Forget Becoming An Auto Journalist, The CIA's Job Benefits Sound Way Better

It isn't hard to see why so many enthusiasts dream of becoming auto journalists. Who wouldn't want to travel the world driving cool cars and get paid to share their thoughts on said cars? You get to meet all the coolest people in the car world, there's more free branded swag than you could possibly need, and every day's probably just as exciting as it looked on "Top Gear." As someone who's done it for nearly 15 years, I'll admit the benefits are pretty great, but after reading this recent New York Times article, forget becoming an auto journalist — go work for the CIA.

A CIA gig will probably involve fewer press cars, and the aforementioned NYT article does start with the FBI arresting CIA official David Rush, but hear me out. Even with the risk of maybe, possibly getting arrested or assassinated, the benefits of working for the CIA sound so much better than anything auto journalism has to offer, you'd be a fool to consider any other career path. Because once you get past the "senior C.I.A. official was arrested last week" part of the opening sentence, you get to the "investigators found hundreds of gold bars worth over $40 million stashed in his Virginia residence."

Yeah, you read that right. Allegedly, the FBI found a pile of gold bars at this guy's house, and all that gold was worth more than $40 million. Meanwhile, I've never been left alone with $40 million worth of anything, let alone allowed to take it home with me. If this is the first time you're learning that automakers don't actually hand out gold bars on press trips, I'm sorry. At this point, they don't even give out thumb drives, and if any one of the drives I've gotten had a crypto wallet on it, I sure never found it. 

If your detective skills are already telling you the FBI probably claims it found a lot more than gold bars in Rush's house, perhaps that's another sign you should work for the CIA. Because, oh yeah, they did. A little further down in the article, it says, "Investigators also seized nearly three dozen luxury watches, many of them Rolexes." Which is, again, way better than automotive journalism. No one's ever given me a single watch to review, much less offered me one for free. But you get dozens of luxury watches if you work for the CIA? Clearly, every watch-obsessed auto journalist made a huge mistake.

At this point, it's also possible you're a little confused. Anyone can steal things, even an auto journalist, and obviously the CIA doesn't just hand out gold bars any time you ask. So why do I keep talking about job benefits? I'll let the NYT take that one:

From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, "a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses."

When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed, the agency was "unable to locate the gold bars or significant amounts of the foreign currency," according to court papers.

That's right. If I'm reading this correctly, people who work for the CIA can just ask for cash and gold bars, and the CIA more or less hands it out like candy. What happened to the cash? Who's to say. Why did he need it? The court documents don't say, and the CIA won't say, either. 

But if you're picking careers based purely on the benefits, why would you pick the one where your boss tells you no every time you ask for even one gold bar, much less 303 of them? It just doesn't make sense. Do you know how many terrible decisions I could make on Marketplace awesome cars and motorcycles I could buy if my boss Erin would just give me a few gold bars any time I asked?