could not possibly be designed by some other force or agency, e.g., another god, force of natural selection or by a self-designing job, whatever that might mean.
3. The success of the job should be completely predictable, i.e., it should be a zero-risk job, from the standpoint of outcome risk-to-reward ratios and probabilities. Since God is absolutely omniscient, a successful outcome should be 100% predictable and guaranteed, otherwise it would be pointless or a potential compromise (if the success were only partial or otherwise limited).
But since God is quite unlike Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to pointlessly and eternally roll a rock up a hill only to watch it roll back, such pointless or even partial results would be incompatible with God’s perfection. Hence, the job should be both a sure thing to get and an equally sure thing to pull off completely successfully.
4. The job won’t be tiring. The Biblical notion of God’s resting on the seventh “day” is entirely at odds with God’s omnipotence. Omnipotent beings don’t fatigue. Divine rest on the Sabbath was probably just a case of role-modeling and encouragement for humans obliged to observe the Sabbath through worship (which requires not working) and a small reprieve from the curse of labor (in both senses) imposed upon Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden .
5. Any boredom associated with utterly predictable job results will be offset by the enjoyable processes of creating, designing and executing the job. This makes the perfect job an example of the principle that says, “It’s the journey, not the destination, that counts.”
Whether bored before or by creation, the product, God may have enjoyed the job exercise as a process, despite its predictable outcome, much as some under-qualified job seekers do today, when they craft and submit an interesting resume, despite knowing they have no shot at the job.
6. The job has to be absolutely safe. This is an assured consequence derived from God’s omnipotence and invulnerability to any form of harm.
7. The job offers flex-time, no deadlines and infringement of its own rules. This follows from God’s complete autonomy, including the self-delegated authority to suspend the job rules and violate the job description through performance of rule-breaking miracles (unless the latter are part of the job description covering natural law and order in the universe(s)).
8. Evaluation is by self-assessment only. Despite the injunction “Judge not lest ye be judged” imposed on humans, God cannot be judged by anything or anyone but God. Hence, assessment of performance on the perfect job must be entirely through self-evaluation.
9. The job, despite its perfection, should have imperfect competition. This is desirable just to keep the clientele in suspense and a state of commitment-testing temptation. That’s a one-sentence justification for the existence of Lucifer.
10. You can’t get fired, become redundant or furloughed. Being God, God is not vulnerable to any of these.
11. There is no need to network, including having a Facebook page, LinkedIn profile or a Twitter account. Any networking, e.g., through the likes of Moses, is optional and a matter of divine whim.
12. There is no negative environmental impact. Seemingly adverse environmental actions and impacts, such as plagues of locusts, flattening of sin cities, frog infestations, fire falling from the sky and transformation of the water of seas, rivers and ponds into blood—not to mention cataclysmic earthquakes, devastating tornadoes, endless droughts and horrific tsunamis—would, despite any appearance to the contrary, under the job/Job description fall under the category of “necessary environmental interventions”.
13. There are ample holidays. On a “deist” interpretation of God as a master clockmaker who merely makes, winds and “releases” the universe in a “fire-and-forget” mode, with no further intervention, the holidays are immediate and eternal, once the initial job of cosmic creation is done.
In mortal terms, this means having the Stephen King option to retire after publishing any one of his many blockbuster spooky novels.
Otherwise, being omnipotent, God can take a holiday at any time for however long desired.
14. The salary and revenues are never a problem. When you’re an omnipotent God, of what use could money possibly be?
15. No burdensome regulations and codes—except those created, again, by divine whim, i.e., by the job-holder.
16. No shift work: When the entire cosmos runs on your clock, its clocks are irrelevant. “Shift”, like “day of rest”, is a purely “anthropocentric”, i.e., human-centered notion of and for, if not by, (the) people.
17. The job is completely immune to any forces of supply and demand: It would be nice, indeed necessary, to have a job that is sheltered from the vicissitudes of the marketplace, completely unaffected by any supply and demand considerations, e.g., supply of and demand for the job services and products or other factors of production, such as raw materials, supplies and equipment, and, of course, supply of and demand for candidates for the perfect job.
At the outset, jobs with small well-capitalized start-ups can enjoy a cash supply-demand “honeymoon”, but that’s almost always short-lived. Funding being irrelevant to perfect-job tenure, supply-demand imbalances not only do not occur, they are also completely irrelevant to it. [See point #14, above.]
Moreover, since God holds a total monopoly on the supply of everything, including the labor required to perform the job and pro bono miracles, it may be claimed that Creator’s job has assured “vertical” integration of every factor and step of creation and production of everything.
As for demand for God’s services in the position of perfect-job holder and perfect job-holder, if it were a determining factor of operations, productivity and job viability, a lot more prayers would have been answered by now.