Bullshit Jobs

I just read about the recent poster campaign in the London tube system about the meaninglessness of most jobs.  A lack of camaraderie, which can be caused by back-stabbing co-workers, tyrannical employers or supervisors, favoritism and plenty of other things, helps to create a meaningless atmosphere. That job I talked about in the first post, about being a stuffer in a soft sculpture factory, would strike many people as meaningless. As you can see in that post even I thought it was a peculiar way to make a living. But I can't remember ever waking up and thinking, "Ugh, I don't want to go to work today." The only job I've had that I can honestly say I hated going to was being a carrier for the United States Post Office. Now there's an organization that knows how to suck all the fun out of everything. At first, I really enjoyed that job because I was outside all day and got tons of exercise but the way the supervisors pile it on and nag, nag, nag just wears a person to the bone. My supervisor had been annoyed with me ever since the day after she recommended me for a permanent position. That's the day I had an accident with a postal vehicle. I was short of sleep, partially because of working 11 and 12 day stretches with only a day off in between, and partially because I had a second job sewing costumes at home (I was on a major push to get out of the debt I'd built up the previous year while severely under-employed). To be honest, I think I dozed off, although I never mentioned that to the post office and while swerving to keep the van upright struck the bumper of a parked porsche. Now this car already looked as though someone had beaten it with a club - stripping some rubber from the bumper did not detract from the curb appeal of this car at all. In fact, the guy who owned the car was so un-fussed about it that he never came in to collect the money the PO insurance team felt he was owed. But that didn't stop my manager from being extremely fussed! She punished me every chance she got, by assigning me routes that were too heavy to be done in the scheduled time, by loading me up with extra streets from other routes and not allowing me travel time, by scheduling me to follow other carriers who were known to leave messes behind when they finished a route. Once I had the feeling she was trying to set me up to take the blame when some money went missing. I stuck it out long enough to be assigned a route of my own and that did make things better for awhile. However, one of the duties of a supervisor is to spy on the carriers and make sure they don't take a minute more for breaks than they are entitled to. Carriers are supposed to bust their asses getting an overload of work done in the minimum of time. I think the post office would like to execute anyone that clocks up as much as five minutes of overtime. On the flip side, you'd think they'd cut the carriers some slack on a light mail day. And you would be very much mistaken. It so happened she caught me and two other carriers relaxing over lunch one day and you would have thought we were committing high treason by taking an extra 15 minutes. And you couldn't say you were tacking on your two 10 minute breaks to your lunch (which was, in fact, what we were doing) because that was against Post Office Rules. The post office would like people to believe that the first postmaster-general got these rules before Moses received the 10 commandments. So be nice to your carrier because he or she works in a mean-minded, uncaring system that does not value the carrier's contribution to society.
So everyone's job should be meaningful; that's fine and dandy but who decides which jobs are meaningful? And what's going to prevent glamour from overshadowing purpose? For my money, the Molly Maid who swabs out the building's toilets is a far more important person than the latest American Idol. Judging from the the length of time that show has gone on there is a surplus of people who have some mediocre, marketable talent and a dearth of people who know one end of a johnny mop from the other. Society needs more people who are willing to do the dirty jobs, the mundane jobs and the unsung jobs than it needs people squealing for a chance to bask in the limelight.
If you're interested in the original article that inspired the poster campaign - and it's well worth reading - here's a link: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/. If necessary, copy the link and paste it into your browser. You'll be interested to see some of the jobs the author, David Graeber, suggests might be so much BS.

The First Bead

How Do You Know Where To Start?

Everything has a beginning but it is not easy to pinpoint where that actual beginning is. What possessed me, a shy, introspective person - a person so shy that she is quite comfortable not talking to actual other people for days at a time - to open a store? Most of my working life has been spent in service or retail kinds of jobs, with the exception of my first job. That job was as a stuffer in a soft-sculpture factory. When I told my mother I was stuffing pink flamingos for a living she thought I was working for a taxidermist. It was a fun job in many ways, although very dead end. After all, how many life-size pink satin flamingos does the world need? I worked there with a friend from college, both of us drop-outs. Other employees floated in and out, but mostly is was just us and the owner. We listened to the radio and lived for 3:00 when Book Time read by Dick Estelle came on. While we laughed and sang and smoked like chimneys the rest of the time, we maintained absolute silence while Dick read to us, only speaking during commercials. And now that I think about it, it was very strange that we smoked on the job. If the world doesn't need an abundance of pink satin flamingos, it probably needs even fewer that reek of tobacco smoke.
Alison eventually moved to New York so I actually got promoted to assistant manager. Considering that the most people that ever worked at this place was four, including the very hands-on owner, the promotion was about as dumb and meaningless as it sounds. And I wasn't even very good at it! We did a monthly inventory, and I regularly forgot to multiply the number of stuffing bales by their weight which lead to many scenes with the owner. These scenes always depressed me because I quite admired her and wanted to earn her respect. Here's a tip: people tend not to respect you when you burst into tears every time you are criticized. Laura, the owner, was quite a dynamo - she'd gotten her start by selling at craft fairs, filling her VW bug with her mostly avian stuffed creations and driving from venue to venue. She was a genius with a sewing machine. When she got married she made herself TWO wedding dresses. One of them she designed herself and the other was a copy of the one Lady Diana wore when she married Prince Charles. Now Laura knew exactly what had propelled her into a designing career: when she started high school her parents informed her that they were no longer going to buy her clothes; she was going to have to pay for them out of her allowance. Back then it was very possible to make ordinary clothes for less than they cost in a store (see if you can guess how old Laura must be now!) so she started sewing her own clothes and had started making money with her machine almost immediately. Laura was the first self-employed person I had ever gotten to know. I did have a friend in grammar school whose father was a sculptor and later, in high school, a friend whose mother was a fiber artist but I never got up the courage to ask either one of them how you turned being a sculptor or a fiber artist into a job.
Although I wasn't so competent at some of the paperwork, I did learn a lot about wholesale pricing, setting up a production or assembly line, and what the paperwork should be doing. Fortunately, I was quite gifted (though sloppy) at mathematics in high school so I wasn't actually intimidated by the paperwork - just careless. Thus I began to understand the process through which a person turned a skill into a livelihood. And that is one beginning point that ultimately led to Ubeadquitous.