Work Daze

Don’t like to brag, but nobody is harder on business books than yours truly.

Day by day, author by author, they come off the business bestseller conveyor belt and book by book, we shoot them down. Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese?” We found it rancid. Stephan Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?” We found it highly effective at putting us to sleep.

But once every blue moon along comes a business book with a philosophy so twisted and an attitude so subversive, we have no choice but to go completely moo-moo ga-ga and embrace it completely. This is the case with the latest from the razor-sharp quill of Stanley Bing, “100 Bullshit Jobs and How To Get Them.”

Bing’s book begins with a bang-up quotation from Aristotle—“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” Undeniably true, you will agree, and also undeniably depressing. If being a Greek philosopher was a crummy job, way back in 384 BCE, what chance do the rest of us have, especially considering that Aristotle never had to worry about expense reports, or whether hot pants could substitute for those little short Grecian skirts on casual Fridays.

Bing begins his book with a lengthy exegesis on the nature of a bullshit job, most of which will probably be unnecessary to those of us who have been in the workforce for more than, say, 5 minutes. Basically, to Bing, bullshit is the “high-octane, lucrative, completely insubstantial charade” that represents from zero to 200% of any job description.

In short, bullshit work is not productive and does not move the ball ahead. It’s work that could disappear completely without any harm to the company or its prospects. Yet it remains the most important part of our day, since it gets us raises, and perks, and if we do it well enough and often enough, gets us promoted to positions where other people have to spend all their days bullshitting us.

Bing’s thesis is that we should attempt to get positions that offer the highest BS quotient, since those are the jobs that require the minimum amount of work and return the maximum amount of compensation. He further posits that the amount of BS required in any position can be quantified. His theory, which I trust will be duly noted and considered by the Nobel Prize committee—calculates the amount of bullshit by multiplying the amount of abuse an employee must endure (A), multiplied by the amount of perks one enjoys (P) times salary ($), all divided by the number of hours (H) one must work to achieve all the above. Or, back to the Greek, ß = AP$/H. [Bing multiples the whole calculus shebang by G, the growth of your firm, but let’s face, the only growth in our jobs is seen around our expanding waistbands.]

The majority of Bing’s book is occupied with a listing of 100 specific bullshit jobs. In my one criticism to this important publication, the jobs are listed alphabetically, rather than by their BS quotient. As result, when flipping through the pages, you might decide to direct your career course to becoming #23, a Closet Organizer. With a ß of 99, you may decide that spending your days helping rich, disorganized people systematize their socks, or separate their Gucci from their Prada, represents a pretty sweet gig. But then you flip a few pages, and discover the even better bullshit position of #70, Pet Psychic, a job where the ß is twice as high, but the perks are even more juicy, like the opportunity to relate to clients like Drew Barrymore who Bing quotes as saying, “If I die before my cat, I want a little of my ashes put in his food so I can live inside him.”

Funny, I feel the same way about my boss. Except I want his ashes in my cat box.

The ultimate bullshit job, according to Bing, is #11, Being Donald Trump. The bullshit level of this job is 200—the maximum possible. As in all the job descriptions, Bing toplines the skills required (swaggering, primping) and the duties (break a lot of wind), as well as the next step in your career path—in Trump’s case, The Bosley Institute.

I might go after this position myself, but frankly, I’ve got an even better bullshit job—workplace humor columnist. It pays like crazy, is very easy, and the best part is, no one ever makes fun of my hair!