Crap Job or No Job?
II. Counterpoint: I Quit
III. Final Word: ... And Shove It!
Point: You Can Take This Job ...
Is it better to have a lousy job or no job? Should you take a job just to take a job if the job doesn’t seem worthy of someone with your skills and background?
After I graduated with honors from Harvard, I went to work in a video store. I didn’t start as a manager. I didn’t start as an assistant manager. I didn’t even start as a shift leader, which is the position in the video store echelon right below the assistant manager but still higher than a Guest Service Representative (otherwise known as The Guy Behind The Counter), which is what I was. Considering that Unnamed Video does not employ custodians, I had taken my Ivy League education and found a place at the very bottom of the retail world. I thought it was temporary. I thought I would have another job in a couple weeks. I was wrong.
I stayed with Unnamed Video for two years. Eventually, I went back to school for a master’s degree. To all those people out there thinking about majoring in English, I would advise at least a solid half-hour’s worth of contemplation considering the marketability of an ability to explain Grail symbolism in T. S. Eliot.
That I actually now consider working in a video store like Unnamed Video to be a challenging, sometimes rewarding experience is a little beside the point. For one, I just like movies, and the free rentals were great. For another, working in a video store is one job where people routinely asked for my opinion and actually took it into consideration. “Hey, have you seen this? Is it any good?” people would ask, and I could change the course of their evenings for good or ill. [If you’ll permit me a brief tangent on this subject: When you’re a clerk at the video store and someone asks you if a movie is good, you have a choice to make. Either you can lie (like the company wants you to) and say that The Terminal is a fantastic film, hilarious, brilliant, you just love that Tom Hanks!—or you can tell them the truth: that rarely have you seen Spielberg poop out such irresponsible fluffery as that humiliating piece of shit. You could actually save them from watching a bad film. You could recommend something else—something better!—and you will have salvaged two hours of that person’s life, and how do you put a price on that? Of course, neither of these options will work. For one, you don’t want to become a tool of the corporation, but you also will have limited success trying to get most people to like anything other than humiliating fluffery. So my advice? Lie. Say you haven’t seen it. During my time at the video store, I managed to not watch an absolutely absurd number of films.]
But that’s a good job. That’s what graduating from Harvard will get you. The store I worked at outside of Boston employed two Harvard graduates, a computer systems guy, and (for a short time) a chemical engineer. Before I got my diploma, times were tougher. I worked the jewelry counter at Wal-Mart (I know nothing about jewelry), where I pierced the ears of small children and made them cry. I also dug trenches, cleaned bathrooms, and was a telemarketer two times over (once for Harvard, calling alumni asking for donations, and another time for a market research organization). In college, I had a job for two weeks delivering papers, but I was mercifully fired from that one after oversleeping two days in a row. Outside college, I worked the night shift. I worked weekends. I did not turn down any job that required me to start at minimum wage, and I got to know how insane the general public really is when they can’t get what they want. People are mean bastards, and I took their shit and gave them what they wanted (even though what I really wanted was to argue the very need for them to exist, let alone get a free rental out of me).
Wouldn’t I have been better served to just say no to all this crap and wait for something better? Perhaps. But you should understand that at the time, the job market was pretty tough. A lot of my fellow graduates were also spending lots of time on the couch watching daytime TV. Even the valedictorian of my graduating class at Harvard spent his share of time wandering the job market. We all went through it, and most of us wound up going back to school after realizing that an undergraduate degree doesn’t really buy you all that much in terms of career prospects. You need to learn marketable skills, and unfortunately that’s not what an undergraduate degree is really about. For a real career, you need law school, business school, medical school, or something else that actually teaches you useful stuff. The four years you spend drinking and partying and blathering on about Zora Neale Hurston in order to get your undergraduate degree are really just a four-year process of distraction in which you accrue a whole bunch of personal debt (which, incidentally, cannot be eliminated by declaring bankruptcy). This debt is important. Without it, the world won’t trust you because you might be too idealistic to put a price on yourself. You’re like a politician that hasn’t got any dirt and therefore can’t be manipulated. The more debt you have, the more firmly you are tucked into the pocket of a system dedicated to turning you into another useful cog in the machine. If you’re starving and hungry, it’s that much harder to resist the White Witch’s Turkish Delight.
So the degree doesn’t buy you much, and usually you end up having to make a choice if you don’t immediately go back to school: do you struggle and fight your way into one of the few good jobs out there, or do you take the low road and just accept what you can get as you get it? Let me give you the boilerplate career guidance advice: extended periods of unemployment look really bad on your resume. A thankless job looks better than no job; it shows that you don’t mind working and are a person who does not let pride get in the way. The other thing is that even in the biggest crap job in the world, there are ways of working your way up the ladder. I became an assistant manager of the video store pretty quickly and was offered a managerial position just before I left the company to go to graduate school. (I probably could’ve made manager more quickly had I not been such a surly grump and so antagonistic when it came to customer service). Other friends have started out in similar positions at the bottom of organizations and worked their way up to astronomical heights of success. In short, if you are afraid of starting lower than you think you should, you might find yourself quickly going nowhere and watching a whole lot of soap operas and Oprah. You could miss out on an opportunity that would lead you places quickly, if only you would suck it up, do your time, and take the necessary hits.
That said, you could also wind up in a monkey suit taking shit from soccer moms and their annoying spawn. And that’s just my version of hell. There are many other forms misery can take, and you will most likely not be spared. In the end, the best argument I can give for why someone should sacrifice the freedom of unemployment and take an unlikable job (beyond issues of just bringing in a paycheck, no matter how small) is that sooner or later, unemployment begins to seem very lonely. Your friends may not judge you (though some surely will, and you should be prepared for their smug mockery), but they won’t exactly be there to hang out with you, either. Unemployment can be a sad, boring place, and you’re likely to eventually realize one simple truth: that you like doing things, and it is a rare day where you just sit there and do nothing. And if you’re going to do something, shouldn’t you be getting paid for it?
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Counterpoint: I Quit
We place far too much emphasis on working in this country. Working hard is a threshold issue to receive respect and honor from your peers. Working hard is thought to be necessary to achieve success and of course--the one true God--money. I’ve even heard people argue that certain things are not worth having unless you had to work hard to get it. This is a society that knows how to apply the stick behind every carrot however. We ostracize those whom do not appear to be working hard and label them as lazy, shiftless, irresponsible, and often enough, impoverished in spirit and coin. Even the liberal supporters of the social safety net believe that everybody must work as hard and as often as they can.
Paradoxically the lower down on the money/interest/status nexus your profession falls, the more these rules are supposed to apply. If you find yourself cleaning toilets or getting coffee or selling doors door to door the solution you are offered is to work … harder. Spend more time and effort and energy pouring your heart and soul into the bellhop business and maybe just maybe you can rise above that station to some other “better” job (better of course means a job that gives you more money/interest/status than your current job for less work). In fact, if you don’t work harder, if you don’t run as fast you can to stand still, you’ll get replaced by one of the ten people just like you who perhaps better understands how important it is to work very hard. This paradox is no accident. The system is designed to extract the maximum amount of energy from all the sparkplugs. The worse of a job you have, the more you have to be lied to and threatened to produce clean bathrooms, fast coffee, and superfluous doors that make America what she is.
America conflates work ethic with merit and this is a very dangerous mistake. Rare is the person who is both uniquely capable and especially motivated at the same task. It is the price we pay for letting the market determine how money is distributed. Most people who are good at something don’t work particularly hard at it, and most people who work particularly hard at something weren’t that good at it to begin with. The best “guy behind the counter” becomes the assistant manager regardless of whether or not they have any managerial skills. Meanwhile, the person who intuitively understands how to delegate, how to mentor, how to creatively attack old and new problems invariably gets stuck in a job where delegation is called shirking, mentoring is called wasting time on the company’s dime, and problem solving is called an inability to follow instruction.
I searched two online dictionaries--the Oxford English dictionary, and my own trusty Webster’s--for the definition of “work.” Nowhere could I find one definition of the word that involved the words: “fun”, “enjoy”, “happy” or even “good.” Instead I found definitions that included “exertion”, “effort”, “production”, “accomplishment”, and “duty.” Suffice it to say that work for work’s sake is not even intended to make anyone happy. It only fits into the good life if one enjoys the effort and exertion, or one takes pride and good feeling in the accomplishment of it, or if there is some other benefit (like cash) completely outside rigors of the work itself.
This is where crappy jobs reveal themselves to be grossly overrated. I am not gong out on a limb to say that the effort of digging a ditch or calling people for money or any number of things that are required of a low wage worker is on its face horrific. There are not many people who would honestly say that they enjoy the effort of their jobs and this effort gets proportionally less enjoyable the crappier your job gets. In addition, the sense of accomplishment at the end of a day’s labor has been completely eviscerated by our modern economy. I’m supposed to feel a sense of accomplishment because I helped Corporation X swindle customers out of whatever they earned from swindling somebody else? I’m supposed to look at a neat stack of finished TPS reports and feel like I’ve made something with my day? Unfortunately for most of us our reptilian brains are unable to disregard the piss flowing into our ears no matter how many times the boss tells us it is raining.
Once we pull back the thin lies we tell ourselves that work is somehow good for us, we come to where most people start; the only reason anybody puts themselves through the effort of doing some silly soulless thing everyday is money. Not one of us can go a full earth minute without thinking of something or doing something that somewhere along the chain requires money. It is in sacrifice to this God of kings that we all throw ourselves onto the pyre of whatever employment we can get, and if the price is right we willingly immolate our hopes and dreams and ideals.
We are powerless to stand up to this commodified drumbeat as individuals. I would not criticize any person who took whatever job was on offer simply to be able to afford human necessities like food, shelter, and the sweet alcohol needed to ignore delusions of being treated with decency. However, to my thinking, the inescapable conclusion is a life plan where working at anything above the absolute bare minimum is not something to be expected, encouraged, or celebrated. There is no value in taking a crappy job if you have the economic means not to, and most children of wealth understand this intuitively. This should be an obvious point, and it is if you think about how patently false it is for a recent lottery winner to claim that he “hasn’t decided” if he’s going to quit his job. If you do have to work, then you should do your level best to get out of there as soon as possible, cut every corner possible, and generally exert yourself as little as you can. You should focus your energies on how to game the system so you can get things like promotions and respect without actually working very hard. Doing a crappy job well is the proverbial “scenic route” to the ultimate goal of getting the most money for the least effort.
Some of you have jobs that you honestly enjoy, and many more have fooled yourselves into thinking that you enjoy the living hell that you show up at daily. Whatever you do for money, the worst thing you can do for yourself is to work hard on general principle. In the immortal words of Scrooge McDuck (and like, others) “work smarter, not harder.”
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Final Word: ... And Shove It!
Neither one of us has addressed the problem of dreams and the social prejudice of working toward anything that doesn't immediately bring in a paycheck. If what you really want to do is write novels, for example, what you need to do is to take a bunch of time off and devote yourself to a task for which you may not ever get paid. Work ethic has little to do with it. It's about the money. Writing a novel without getting paid doesn't look like work to future resume readers. Food, shelter, utilities ... necessary things would become an issue, too, and yet you could have still worked a full eighty-hour week on an unchampioned slab of prose. And there is a judgment that will come down upon you that you have wasted your time in an unprofitable pursuit. Worthwhile activity in our country is simply activity that brings you cash. (Notice, for example, the illegitimacy of bloggers in the journalistic sphere.) But suffering through a period of such illegitimacy is the test we ask every would-be success story to pass. Those who make it through? They must have wanted it enough. To them go the spoils. To those who didn't? Sorry, but they just didn't have it. Only one person gets to top the charts.
So what does this mean? Am I pro-foolishly wasting your time on a dream you very likely will never see a dime from, or do I think you would do better to quit and get a data-entry job that actually pays you something? Actually, this one's easy: shitty jobs all the way! Take a piece of crap job, do your time, scrub the floors, and generally make yourself as miserable as possible. Remember, misery is your friend. Contentedness and complacency are your enemies. The happier you are, the less likely you will be to actually keep after that dream. You know who dreams the most? People in bitches of unsatisfactory situations, that's who. And besides, deep soul is what we love in our artists, and a soul is what you get when you go through fire. So find some and self-immolate away!
Ah, masochism.
All kidding aside, there is one wonderful thing about a shitty job: eventually, you will move on. Even if it's that you're moving along to another shitty job, you will still get to experience the simple joy of tendering your resignation. There is something deeply satisfying about the last day on a hellish job. And that's something you'll never get if you stay on the couch until just the right job comes along: that feeling that, damn, that job sucked ... but now you're free.
At least until you get employed again.