Day Job: A Workplace Reader for the Restless Age - Hardcover

Baird, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0966080521 ISBN 13: 9780966080520

Publisher: Allen & Osborne Inc, 1998

Synopsis

It's 9:34 a.m. Do you know where your career is headed? Do you have one? More likely, you'd never call what you do from 9 to 5 a career. You'd call it your day job.

And what if you were given a single day to record it all, to ask the important questions about life and career, to air out your strongest and most private opinions and thoughts-what would you say? That's the question that has been put to customer service rep Mark Thornton. And his answer is Day Job, a darkly comic, high-velocity run through the modern workplace.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Baird is a twenty-seven year old Harvard Lampoon alum and award-winning designer with five years experience in the trenches of corporate advertising.

From the Back Cover

It's 9:34 a.m. Do you know where your career is headed? Do you have one? More likely, you'd never call what you do from 9 to 5 a career. You'd call it your day job.

And what if you were given a single day to record it all, to ask the important questions about life and career, to air out your strongest and most private opinions and thoughts-what would you say? That's the question that has been put to customer service rep Mark Thornton. And his answer is Day Job, a darkly comic, high-velocity run through the modern workplace.

Day Job is a scrapbook, a novella, a 'zine, a broadside- a genre- and mind-bending jumble of text and illustration. And with the notations of authors from Emerson to Argyris, Sun-Tzu to Gertrude Stein, Day Job is as upbeat and illuminating as it is cynical, a must-read for anyone who's struggling to find meaning in their work. Have a look. It could change your life, maybe.

OPEN THIS UP. It only looks like a book.

Reviews

This refreshing approach to the conventional business book, a combination of text and illustrations in an unusual format, is guaranteed to grab the reader's attention?and may furnish some insights, chuckles and a lesson or two about satisfaction in the job market. Mark Thornton, whose notes about his job and his life form the basis of the story, is your typical recent college grad. He's got a useless political science degree and tons of student debts and has landed a job as a customer rep for a graphics company in the throes of Total Quality Management (TQM) training. TQM has driven Lon Baffert, Mark's boss, bonkers, so that he periodically pops into people's cubicles and tells them to "get psyched." Mark has latched onto management's limitless appetite for psychological fixes by getting the company to underwrite his Syscorp Journal program. Offered by a rival to TQM, Syscorp's morale and retraining program requires that, for a day, Mark jot down random observations on his life. Baird, who has been a magazine art director, gives the ostensible results of this project a distinctive journal-like look by rendering much of the text as though it's a typed manuscript-in-progress, including marginal doodles, sidebars (for instance, "a Select Inventory of Management Office Furnishings," listing the baffling knickknacks with which middle-managers tend to clutter their offices) and an array of quotations from such masters as Nietzsche and Steven Covey (of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People fame). The trick by which Mark gets to join the design department is the funny payoff for this quirky look at workplace anomie in the 1990s. (Sept.) FYI: The publisher intends to distribute this book only through college and independent bookstores and the Internet, avoiding the chains. Readers are encouraged to interact with the author and publisher at www.dayjob.com. or jbaird@a-os.com, or lallen@a-os.com.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

(Note: Please keep in mind that this book is heavily design-oriented. To get the whole picture, you'll need to take a look at the book itself-or at least visit our Website.)

9:44 AM -- Ambushed by Lon

Billy the Kid, who was smart, used to sit facing out from corners. I spin around a little late to see Lon Baffert, who's equally surprised to find me here.

It's a typically oblique entrance for Lon, whose slightness of figure and neutrality of dress give him the annoying advantage of stealth. The idea with Lon is that you don't so much notice him as become slowly aware of him, like you'd sense some obscure and unsettling detail, a picture that's fallen askew or a bird that's stolen in and been watching you from a high vantage. Even when you're looking dead at him he's hard to fix, mostly because there's not much to him, 5'6" is all, lean and dissipated as a marathoner. What human jerky would look like if they were to make such a thing.

But you've got to ignore your instincts and take this little man seriously. Or I do, I should say, he's my boss. Lon's the guy who not only administers my professional fate, but who runs the whole customer service rodeo, 10 of us in all. And that, along with being one of the crueller conditions of my life, accounts for much of what's wrong with Lon.

"Hey-hey, glad you could join us this morning, Mark." His index finger, flagged with a bright yellow post-it, is held awkwardly aloft. Authority in this office is feudalized into three tiers. A 10-executive star chamber called Senior Management eats highest on the hog, all interdepartmental powermongers, Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, a President and 4 owners. The middle managers, 30 to 40-year-old careerist group heads like Lon, form the thin buffer of the second tier. And then there's the junior infantry, predominantly recent college grads who cycle through here on one- and two-year tours of duty. The model works like this: the irresistible force of senior-level authority rails at the immovable object of junior-level apathy. One group forces the office toward a civilian militarism, the other toward irremediable discord. And the limbo between is the difficult terrain of middle management.

Jason Pitcher likens it to Goya's painting 'Two Men With Cudgels,' where two men are pounding each other with wood mallets as they both sink into a bog. Except in this model there are three men, two with cudgels and one without, and the two armed men are beating on the third, or the middle manager, in the way they might drive a railroad spike.

The conceit holds, certainly, for customer service: when Senior Management catches the first glimmer of client dissatisfaction, they take it out of Lon's ass. And Lon, being our most immediate and accessible symbol of corporate authority, is where we focus whatever anger and derision we can safely marshal. All of which has lent him that interrogation-victim twitchiness of his, that ceaseless animation of the eyes and hands. You can see the full array of cords on his neck, the sinew laid in little ropes along his arms, the veins and tendons in his wrists and on the backs of his bird-hands, all like pages out of Gray's Anatomy. Everything strained and gnarled like the dark residue from a more robust version of himself. Point is, if he looks like he's been fed through the gears of some horrible machine, well, he has.

"My train, I mean I was running late anyway Lon, but I sat for a good 15 minutes on the platform before it rolled in. I don't know, getting serviced or whatever, one of those schedule delays..." Lon, not stupid, is having none of this. He just sticks the post-it to my counter and waits for me to give up. Note reads: "My office when you get in.--Lon."

"Just a quickie," he sez. "When you get a minute."

"Uh, I've got one now...?"

Lon tries for a cogitative look, to mask a more obvious displeasure. He was going to leave his note here for me and get some coffee, give me some time to get worked up before I finally came to his office wringing a hat in my hands. Now he's stranded himself in the CS bullpen, the rest of the team in earshot and attending closely. If he leads me back to his office this will qualify as an 'incident,' and I doubt it's anything that serious. That spicy, licorice smell that follows him around is slowly gathering mass in my cube.

"All right, sure." Lon stares absently at my guest chair but continues to stand. "I was walking by this station 10 minutes ago, noticed it was empty, heard the phone ringing. It was what, 9:30? Now that's a perfectly reasonable time for a client to call. Ditto from 5:30 to 6. I just happened to be there to pick it up. It was Mary Heidseck looking for her film, said it was supposed to be waiting for her this morning, it wasn't, obviously, and she was looking for you."

"Let's get this straight, Lon, I don't care about Mary Heidseck. Or her film," is what I can't manage to say next. Instead, I'm avoiding his eyes, shifting in my chair, that whole bit. Only hope he's feeling as awkward as I am. Which looks to be the case--like I say, I've caught him off guard too, he hadn't known I was in yet but I was, I am, and now I'm seated at my own desk and he's the one standing with nowhere really to prop an elbow.

"I was able to run some interference which, that's no problem," he's saying. "You still owe her a call but...anyway, no big deal. Bottom line is, I can't have your clients stuck in voice-mail when they call in pissed. Or transferred to another rep who isn't familiar with the job. We make a practice of that, we go out of business. Right?"

"Uh-huh."

Edition details

• Publisher: Allen & Osborne Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0966080521
• ISBN 13: 9780966080520
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 160