Will Consider Situation - Analysis

Satire disguised as career coaching

Ogden Nash’s central move is to give terrible advice in the voice of someone who thinks he’s being ruthlessly practical. The poem pretends to offer radical advice to a job-seeking young man, then immediately delivers the absurd imperative: be a snob. That bluntness is the joke, but it also sets up the poem’s real target: a workplace culture that rewards comfort, status, and proximity to power more reliably than effort. The speaker’s tone is breezy and bossy, full of confident little turns like Why, I’ve got ’em, as if a stack of airtight reasons is about to follow.

The “logic” that exposes the system

The poem’s comedy comes from arguments that are technically coherent and morally skewed. The speaker insists you’ll get on faster at the top because there are more people at the bottom, so the competition is stiffer. It’s a silly syllogism, but it also mirrors a real dynamic: scarcity at the top makes those positions more valuable, while abundance at the bottom makes workers replaceable. The speaker reinforces his case with a hierarchy anyone recognizes—presidents, vice-presidents, clerks—as if the existence of pay gaps is proof they’re natural. Nash lets the speaker confuse “what happens” with “what should happen,” turning injustice into evidence.

Comfort as a measure of worth

A clear shift happens when the poem pivots from rank to the body. The speaker scolds the reader for looking quizzically and declares you’ll never achieve fortune in work that makes you uncomfortable physically. From here on, the poem keeps translating economic value into physical ease: soft jobs are treated as smarter than hard ones, and the speaker supplies a bitterly vivid example. Postmen tramp through rain and snow to deliver other people’s checks to those in cozy air-conditioned offices. The indignation is tucked inside the joke: the comfort of the office worker is literally funded by money delivered through someone else’s discomfort.

Sitting down, getting paid: a cartoon truth

The speaker doubles down with a line that’s almost a proverb: people who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up. It’s exaggerated, but it lands because it’s close enough to recognizable patterns—desk work vs. physical labor—that the exaggeration feels like an exposed rule. The poem’s tension sharpens here: it’s funny to say you don’t need tea leaves to know this, yet the metaphor implies the “rule” is irrational, like superstition. Nash makes the world sound both obvious and nonsensical at the same time.

Leisure, bulging bodies, and the privilege of “health”

The later section widens the critique by showing how comfort creates more comfort. A comfortable job lets you accommodate more treasure and also gives more leisure. Even the consequences of ease—your waistline is a menace—are solvable through elite recreation: golf or tennis. By contrast, in piano-moving or stevedoring you have no time to exercise; you continue to bulge. The contradiction is pointed: the speaker claims physical discomfort blocks fortune, yet he admits comfort produces its own bodily problems—and then shows that only the comfortable have time and money to “correct” them. Health becomes another kind of class perk.

The punchline that reveals the cruelty

The ending pretends to be a neat summary—To sum it up—but it’s really the poem’s sharpest satirical jab. The only intelligent way to begin is to accept a sitting position paying twenty-five thousand dollars annually. The specificity of the salary makes the fantasy concrete, like a job ad from an alternate universe where ambition alone can demand comfort and high pay. Nash’s joke is that the speaker treats entitlement as strategy; the darker implication is that society often behaves as if this entitlement belongs to certain people by default. The poem laughs, but it laughs with teeth: it portrays a system where “getting ahead” is less about character than about starting closer to the cushion.