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This Little Piggie Stayed at Home
I had a job in the reprographics department of a secondary school. It was a disaster from the start. The work load was impossible to cope with and the copiers kept breaking down. I worked on my own. Queues of teachers psychotic with stress screamed for their copying to be done immediately. It was [...]
Whilst completing a Master’s degree at Lancaster University (see crap towns) the year before last, I was simultaneously engaged in tackling the world of work. Having applied for countless tedious jobs, I ended up being taken on by a 24 hour petrol station, doing Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights from 11 till 7 [...]
Probably the only office based job there is in which exclaiming - “I don’t want to be stuck in anal sex all day” - won’t be met by even the merest elevation of eyebrow, working on a phone sex line seemed like a good idea at first. After three months however, the novelty had [...]
Ignoring the fact that any form of labour, either physical or cerebral, is a basic insult to the human spirit, I’ve had a number of shit jobs. Chief amongst them were the twelve hour night shifts I used to regularly do at the cardboard factory near my house. This particular firm didn’t make boxes, [...]
I work for National Rail Enquiries…yes, there is still a call centre in the UK (although only until next April…then it all moves to India where they pay them the equivalent of £1 an hour).
I’ve been there for 3 years. Everything you do is watched, taped, timed and recorded. You have to stick to a [...]
After an unpleasant incident with my bank manager in the summer of 1996 (he physically threatened me in his office due to my immense and unauthorized student overdraft) I was reluctantly forced to get a summer job through a temp agency.
As I lived in a remote Cheshire village and had no transport the only job [...]
A summer job working at a local mental hospital was supposed to be a bag of laughs. I had envisioned chatting therapeutically to slightly confused older folk over soothing cups of tea, but no.
As I was the new recruit - worse, a student - the hardened old lags of orderlies gave me a series [...]
During my Student years (having not yet become accustomed to a life of poverty) I got a summer job in a Marquee erection company in Thornton Heath. My reasoning being that:
1. I would earn money so would make friends and have fun.
2. I would be working outside so I would get a tan making me [...]
Some years ago I took a part time job working at a green house that produced lettuces. The lettuces were packed into big cardboard trays, and it was my job to take the flat cardboard blanks, fold over the end to make them up into trays, then staple each end using a large industrial staple [...]
Ah, buxom, rosy-cheeked milkmaids carrying wooden pails, cheery, Ermintrude-like cows with flowers in their mouths… yuh, right.
The milk comes out of a pipe, into waxed cardboard boxes, which become the familiar tetrapaks. Tetrapaks are then fitted into trays of a dozen, which are shrinkwrapped. When the trays come out of the wrapping machine, they’re hot [...]
IDLER DEPUTY ED IN McDONALDS HELL
I worked at McDonalds, in Liverpool. I didn’t get any stars. I failed all the tests, even though they merely involved copying the answers from The Big Book of McDonalds Test Answers into the questionnaire. Also, I had to work twice as hard as everyone else as the other staff [...]
It’s all very well celebrating being idle if you’re Louis Theroux or some other member of the Groucho mafia and get paid healthy sums for idling with the great, good and kitsch.
For those of us who have yet to escape the provinces life is necessarily idle and it is hell. I would happily avoid paid [...]
I worked in a warehouse for a week where they flattened out old cardboard boxes and redistributed them for wholesalers. It was complete physical agony, but it was the mental pain that weighed heaviest.
I was working with a guy who’d been there for 20 years (and didn’t even take time off on Christmas Eve). His [...]
My parents forced me to take a summer job working at a kennels.
The sun shone all that summer: it shone on the quiet lanes of Binfield, on the birds chirping gaily in the beech trees, on children playing hide-and-seek on freshly mown lawns: it shone on the dog crap festering in the corners of [...]
For the past year I have been blissfully, magnificently idle. But lately I have noticed my pockets are not bottomless, and the bottom I have hit is full of lint and only lint. No hidden pots of gold anywhere to be found.
So I decided to look for a “job”. I dragged myself, kicking and [...]
After graduating from a prestigious London design college and realising that I wasn’t going to get a job, I found work at a small shop in the more salubrious end of Soho selling overpriced designer gee-gaws to media types. The job had
it’s perks, I’ve sold cheap tat at high prices to people from the [...]
In the Summer of 1992 I worked in an off-licence on the edges of a South Coast town. Minimum wage, of course, whatever that was at the time. It was an amount that ran constantly through the mind during the outrageous tedium of the day, the only answer to “what the hell am I doing [...]
For a time, struggling as a quasi-legal immigrant writer in the East Anglian hinterland, I worked in a restaurant owned by a chef whose name one would undoubtedly recognize were I not bound by the terms of a hastily signed nondisclosure agreement.
The food prepared by this chef, whose name I’m sure one would instantly [...]
Janitors are viewed by most as being very low down the food chain, to be an assistant Janitor is as low as it gets. The guy I was working with was about 50 and proud of the fact the he was a Janitor. He had ridiculously ineffecient systems for doing everything but to even suggest [...]
As I reached 17, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to start to learn to ‘pay my way’. I applied for a vacancy advertised in the Kent Messenger classifieds for holiday work at a popular tourist attraction, you’ll know it, a castle sharing it’s name with a Yorkshire city.
I [...]
The Idler joins forces with the men from QI for a celebration of curiosity and an attack on boredom, with plenty of William Morris
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A sumptuous compendium of one hundred pleasures, each lovingly described and illustrated.
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The US version of How To Be Free: "A work of crafty scholarship and
radical intent" - Michael Agger, Slate
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"Packed with wit, anecdotes and ideas ..." Word Magazine
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Take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.
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"Very funny...should be at the top of Tony Blair's reading
list." The Times
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Recommended to anyone interested in either angling or doing nothing.
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"Read this eye-opening and amusingly written book" Daily Mail
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The Idler is a bi-annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic. It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney. The intention of the magazine is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject. As well as providing a radical and thought-provoking read, the Idler is also very funny. MORE …
"The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live." Damien Hirst: Idler 10
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