Why Your Job Doesn’t Matter

Eliminating all non-essential jobs would leave most people unemployed!

Are you working? (Wiki Comms)

Come on, we’ve all done it. Sat around the dinner table, chinwagging about someone’s job, moaning about how little work he or she does.

“What does he actually do!”

There’s a scene in American Psycho (2000) where Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) sits in his New York office listening to this Walkman, seemingly doing nothing. Killing time before he goes to some restaurant or bar with his high-flying chums.

We might not all know high-flyers, but we all know someone who — and excuse the polite British expression here —spends their entire working day doing Fuck All!

It could be Dave or Mike from down the pub. Or Sandra or Karen from school. Or Ken and Linda from the gym. All of whom have big jobs with mysterious titles and who claim to work long hours. Yet when you question them about what they actually do, they have trouble explaining it.

There’s a scene in Office Space (1999) in which hapless product manager Tom Smykowski (Richard Riehle) is grilled by business consultants Bob Porter (Paul Wildon) and Bob Slydell (John C. McGinley).

In the exchange, which is brilliantly done, Smykowski desperately tries to convince the consultants that his job is a value to the company. When, in short, there’s no reason for him to be there. Ditto, Milton Waddams (Stephen Root), who also does nothing, and is only there because of a glitch in the payroll.

Companies are full of these people.

My wife works with a guy who’s a Microsoft Teams Consultant. Sounds fancy. It isn’t. He’s not even an IT expert — when the system goes down, he has to phone the IT department. His job entails training people on how Microsoft Teams works. Even though everybody knows perfectly well how to use it because everyone used it during lockdown.

But just in case everyone’s forgotten how to switch on a webcam, a guy called Roy, who used to be in the tax office before he had a breakdown, feels it’s his God-given right to be “The Teams Guy” when before he couldn’t even operate the water cooler.

According to David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs, Roy is a Duct Taper: someone who fixes a problem that wasn’t there before.

There are millions of these Bullshit Jobs. A job where the people doing them know they are pointless and worthless but are too scared to admit it. In case their brains explode when they realise they’ve just wasted the last 20 years of their life.

I mow lawns for a living.

I’m a duct taper too. I fix a problem that essentially wasn’t there because, up until the 17th century, lawns didn’t exist. Before, open spaces were grazed by animals, and if you were lucky enough to have a garden or land of your own (most didn't), you grew vegetables or kept animals.

What you didn’t have was a lawn! Now there’s a whole industry devoted to lawn cutting. A multibillion-dollar business in order to cut the top off a perennial grass from the Gramineae family.

While you may argue that it’s an essential — even worthy — job. Mowing grass is like cutting hair. As soon as you cut it, it’s just a matter of time before you’ve got to cut it again! A fruitless exercise, which is why, like hair, I like to style the gardens I cut.

But there are only so many circles, rings, loops, and hexagons you can emblazon into a lawn before you realise you’re just cutting grass. Mowing grass day after day, week after week, month after month so that when my boss arrives on a Friday evening from Paris, he can see acre after acre of perfectly manicured lawn.

A lawn he won’t even step on because he’s too busy chatting to someone on Microsoft Teams. Maybe even Roy!

I’m not trying to do myself out of a job here — I’m grateful for it. But, like many people, I sometimes wonder what’s the point. And if I didn’t do it, would the world collapse around me?

Of course not. The grass would just grow, and it would turn to forest. Or more likely, my boss would hire someone else.

I’ve always had this fantasy of everyone downing tools. Everyone stops working, just to see what happens. What would be the response from governments?

Well, actually, we already know.

Look what happened during COVID-19. The UK government spent billions paying people to do fuck all. Why? Because if they didn’t, the entire economy would collapse. You’ve got to keep the machine rolling; otherwise, the machine grinds to a halt.

What did Lenin say?

“Every society is three meals away from chaos.”

You’ve got to keep a certain proportion of the population in work. While making sure there are enough people out of work in order to keep wages low.

So we keep paying the Microsoft Teams guys, the life coaches, and groundsmen like me to mow the lawns. When perhaps we should be teaching people how to survive. So people are prepared when Armageddon comes around.

I’m not a doom-monger, but the next epidemic or climate disaster will happen. And probably quite soon. Are we ready? Or are we still in the training room waiting for the Microsoft Teams Guy to show up and tell us all what to do?

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