Supply-Closet Sex and Instant DNA

July 24, 2008 — -- I'm sure you're sick of hearing writers wail about how there's no way in hell Carrie Bradshaw could afford all those swanky shoes on the income a freelance journalist actually makes.

But "Sex and the City" isn't the only television show guilty of stretching the truth about my trade. On T.V., editors fly 3,000 miles to conduct a chat with a writer that would normally require a three-line e-mail. Book agents hop in a limo, cross a couple of state lines and surprise their authors for lunch. Aspiring authors make a couple of phone calls and land themselves a fat book advance in five minutes flat.

All dreamy scenarios, to be sure, and all pure fantasy.

But writing isn't the only profession that's been tarted up for the tube. Any CSI will tell you that running around a crime scene in heels in your Saturday night best is a recipe for blisters, sprained ankles and a hefty dry cleaning bill. And any lawyer or doctor will tell you that they don't have nearly as much supply-closet sex with their colleagues -- not to mention their clients and patients -- as their fictional T.V. counterparts do.

In fact, when I checked with my extended online network of working professionals, I found that everyone who'd ever toiled a day in their life had gripes about their T.V. alter egos:

Despite their televised versions, therapists protested they weren't all repressed bores and masseuses maintained they weren't all flaky sex addicts. Motivational speakers exclaimed they were not that irritatingly perky. Mediums transmitted that they didn't usually get bedside visits or phone calls from ghosts. I even heard from a commercial shark diver who snarled that he would never throw "whole cured hams, sides of beef and 20-pound frozen turkeys" into the sea to entice a Great White (apparently they prefer tuna).

Some workers have also found that the way their job is portrayed on TV can lead to unrealistic expectations about what they do for a living and how they should be doing it. See for yourself: