Blue-collar man, sort of
So on Sunday morning, I found myself driving a white van with "1800flowers.com" emblazoned on each side in big purple letters.

I was loaded up -- an arrangement in a Lenox vase ("The vase is worth way more than the arrangement," the florist assured me); two identical arrangments going to houses on the same block, and the old standby, a dozen long-stemmed red roses going to a woman in an apartment.

I was doing this as a fill-in for my wife, who drove 16 hours on Saturday from the dog show in Cleveland to our home on the Edge. She's buddies with the guy who owns the flower shop, and delivers for him on weekend mornings to help finance her dog habit. After all that driving on Saturday, the last thing she needed to be doing Sunday was driving the flower van. So I stepped in.

I'm lucky enough to have never worked at a minimum-wage job. The only time I have done anything resembling work outside my chosen profession is a very short teenage stint in my uncle's business, where my role was basically to be The Boss's Nephew. Other than that, the summer in Texas spent umpiring Little League baseball, and The Freelance Gig, I've never collected money for any work other than newspapering.

This has clouded my perspective in life, of course; I went years wondering how anybody actually made a living doing anything else. Most other jobs seem so much like, well, work. At this point in my life, of course, I envy those people, people who get holidays off and who aren't on 24-hour call at the whims of some terrorist or untimely celebrity death.

For a few hours on Sunday, however, I was just the flower-delivery guy.

So, of course, where was my first delivery? You guessed it: A television newsroom. The recipient of the Lenox vase works for the local Fox station. A security guard leads me to the newsroom, telling me along the way that he owned a flower shop back in New Hampshire or New York or New Jersey or somewhere new. The newsroom looks much like the one in which I work, except with fewer square feet and more video equipment. Manning the newsroom at 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday were two young male producers, who were most impressed with the ornate white vase in which the recipient's flowers were arranged. "Jesus Christ," said the guy who signed for it. "How much does that go for?" I was about to tell him I didn't have a clue when a loud beeper went off. "Uggghhh," he said, running to the source of the beep. "Breaking news ... "

With every bone in my body, I wanted to stick around and find out what the breaking news was. But ... I was just the flower delivery guy. I almost blew an internal gasket in the process of saying, "Thanks, have a good day," and walking back to the van.

It was interesting to be on the other side of the desk, as the service-industry guy rather than the servee. People, of course, are very nice to the person who delivers flowers to them. But I could tell I was still just the delivery boy. People are way more impressed with my real job than they should be, and at times, that has created in me an overblown sense of my actual worth to the world. I had no such issue on Sunday morning.

Having made all my deliveries -- on time, on target, safely and without incident -- I returned the van to the florist and prepared to return to my real life after essentially a three-week vacation. Alas, when I arrived Monday morning, that newsroom wasn't in a lot better shape than when I left it.

Chucking it all and delivering flowers for a living isn't an option, of course. But my four-hour foray into the real world has made me wonder even more what else might be out there.