The worst communications job ever

Thanks, Steve Crescenzo at Corporate Hallucinations, for this great post. Puts things in perspective. When I think my job or my life sucks, I'll remember this one.

Would you do this job?

Having a bad day? Hate your job? Your boss sucks?

This story might cheer you up . . . because as bad as you have it, at least your job isn’t the one “Billy the Kid” had to do for almost a year.

I met Billy The Kid in Atlanta this week. His nametag said William, but he introduced himself as Billy, and in my mind he immediately became Billy the Kid, because he's from Texas.

After Day One, Billy was one of the drinkers in the bar, and I asked him what he did before he came to his current job.

Turns out Billy worked for the Red Cross . . . but in a very unusual role. He was on the ground in Iraq, near Tikrit, Saddam’s home town.

Billy’s job? He was responsible for delivering bad news from home to soldiers. So if a soldier’s parent died, Billy had to go tell him. If something happened to their spouse, or their kids, Billy had to pay them a visit.

“I was like the Grim Reaper,” he told me. “People would see me coming and tell me to get the hell away from them.”

That may be the worst communications job I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve heard of a lot of bad ones. Telling soldiers—who are miserable enough already—that they now have to deal with a personal tragedy could suck the soul right out of you.

The worst kind of news Billy had to deliver—even worse than the deaths—was when he had to tell a soldier who had been in Iraq for more than a year without a break that his wife was pregnant with somebody else’s child.

“I had to do that quite a bit,” he said.

If there is a worse job out there, I’d like to hear about it.