Day Job : A Workplace Reader for the Restless Age

Alissa Lara Quart

Day Job bears the axiom: It only looks like a book. A better one might be: It only looks like a Gen X book. After all, Day Job shares the homegrown, hard-to-read quality of Gen X zines. Here's the book's gimmick: It's ostensibly a real journal, accessorized with a fake coffee-cup ring and margin doodles. The narrative itself is "typed" on mock blue lined writing paper. But unlike most texts of this genre -- cyber memoirs, kiddie capitalist tracts, "Dilbert"-like rants from cubicle dwellers -- Day Job is actually worth the effort it takes to read it.

The book's narrator, Matt Thornton, is a young, white wage slave who's wasting his photographic skills as a customer service representative. Our hero pokes sad fun at cubicle culture and arrives at uncommonly acute observations, noting such things as the terrible inspirational puns ("Here We 'Grow' Again!") and the mindless workplace martyr ("Whether she leaves the building at all, in fact, is a secret of the third shift and the cleaning crews"). There's a biting taxonomy of a middle manager ("What human jerky would look like if they were to make such a thing"): "He knows how weighty an adversary he's got in our apathy, and he knows his fear-and-money management style won't eliminate it, only put it off in some dark recess where it'll anneal into something permanent and truly sinister." Day Job really shows its teeth and its inventiveness in a chapter on management gurus. A speaker, Jay Gathers, visits Matt's office bearing props, among them a fan-blade entitled "winds of change." Gathers finally gets the company's managers to write their groups' flaws on the sides of melons and then sledgehammer the melons to bits.

But this novelty novella is not just a parody of corporate life. Matt gives voice to the desperation so many feel when confronted with the fruitlessness of their labor. He admits that he longs for that feeling of "belonging or correctness" in his job and winds up concluding that, somewhere else, "People are finding their rightful place in the working world."

As it happens, Day Job isn't the work of a hard-luck middle manager. The author, Jonathan Baird, is a 26-year-old who was formerly art director for the publishing consulting firm Allen & Osborne, which published the book. (Baird wrote and illustrated it as part of his own "day job.") His aim seems entirely true, however -- especially if you discount his attempts to trick the book up with gratuitous quotations from the likes of Emerson, Proust and business Svengali Steven Covey.

Baird's a lively writer who's got a gift for depicting the unhappy, dull materials of life, the stuff that fiction usually tries to help us escape. If Allen & Osborne wanted to find a real selling point for Day Job, it should have peddled the book as what it is: a unique piece of fiction. After all, how many good recent novels have tackled office culture? In today's literary climate, with authors competing to gross us all out, digging into workaday realities might be the most transgressive act of all. -- Salon

Gavin Leigh

Day Job is a work of enviable clarity, and offers much, not least a long-needed double-take at the office environment of the 90's....Sharp, dry and intellgient, this book deserves to go on and on, gaining recognition for what it is; a necessary commentary, with all the makings of a modern classic.
— Likewise

Joel Kurtzman

This is a quirky, strange, lovable book written and wonderfully illustrated and designed by a Gen Xer for Gen Xers. Its subject is work, and though it purports to be a novel, it's really a commentary on the plight of men and women in corporations. Some will call is screed; others, near-poetry.
— Fortune

Rob Spillman

Day Job...[is] a sneaky little book that's dead-on hilarious and whose pages are sure to be xeroxed stealthily and posted over water coolers in hypermanaged offices everywhere.
— Details

Victoria Griffith

"[As] a commentary on modern corporate life, it's brilliant. For anyone who has ever spent any time in a corporation, the dialogue has us alternately giggling and squirming, as we recognize ourselves and others in the book.
— Financial Times

Publishers Weekly

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 1990's.