Unsurprisingly to some (including myself) the so-called “makers and takers” within society are not a uniform people who are hellbent on exploiting other people for their advantage. Oddly enough, the category of people who deal with lots of money whether it be through expensive houses, boats or the stock exchange are a multi-faceted bunch of…
I’m not quite sure about the title for this section, “The Quiet Life”. If you ask me the only possible life that could be quiet is our first prospective interviewee, the book binder. But as for the pharmacist and the piano tuner (who literally works with sound everyday) I find myself a bit skeptical about…
I would say this part of book five is going to help me stretch my “feminist legs” but that sounds weird. Therese Carter (Housewife) Right off the bat I just want it to be clear that this article is going to be short. Mostly because this part of book five is only 7 pages long…
For a few reasons or more this section of part 3 is going to be a little challenging for me. The main problem being that the first two people I’m going to highlight from Terkel’s interviews are actually happy with their jobs. And these aren’t jobs you would usually associate with being happy either. So…
There’s a lot of variety in this section of book five. There so much in fact that I’ve had to split it up into two different sections. It certainly helps that some of the interviews are short and to the point. So Terkel ends up getting around 4 interviews in about 15 pages which is…
We’ll be going a little short today with only two entries to cover but them’s the breaks of this chapter. Counting isn’t a particularly in depth look at the world of financial jobs at 10 pages, but maybe Terkel just finds math as boring as I do. Still, there’s definitely some winning equations in this…
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…
As I sit cross-legged with my brutally unkempt hair reaching past my shoulders I’m completely aware of the situational irony that I am about to criticize folks who work in beauty. I’m not exactly the kind of person who will ever be put on a magazine, I’m one of the last people to think about…
The Parking This time we have a twofer and are tackling two different sections of Book Four. The trick here is that part 3 and part 4 combined are only 10 pages long. I thought about, for a moment, just doing it one part at a time. But I don’t wanna space things up that…
Well, you don’t always need many interviews to finish off a chapter. Sometimes you just need one. A long one. Frank Decker is your guy for that sort of thing. Frank Decker (Interstate Truckdriver) So this time Terkel has it as “truckdriver” but my web browser disagrees this is a word. It’s a nice(?) middle…