I have worked at so many newspapers and have become so hardened, bitter and cynical by this profession that I cannot help but agree with Miss America.

Specifically, Miss America 2000, Heather French, is tactfully peeved that a USA Today reporter will participate in the next Miss America pageant as a quasi-contestant.

Twenty-something-year-old staff writer Olivia Barker, who tends to write about odd fashion trends in middle America (the return of corsets, the popularity of mullets, the rise in flag tattoos, the advent of online plastic surgery), will join the preliminary contests in talent, evening wear and judges' interview portions, but won't be in the swimsuit competition or be eligible to win the pageant. Nor will she be allowed into the dressing room with the 51 regular contestants - which should finally prove to you all that I'm not the only person who's been kicked out of there.

"I don't know why they're doing it," French said in an Associated Press story. "I just hope it doesn't take away from the scoring of anyone else."

Others have said Barker can't really experience the pageant unless she walks the runway in her swimsuit. Tricia Bowman Branch, Miss New Jersey 1988, added that "she really should go through the whole process."

And yeah, how well can Barker really understand the competition unless she's spent years preparing for it and wondering whether nude photos of her will turn up from when her boyfriend caught her off-guard as she was coming out of the shower, or even when the doctors caught her off-guard as she was being born?

I do not entirely agree with the reasoning of these fine, lovely representatives of America's finest hopes, however. Barker may be begging out of the swimsuit competition because she supposedly has to file her story beforehand, according to George Bauer, the pageant's acting CEO, in a story reported in The Press of Atlantic City.

And who knows but that Barker is staying out of the rest of the competition because the Miss America Organization prefers it that way. Maybe they're afraid she'll cause too much of a distraction, or maybe they suspect that the presumably gorgeous Ms. Barker nonetheless lives at her desk like most other people in the newspaper business and subsists on a Pepsi and Korean takeout; even the most hardened judge may shrink from the blinding, colorless flesh of a semi-naked features reporter.

But I have other gripes. I'll even skip the most egregious among them - that Barker is in her 20s and is working for USA Today. What bothers me is that a journalist gets to live out a fantasy as a beauty contestant. A reporter's job is not to have fun. A reporter's job is to go to miserably dull meetings, or try to go to miserably dull meetings and not be let in.

Of course, you might say that being a journalist is someone's fantasy as well. But I think a lot more people fantasize about being Miss America than about covering the public comment section at a zoning board of appeals. Few children say, "When I grow up, I want to listen to some rich idiot in Westport, Conn., complain for three hours because Sprint PCS wants to put up a cell-phone tower within 500 feet of his tool shed."

Barker is giving an unrealistic picture of newspaper work. But I am willing to shut up about this if you just let me do the following things in the course of my job, while paying me overtime: