Day Job: A Workplace Reader for the Restless Age Book

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 Read More