Damn! My Job Is Boring... Here's A Diary of It

The Indy has an article by someone being reasonably witty about his terribly disappointing job, in this case as a Bookseller. It has all the usual little anecdote about silly customers:

Constant enquiries along the lines of "Have you got that book? It's red," begin to chafe.

Angry customers:

The growlers were the worst, barking at us, demanding maps of the Dordogne and biographies of Napoleon.

"What do mean you still haven't got it! It was ordered a bloody age ago!"

Crappy managers:

He had caught me leafing through a copy of Sylvia Plath's diaries. Before I could turn the third page, Ronald was upon me. Incandescence in a cardy, he stormed: "Get on with some fucking work, Anthony, I've got better things for you to be doing than reading in this shop."

In a modern bookshop, literature is of no great importance unless it is neatly stacked, branded with a three-for-two-sticker and sold to some idiot who wants what they saw on the advert. God forbid you read any.

It's not a bad article and, as I said, reasonably witty. It just seems to me that there's a lot of this sort of thing about these days. I'm pretty sure there someone who works in Waterstones (or wherever) blogging something now along much the same lines. I know that there's at least one fast-food employee, video shop employee and prostitute (assuming Belle De Jour is real, but there are probably plenty of others out there) blogging merrily away, letting us all in to their little private hells, or epiphanies, or that moment when the manager did something really funny/ totally out-of-order.

You know, people you would start drinking in other pubs to avoid are suddenly touted as the fresh face of blogging. I don't get it. When I go out, I don't really want to hear other people's work stories, unless that story is exceptional or something that really affected their mood and them not getting it out of their system is harshing my buzz. Daily accounts of the tedium of someone else's job is, well, tedious.

These things happen in jobs everyday for just about everybody. The decor changes and some of the props, but the main difference between a bloke at McDonalds and a bloke in an office is that the bloke in the office is going to go out of his way to deep fat fry something.

I suppose on one level these blogs are the living embodiment of "Write what you know". But at least one writer has opined that "Write what you know" is the sort of advice you give to writers that you suspect have difficulties holding a pen.