Oy ve! I was compiling a list of least-appreciated jobs this weekend -- it's what I do when I have three days off from work -- and guess how surprised I was to find a job at Apple as Numero Uno Least-Appreciated Job?

Yeah, exactly, I was that surprised! Whoda thunk?

The job in question is being on the App Store approval team -- the group of men and women responsible for deciding which of the thousands and thousands of submitted iPhone apps gets approved and which gets rejected for being at odds with Apple's developer license and internal guidelines.

From fart apps (You know, really? A fart app? Several fart apps? A plethora of fart apps? Good [lack of] god(s), but I sometimes despair of my fellow human beings), to Jesus faces, to South Park (How in the hell was that rejected? How does that make any sense?), to calculator alternatives, to would-be Safari alternatives, to Bittorent clients, to games, to currency converters, to Baby Shaker...come on, how was that approved?

There's a poop-ton of apps out there, all stemming from the creative ingenuity of thousands upon thousands of developers harnessed towards thinking of new and different ways of leveraging the strengths and limitations of the iPhone and iPod touch.

And the product of their creativity, their work, their dedication, sweat, and desire for a new income stream, all has to meet the standards of one of the most secretive and paranoid companies in the tech space.

Which brings us back to that least-appreciated job, the people who are stuck between navigating through what the developers submit and working for an exacting team of executives, guided by rules written by mid-level engineers and managers scared of pissing off those executives and then tweaked and rewritten by lawyers.

Now, add in a dash of the subjective, that old I-can't-describe-obscenity-but-I-know-it-when-I-see-it, and we get yet another layer of complexity and difficulty.

Good lord. I don't want that job. Approve the Jesus-face app and get yelled at because all the religious nutjobs out there get up in arms. Deny Eucalyptus for reasons that are entirely logical -- you can access pornography in the form of The Kama Sutra -- yet utterly devoid of common sense -- it's the freakin' Kama Sutra, which is available through Safari!!! -- and you bring a different poopstorm of (deserved) criticism down on your company.

And that's not even talking about just how many apps have to be weighed and judged, and then all those updates that have to be weighed and judged...

No thanks. I picture this job as being the kind that you can do well, really well, 99.99% of the time, but that .01% mistake is all that will ever be remembered.

The reality is that Apple needs to revise its App Store approval policy to, at the very least, include some leeway for common sense, and to become more open about that process and more communicative with developers. One of these things is likely to happen as time progresses (hint, it's not Apple being more communicative with developers), but until then I just don't want to be on the team stuck between the twirling and swirling forces pulling and tugging on each app.

At least Apple has had the good sense to reverse some of its most silly mistakes. Eucalyptus, for instance, is good to go, while Baby Shaker is gone. I personally see both decision reversals to be good moves.

In the meanwhile, I'm thankful for my job as the guy who gets to write about the guys (and girls) doing the real work.

Follow me on Twitter @TMOBryan.
Bryan Chaffin began using Apple computers in 1983 in a high school BASIC programming class. He started using Macs in 1990 when the Kinko’s guy taught him how to use Aldus PageMaker, finally buying a Power Computing Power 100 in 1995. Today, Bryan is the Editor of The Mac Observer, and has contributed to the print versions of MacAddict and MacFormat (UK).
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