Great Jobs #4: T-Shirt Designer

As an important preclude, I’ll just say that I can’t draw. At all. Small children laugh at my attempts to do even the simplist things, like rainbows. My stick men end up looking like some quickly done Hebrew. If I’m feeling ambitious and attempt to sketch something, the result usually ends up looking like a Magic Eye. And by Magic Eye, I mean Bleeding Out The Eye.

With that in mind, I’d love to be a T-Shirt Designer. I could start off by doing text tees, with such clever and ironic lines like “you’re stupid” or “you stupid dumbface.” I’d do this to capture the coveted Wal-Mart market, because it seems that large portions of that demographic don’t actually dress themselves, but rather wake up covered with something that seemed insanely funny while drunk. The only difficulty is getting the rights to slapping the Budweiser “seal of quality” (a.k.a. “we’re pretty sure you won’t die from this.”) on it, which will cause it to sell at least three times as fast.

After I make my first couple million that way, I could move up in the world and hire artists to do my work for me. I’d do one with a crazy angry unicorn, because he’d be pissed that people keep killing his people for aphrodisiacs or cures for cancer or whatever. But to balance that out, I’d have a happy unicorn who just carried donuts around on his horn, bringing joy and glaze to everyone he meets. Or like a knight and dragon dueling, but over a chessboard, contemplatively. I could do more emo/indie ones, like a robot falling in love with a mixtape, with a CD looking on jealously. They’d all be very hip and would take the world by storm, obviously.

And then, at the height of my dominance over the fashion world, I’d disappear, leaving only a puzzling trail of bread crumbs and a bunch of esoteric clues to feed the conspiracy theory folks. I’d just leave everything behind. Well, everything but the boatloads of cash. Strippers don’t come cheap, ya know.