I have a friend named “Dave”. He is a really great guy. Dave has strong morals. He’s probably never engaged in any kind of sex other than what is listed in the physician’s manual. He is not a church goer by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s not stepping on God’s toes at all either. Dave is a great conversationalist, never says the wrong thing in mixed company, and is just a good person all around.

Dave is a Farkologist. Dave studies things that have gone wrong and tries desperately to come up with answers. Unfortunately, as it is for most farkologists Dave comes up with more questions than conclusions most times. This is the farked state of farkologists. There are no definitive answers for why things continually go wrong and why they go wrong in the worst imaginable ways. This provides an endless stream of material to digest and it becomes a life philosophy. For some, it becomes the only thing they can do.

Dave isn’t paid for his slanted views of life. He’s paid to program .net and .asp nerdy type stuff. Dave applies his farkology mostly at work, but in his off-duty hours he is a life farkologist as well. He tirelessly analyzes life and how the dung is being slung. He enjoys it immensely. I know that because I don’t believe he’d continue day in and day out unless he was really driven by, and enjoyed it fantastically.

Myself? I enjoy dabbling in a bit of farkology with Dave on occasion as we’re having a beer at the local see and be seen club. Dave has a way of seeing things that can make even the most innocuous situation seem farked. There are unseen motives behind everything. And, they are negative. Dave is the consummate student of farkology, practicing earnestly and seemingly without tiring. We might spend an entire night talking about how screwed up things seem to be. We might really enjoy it too. But, while I enjoy it sometimes as it provides some great laughs… I prefer to keep a positive outlook overall. For Dave, his life philosophy is farkology. The state of the world is farked according to Dave, and there isn’t anything we can do about it except analyze it and talk about it.

I know of just one other farkologist that is any good at what he does. I used to know 2 but I now consider Dave Barry to be just a machine regurgitating old articles and cutting and pasting whole paragraphs from old articles into new articles. I just can’t see anything new being churned out by Dave. That might be FAR from the case, but my perception is that his farkology is limited to just a few situations that he liberally applies to all situations. I’m bored by Dave Berry’s brand of farkology by now but it took a year of it back in 1991 to reach that state. If you haven’t read his articles, try them, they might seem fresh to you.

So, being a farkology craving realist, I moved on to the next well-known farkologist that seems to think a lot like myself. Besides being good at what he does, expound on the negative, he’s quite famous for it. If you saw him on the street you’d never know who he was, but he has more money than God and a blog that has a bigger daily audience than www.CNN.com. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic series is who I’m referring to. Scott is one of the few people in the world that gets paid incredibly well just because he shares his negative outlook on life in the work place with a billion people through his comic. His insights are uncannily spot-on, and yet as good as they are I don’t think he has anything up on my friend Dave. The difference between the two appears to be that Scott can draw and Dave can’t draw.

Dave is making somewhere around $70K USD per year programming. He hates programming, he is only there doing it because, he has no other marketable skills. He’ll tell you that. He has worked in about 7 different corporate environments and they all sucked to varying degrees but the thing in common was they all sucked. I’ve worked in 20+ corporate environments and yeah, I’d have to say that everyone of them sucked too. My mind doesn’t do well in a corporate environment where I know the value I’m giving the company is $100K+ and yet I’m making only $60K and taking home and able to spend only $30K of that.

Dave knows the financial facts too. He’s in programming so he’s bringing $200K to the company and ‘making’ $70K and able to take home and spend just $35K. It’s something that smart people have a hard time coming to grips with. Some of us move to Thailand where we can eek out a meager (but happy) existence on just $8 per day. Others stay where they are and grind it out day after day and become hardcore farkologists that spend unpaid hours each day thinking, analyzing, questioning and talking about the farked state of things. There really are no answers, only more questions. Nobody is getting paid just to ask more questions.

If Dave could draw, he’d be making $100 million dollars, or, $50 million take-home.

How farked is that?