IKNEW IT was bad, but I didn't know how bad--until I watched the 11 o'clock news the other night.

Somebody had compiled a list of the best and worst professional jobs, and as the top five appeared, I noticed that none of my several professions had made it.

Then I saw the "worst" list and there it was, right down at the bottom.

Newspaper reporter.

I was at the bottom of the barrel. It was devastating. The worst professional job on the list! How humiliating.

The first job above me that I noticed was enlisted soldier. These guys have latrine duty and carry 80-pound backpacks on their shoulders for 20 miles.

They get shot at and have to take orders from second lieutenants who don't know north from south. And my job as a newspaper reporter was below that.

I looked up higher and there was "dairy farmer."

Dairy farming is a rotten job. I know because I have done it. You have to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning to milk those cows and sometimes you don't finish the second milking until dark--even in the summer.

And those cows have to be milked every day, seven days a week, 12 months of the year.

Dairy farmers are out there in the sweltering heat of summer and the frigid nights of winter milking cows and cleaning manure out of the barn. That ain't fun.

Why, I once had to cover a story about a dairy farmer who slipped into a liquid manure pit and drowned. What an awful way to go!

And my job was considered lower than that. Who woulda thunk it?

Then I started thinking about what I go through on a daily basis. I have to sit through government meetings that are more boring than dirt and struggle to come up with a story when almost nothing happens.

I have to listen to retired people come to public hearings and whine about not wanting to pay higher taxes because they are on fixed incomes.

I have to listen to reasonably intelligent people come up with off-the-wall reasons why this or that shouldn't be built in their backyard.

I have to listen to politicians who promise things that they know they can never deliver. And I have to write about them as if they actually might somehow do what they say.