No matter how job titles have moved on I was not prepared for finding someone genuinely offering their services as an Evil Genius.
As job titles developed from simple descriptions the next stage in their evolution was that of manager. I always aspired to be a manager but it was not long before the title was devalued by job title inflation and suddenly people who did not manage anything or anyone had manager in their title. Then we moved in to an era where the job title was meant to not only reflect what we actually did but was meant to make the role sound attractive so that others would want to join in and aspire to that job title. Roughly around this time the special title of Consultant was born which, in many industries, simply replaced the title salesperson and thus there are literally millions of people with the word Consultant in their job title leaving me wondering if there are so many people consulting who indeed is consulting them?
Now we seem to be in an era of the selfie we also appear to be in the era of the selfie job title i.e. job titles made to get attention quickly in a world where our average attention span is diminishing day by day and this is where my attention rests (albeit very briefly) today.
Whilst searching LinkedIn for a contact I had met I came across an individual whose job title was Evil Mastermind. This led me to do a search based on this job title and I discovered that on LinkedIn there in fact 30 people with the Evil Mastermind in their job title. Refining that to “current job title” and the search revealed 27 suggesting that 10% have since retired. Do you ever retire from being an evil mastermind or are you retired by Secret Agents of which there are currently 898. Of course there will only ever be one 007 except that at the time of writing this there were 4. They can’t all be the real 007 so I am drawn to the one with the enigmatic employer Spies R Us. This leads me to conclude thus far that the ratio of secret agents to evil masterminds is an optimum 33 secret agents needed to keep in check 1 evil mastermind.
I thought I would take it to another level and see how many Evil Genius’s there are in the world of job titles. It turns out there are 138 although only 102 are active. Now we all know Evil Geniuses need a different type of deterrent to keep them under control and for that we need… wait for it…Super Heroes of which there are currently 587. A much lower ratio needed but one would expect that wouldn’t one? After all super heroes are super.
Just to prove that good wins out in the end though there are 15473 different types of genius out there and only 138 of them are evil. Clearly the rewards are deemed greater for geniuses of a non-evil nature.
This started me on a whole voyage of exploration and discovery. Did you know there are 39049 Gurus out there? Now what do Gurus need to validate themselves as a guru? Its followers, of which there are only 1400 which, suggests all those gurus out there are not doing a great job.
There are 748 people with rebel in their job title and only 98 conformists suggesting that there is indeed a cause out there.
There are 3 Queen of England job titles out there one of which resides in Washington DC. Is she trying to tell us something?
I always thought that those with the title of Head Honcho were people who wanted to tell you they were the boss but wanted to show they had a sense of humour. There are 4234 of those. Bosses that simply call a boss a boss are more prolific there are 156799. Of course bosses and head honchos need workers and luckily there are about 1.18 million people with “worker” in their job title which may make those boss types feel better but somehow does not feel quite right given that LinkedIn has more than 350 million users. In an attempt to top up those numbers I also found 187 underlings of which 8 were chief underlings (there’s always a hierarchy even at the bottom) and 9302 slaves of various descriptions. I am still left wondering if there are too many bosses in the world.
As my curiosity grew I realised that everywhere in life there will always be a b****rd somewhere. In fact there are 9 self acclaimed lucky ones, 53 lazy ones and 1 nasty b****rd .
Finally I wanted to share with you a few of the more unusual job titles out there. I found…..
- 1 Master Pedant & Nitpicker
- 1 Bomb-Throwing Anarchist and General Misanthrope who incidentally used to be a Smarmy SOB…that’s some transition.
- 1 Rude Frenchman who has clearly decided to live the stereotype.
What does all this tell us about the world and our job titles? Not a lot but it does tell you a great deal about what I find amusing.
It does show that there is a lot of humour out there and a lot of people seeking to distinguish themselves by their title and not necessarily succeeding.
It is worth remembering that that humans are the most judgemental of species. One of the ways we make ourselves feel better about ourselves is to seek to make out we are higher up in some way than others. This can be through our job titles or simply through the thoughts we have about those seeking to distinguish themselves by their job title.
Of course, a lot of these job titles shout about what they think they are, aspire to be or care about. May be the real super heroes are the ones that don’t shout about it and simply get on with battling evil geniuses in their own quiet way.
What are your favourite job titles and what do you think they say about the world we live in? Tweet me @TheCalmPeople or comment below.
Bearing in mind what we are doing when we are being judgemental please stop yourself from being deliberately hurtful or malicious in your replies.
