you’re fired…
So, the CV looked good and succeeded in getting your foot in the door. You sailed through the first interview and sounded almost half-credible in the second. The offer was made and job done, literally and metaphorically. Now what? Well, according to author, David Graeber, in ‘Bullsh*t Jobs’ up to half the population believe their jobs have little or no meaning and that “it wouldn’t matter if they didn’t do them”.
Graeber analyses the inherent pointlessness of much of today’s modern work and divides bullsh*t jobs into five categories: Flunkies, who make others feel important; Aggressive Goons to do their masters’ bidding; Problem-solving Duct-Tapers who pick-up the pieces, Self-explanatory Box-Tickers and the supervisory Task-Masters. Real-life examples include individuals who write reports knowing that they’ll never be read, a worker hiring a car every week to drive 310 miles to move a colleague’s computer a few feet, a museum guard whose job it is to protect a completely empty room, a tech-savvy designer who cuts & pastes emails received in one format into another that a somewhat pedantic manager prefers, and a temp hired to “sit at a particular desk and look busy”.
Furthermore, he remains highly sceptical of anyone with the terms ‘consultant, assistant, coordinator and strategist’ in their job title and considers even “proper” meaningful jobs, usually undertaken in any normal forty-hour week, could easily be completed in less than half that time.
You’d be forgiven for thinking these almost pointless jobs hardly make any sense in our current uber-competitive, highly combative capitalist economy but Graeber attributes their continued, and growing, existence to the feudal nature of today’s management hierarchy and highlights we should never underestimate an individual’s desire to grow their empire whilst making themselves feel all the more important in the process. It’s ironic that, in an age that supposedly prizes efficiency above all else, modern organisational structure mirrors the bureaucracies of old. Oh, as was ever thus. Now, where’s my assistant flunky got to…
