NEWTON'S LAW: JOB EVEN RINGO DIDN'T SWING: GETTING PAID WITHOUT WORKING

In a movie called "Lost in America," Albert Brooks played an advertising executive who, ticked at an office slight, gives up a lucrative job for early retirement, Winnebago dinners and self-discovery.

Within weeks, the open road proves unfriendly and, due to some bad fortune (his wife loses the family savings at a roulette table), the Brooks character finds himself at an Arizona employment office, looking for work, though in a finicky way.

The employment counselor is perplexed and more than a little amused that Brooks couldn't conduct his search for self on a six-figure income.

Asked if he couldn't think of a higher paying job, maybe something in the "executive box," the employment counselor applies the knife. "Oh," he says to Brooks, "you mean the $100,000 box."

Accept this sarcasm with the small bits of truth it holds. In grumbling moments, most working folks believe that somewhere there is a job they could do that would pay three, four, five times their current salary.

It's just holed up somewhere, maybe in the "$100,000 box." Albert Brooks shouldn't be begrudged for asking about it. The rest of us shouldn't be begrudged for laughing that he asked.

There is a broad consensus that the luckiest man of our times is Ringo Starr, a drummer of average ability who happened to occupy the riser behind the best pop songwriters ever. Ringo has been on the gravy train for nearly 30 years.

Don't look for Richard H. Reynolds to match that achievement, but don't expect him to look back with regrets either.

Reynolds has worked a pretty good deal for himself. He has achieved what working stiffs, in dark or bitter moments, can only dream of.

He managed not to work and still get paid for it.

Hey, even Ringo had to hit the drums.

That Reynolds set himself up this way at the largess of taxpayers might raise the blood pressure of some (and draw knowing smirks from others who expect public treasuries to be squandered); still, give credit where it's due ... the guy is living out a dream.

Reynolds was, until the spring of 1989, the personnel director at St. Louis Community College. You might remember this college system has a recent history of relaxed fiscal standards. The now-deposed president of the institution, Michael Crawford, had taken $47,000 from the system's coffers to remodel his office suite; the renovation included installation of an $84 toilet-tissue holder in his private bathroom.

Even in this grab-bag environment, Reynolds earned special points for chutzpah: he continued to draw his $62,594 annual salary for a year after his contract had expired.

The payments were supposedly "paid professional development leave" but Reynolds's contract had expired a day before the leave began and trustees had been told three months earlier that his employment would not be renewed.

Building on the Reynolds treasury, he started collecting last year on a three-year, $20,864 annual early retirement incentive, in addition to getting $10,437 for unused vacation days.

Here, Reynolds showed himself to be not so much a loafer as a gold digger. Bored perhaps two months into his leave, he took a $41,000-a-year job with the East St. Louis Housing Authority.

For all the ingenuity he showed in building his personal portfolio, Reynolds sees no need for modesty. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "I'm one of the best personnel directors in higher education in America."

How these things are judged, outside Reynolds's swelled head, is a bit hard to pinpoint. An honest day's work might be a good place to start.

None of this is to necessarily crucify Reynolds or define the type of immorality that allows people to gorge themselves at the trough of tax dollars. Nor is it a condemnation of college trustees who don't have good heads to go with the good hearts of their public service.

Maybe it's just about the question that goes begging when someone is making more money than you and doing nothing to earn it, which is:

Where does one apply?