Dear Writers' Guild:

I know as a fellow writer, I should be incredibly sympathetic to your plight as Hollywood writers. But when I say 'fellow writer', I truly mean that you (plural) and I share one small trait. We all have computers, and we write on them. However, you are getting paid approximately 200,000 dollars a year to tap out cute little sitcoms and bouncy little mystery stories. Occasionally, you really stoke our fires with an intelligent and meaningful story, but even those television oddities grow stale after one or two seasons. In fact, those of you who have been brilliant enough to write for "Arrested Development" and "Dead Like Me" are probably now in a psychiatric hospital somewhere, suffering the hallucinations brought on by all of the reality garbage pumped out of the camcorder-genre of entertainment. And for all five of you clever writers, I am truly sorry. That blows.

I will not attempt to validate this stunning rejection of television writers with suggestions that I am a better writer. In fact, if you were to diagram that former sentence, you would find I am merely a strange amalgamate of post-Romantic-period writers and Virgina Woolf's pathetic self-esteem. If some hot-shot Hollywood producer demanded I write a witty dialog between two one-dimensional characters, I would probably have to go ahead and shoot myself in the foot before I even sat down--that's how bad it would be.

However, I cannot feel any inordinate amount of sympathy for a group of people who are demanding more money for doing something they should love doing, anyway. While I certainly understand that fat cats somewhere are getting fatter based on your writing, I would also contend that all of us play a part in some fat cat, somewhere, getting fatter.

In fact, it is almost anti-American to wish for higher compensation for a job that is making someone else really, really disgustingly rich. You're just being a bunch of big whiners.

I know I've said this several times before in past diatribes, but I think I have an excellent point. I am a social worker.

A social worker.

True, I am embittered and regretful of this choice of profession. Had the school I attended actually done its job and educated me, I would have chosen management, human resources, or Internet biology as a degree. Instead, I went with the foolish choice of social work. And I am paying the ever-living price for it. I work fifty hours a week for $33,000 a year. For this money, I am expected to:

-Attend four hour long staff meetings that talk about exactly nothing
-Create a dialog between nine or ten other agencies who are also dealing with one individual receiving services
-Answer close to twenty calls a day
-Screen mindless intra-office emails regarding the contents in the break-room refrigerator
and
-Pretend to understand Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security Insurance, Social Security Disability, Food Stamps, Section 8, and all other related documents, policies, and administration purposes of these entities.

So, please. Do not whine about your salary being so small. It could be a lot worse. For a lot less money.

Now, go do your job and pump out another season of 'Heroes', because this last season could not have gotten any worse if Eddy Murphy and a 'Norbit' character showed up with the power to unsnap bras using one finger.

Thanks for listening.

Your Friend,
Fritz