Day Job - Hardcover

Jonathan Baird

3.05

21 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841120154 ISBN 13: 9781841120157

Publisher: Capstone, 1999

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This jumble of text and illustration can be seen as scrapbook, novella, "'zine"or broadside. Notations range from Nietzsche to Charles Handy, Sun-Tzu and Gertrude Stein. It is designed to encourage anyone who has ever struggled to find meaning in their daily work.

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Review:

Are the walls of your cubicle starting to close in? Have you just sat through yet another meeting trying to rally team morale? Time for a break. Grab a cup of coffee, find a quiet spot, and delve into Jonathan Baird's illuminating and hilarious book Day Job. Take comfort in the fact that you are not alone.

Mark Thornton works in customer service for a company committed to TQM (Total Quality Management), a program in which "groups of contaminated individuals lapse into loud and ungovernable fugue-like states, wherein future trends of commerce are prophesied and cosmic lessons in human behavior are thought to reveal themselves." Charters, team spirit, unreasonable clients, and a manager totally dedicated to TQM plague Thornton, who, just a couple of years out of college, never envisioned himself working in a meaningless "day job." So when a client recommends participating in the SysCorp Journal program, Thornton jumps on it, hoping, perhaps, to discover a career path for himself. For one day, he'll record everything that happens to him at work, which SysCorp will then analyze and notate. The result is Day Job; half business self-help, half humorous novel, it is the journal of a disillusioned worker, complete with notes from SysCorp, doodles and asides from Thornton, and helpful words of advice culled from everyone from Proust and Walt Whitman to Deepak Chopra and Stephen Covey's (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People).

The design--which at first may appear gimmicky--is ultimately delightful, making this book a pleasure to flip through. But the true fun lies in how Thornton dissects his life and the lives of those all-too-familiar characters who appear in our own offices--the defensive temps, the proudly overworked, the suspicious coworkers. Whether you're just starting your career or you've been master of your cubicle for years, you'll enjoy the lively prose (think Douglas Coupland meets "Dilbert"), not just for its humor but also for how close it hits home (or, rather, office). --Jenny Brown

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.

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