Bringing Home the Cookie Dough

I know I have a glamorous and important job, and I know you are secretly jealous.  I get to use fancy phrases like "value added," fly to exotic cities like Cleveland, and generally save the world with my synergistic approach to work plan execution.  Also, I use pivot tables! But at times the responsibilities of this career can weigh heavily on my shoulders and it is at those times that I consider making a career change.  It is hard to imagine a career as value added as this one (see!), but one I have been quietly pondering is a career in the field of chocolate chip cookie tasting.


I only learned of this option when my friend Alisa, a Harvard-educated corporate litigator, told me she aspires to be a member of this profession.  I know, on the surface it doesn't sound like a job that adds value to society, but let's give this some thought.  Chocolate chip cookies play a very important role in modern society.  Unappreciated day at work running down unexpected charges to your budget code, which entails contacting people you don't know to ask them with whom they went to lunch and what they discussed over that lunch? Fix it with a chocolate chip cookie.  Unappreciated night at home reteaching yourself 9th grade algebra, only to find there was a typo in the math problem you worked hard on and even pestered both your neighbor and your cousin for help? Break out the Nestle's Tollhouse.  Unappreciated late evening trying unsuccessfully to tell the American Airlines award desk AGAIN how to spell your daughter's name correctly so that she can actually redeem her lifetime of frequent flyer miles, 17,000 of which have mysteriously disappeared already? Crunch down on a chocolate chipper.  Suddenly the frustration of your day melts away - the cookie almost literally is patting you soothingly (on the inside your mouth, of course) whispering, "Don't listen to these unappreciative clods! You are smart, pretty, hardworking and truly deserved to get the lead role in the 8th grade play that went to that smug Reagan, although of course you have moved beyond that crushing disappointment as you are a fully actualized and secure woman."


Imagine, instead, if in any of these instances when you bite down, you get a sub par cookie!  A cookie with the wrong ratio of cookie to chip.  A chip that is too sweet - or worse, too bitter!  A cookie that is rock hard.  Far from helping you cope with your difficult situation, such a cookie only adds to the frustration and anger you are already feeling, and the world is a worse place for it.  Perhaps it is just such an experience that let the woman behind me on the train the other morning to karate chop me in the back of the head when the only offense I may have committed was swinging my hair. (Note I did not actually condemn the assault - in fact I actually feel some respect for it and am just trying to understand how the woman reached the decision to take that particular action against me so that I may employ that same rationale to a similar situation myself, should one arise.  Which it will.)


Is it really that much of a stretch to say that many of the world's worst conflicts might never have happened if there had been some really good chocolate chip cookies around to soothe the opponents as the issues escalated?  Ok, it is completely a huge stretch, but it would still be the most awesomely delicious job ever.