After reading this article on the New York Times about The Brutal Life of Sanitation Workers and watching Top 10 Most Disgusting Jobs, it got me thinking about why workers who have such gross jobs get such little respect. Whether in their pay, the amount of social recognition and maybe even pride they take in…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A dentist, a hotel clerk, a bar pianist an elevator starter and a janitor (also ex-salesman) walk into a chapter of Working. What, never heard that classic joke? Neither have I. Dr. Stephen Bartlett (Dentist) First we start with the dentist who got a late start (28…
Today I went through an article on Cracked all about job interviews and how awful they are, I wondered what a similar article might look like if it focused on the next part: Actually having the job. Here’s my version. 5. Your resume didn’t really matter in the end It’s a nice initial feeling when…
There’s a semi-recent theory in psychology called Terror Management Theory and it concerns how we all try to live with the fact that we’re going to die. It says that in trying to deal with this we build churches, create nationalities to celebrate, busy ourselves with projects (like writing) and enter other worlds through books…
Last week we started from the bottom and now we’re…here? This continuation of The Demon Lover (referring to those who work with cars) is more focused on the middle and upper echelon of the Ford factory we saw in the last part. Whereas Phil Stallings the spot-welder wanted to be a utility worker, this time…
I’ve had a pretty exhausting day for various reasons so I’m sticking to a smaller entry to kick of this section. There should be three sections in total and they will gain momentum in terms of length as we go on. The Making Phil Stallings (Spot-Welder) We start this section of Book Four with two…
Here we have an interesting mixture of jobs: a private investigator, a photographer and a film critic. What’s notable about this section is that despite however much you might think a photographer and a film critic may have to say, it’s the PI who spends around ten pages talking about his job, not the critic or…
Maggie Holmes (Domestic) This time we don’t have the flurry of individuals we often have per section. The rest of the section is made up of two (relatively) lengthy interviews. Both are interesting in many ways and it starts with Holmes who is a person of color that mostly works cleaning folks homes. Her perspectives…
There are many old refrains when speaking about relics of the past: “Oh for it’s time it was a terrific movie.” “It was a true innovator and was beloved by many back then.” “If you had been alive then you would have loved it too!” All of these phrases imbue the present with meaning narrowly…
A few days ago I had the frustrating experience of having one of my favorite managers (and also one of my favorite people) actually act like, you know, an actual manager. This meant that they would constantly put pressure on me to do things, even if I was clearly disinterested or barely feigning interest. This…