By the way, Conrad, I don't know how things are in your neck of the woods, but a lot of the grunt-work at the Northwest Folklife Festivals is, indeed, handled by unpaid voluteers, including, as I have pointed out several times before, the singers and other musicians.

Nobody holds a gun to their heads and forces them to volunteer.

(Look up "volunteer" in a good dictionary.)

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AND ALSO by the way, nurses and secretaries DO get paid. A young woman I was dating in college, in addition to going to school, was a secretary by trade. She was getting paid well enough to live off-campus and pay her college tuition.

My mother was a nurse. And my younger sister was also a nurse. This required four years of college, and they definitely got paid by the doctors for whom they worked. Salaries for nurses and receptionist is part of a doctor's overhead, and the costs are passed on to the patients.

Ever take a couse in economics? Or business management? I didn't think so.

So I reiterate jeffp's question: "Where do you get the idiotic idea that secretaries and nurses work for free?"

Don Firth