Word: tester
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Traditionally, were you to ask somebody what "the best job in the world" is, you might expect to hear 'astronaut', 'movie star' or 'bed tester' thrown back at you. But for 34-year-old Englishman Ben Southall - and 35,000 other hopefuls - it was the six-month gig being offered by Tourism Queensland to be the caretaker of an Australian tropical island. And for the not exactly demanding 12 hours he's expected to work each month in Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef (key duties: snorkelling, feeding fish, blogging), he'll be put up in a three-bedroom...
...serious moving to a company. Still, there are some fragile pieces of art--all of them involve horses or places that horses graze or things horses like--that we can carry. I grab a foam-core-mounted map of Montana, and on the way to the new digs, Tester takes me down to the basement, where he worked in windowless offices for his first three months, holding staff meetings in the cafeteria, waiting for the office-shifting process to progress through the Senate. Mark Udall is now in Tester's old space, waiting. "It's just survival," says Udall...
...take the Senators-only elevator, which, sadly, doesn't have any cool Senator stuff in it, and when we reach the seventh floor of the Hart Office Building and walk into Tester's new office, it is hard not to feel like a family that's gotten picked for the bizarro version of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which people come to your house and, in just 48 hours, make it look like crap. Whereas once Tester had high ceilings and period details, now he has cubicles and modular furniture. It's just not Senator-worthy. Tester notices my disappointment...
...brighten up the place, I offer a housewarming present: a framed picture of me. Tester admires it a little too long and says he'll put it right above his desk--in a way that, if I did not know better, would make me think irony had reached Big Sandy, Mont. I cheerily point out that he's across the hall from Daniel Inouye, who is from Hawaii. "I get to say 'Aloha' every morning. Maybe he'll invite me to Hawaii," Tester says...
...Tester takes off for a confirmation vote, and I head back to the old office to wait for the phone guys to come and transfer the numbers. As I look up at his old giant ceilings, I realize Tester made the right call. Being a Senator is a huge job with a big staff, and to get things done, you need cubicles and meeting rooms, not marble and courtyard views. Besides, the Inouye staffers wear Hawaiian shirts to work a lot. That's never going to stop being funny...