I didn’t go to work today; let’s face it I haven’t been to work for a while! – and today – and all the other days I haven’t been, nobody noticed. I was a hand in a bucket of water – pull it out and it doesn’t leave a hole.
I actually thought my job was important and I was the linch-pin to the whole show going on.
I had worked hard for years, put up with all the bullshit, all because I thought I was making a difference – and maybe I was. But, now I am gone, I think the difference is still being made, just not by me. (Have a look at my post on the “Indispensable Man” if you think your indispensable – click here)
But, I think more importantly we are thinking things are important when in actual fact they are not really important at all.
Take printing a document. It was supposed to be about now, in our futuristic world of technology, smart phones and the internet, that we were entering the time of the ‘paperless office’ yet there seems to be more actual paperwork, literally, (for everyone under 20 this is the correct use of the word ‘literally’) and it seems to just sit there in baskets on desks with more paperwork coming in constantly to put on top.
I heard recently that an office in the city set up all their printers so you had to actually go to the printer, where you swiped your personal identification card over the printer; only then would the printer print your job; you had to be standing next to the printer to collect it when it came out. The little trick to this system was that every 24 hours all the ‘buffers’ in the printers in this 8 story building all ‘reset’ – wiping out all the documents that had been sent to the printers, that had not been printed and no one had come to collect. There was no pile of paper (in the basket next to the printer for that express purpose?) of print jobs that had not been collected throughout the day, or week for that matter. The little trick to this system, other than obvious confidentiality and security reasons, was that the company saved over $1,000,000 (yes, that is one million dollars) in paper and printing costs alone in one year!
Think of all the bullshit documents that never got printed and just disappeared into the electronic ether at midnight each day.
Also think about whether all that printing, all that word processing, and all that time sitting in front of a monitor was really even necessary?
Maybe you are sitting at your desk right now, working, reading this, and realised that your job is bullshit – it is made up, it is unnecessary, and in fact if you got up and walked out right now, no-one would probably notice for a couple of hours, if not days.
We are not talking about worthwhile work here, we are talking about bullshit jobs, mostly office jobs, administrative jobs, mostly in middle management business or just about everywhere in government and definitely any job involving HR (that’s Human Resources which used to be called Personnel which before that was called the boss who hired you…), regulatory law or the king of all bullshit jobs, local councils!
Worthwhile work and bullshit jobs – what is the difference (You may want to read something else I wrote about ‘worthwhile work’ – click here).
I am in Bali at the moment and there are so many people. I quickly looked up the statistics and Australia has approximately 3 people per square kilometre and Bali has 690 – so, okay, yeah it is a bit crowded! But, there are not too many people doing bullshit jobs.
Most of them are out in their fields growing rice so that their family can eat – certainly 
not bullshit and certainly necessary. I sat on the balcony of our villa overlooking a field the other morning and watched a guy hand till a quarter acre block of land. I only watched for a while in the morning as I had to have a swim, eat in a restaurant, buy some more shit I didn’t need and then drink beer… But, later in the afternoon when I had filled my day with fuck all, I went back up on the balcony and saw that he was still working, finalising in the twilight the last few metres of tilling his field. Worthwhile work? Most of all I wondered what he was thinking…
Did he think he would be better off:
- Being a telemarketer and asking people if they need funeral insurance
- Being a public relations expert for a big company managing its image
- Being a investment consultant
(Just on ‘investment consultants’ – what the fuck sort of job is that, surely if you knew everything about investing you would be rich and wouldn’t have to work?)
- Being a mortgage broker
(Just on ‘mortgage brokers’ – do people think they do it for free! So you go to a mortgage broker to get a loan from a bank, why not just go to the bank?)
- Being someone who does administrative support, information technology solutions, security, sells them office furniture, stationary or caters to any of the above (and a 1000 other) bullshit jobs.
I am sure my Bali farmer tilling his field doesn’t give a rats fuck that there is a compulsory seminar on today for all employees at ‘Mortgage Broker Financial Services & Telemarketers Pty Ltd” on equity and diversity in the workplace! (PS: Another group of bullshit jobs in ‘corporate training’!!!)
Even the good jobs are now full of bullshit. Just imagine our Bali farmer tilling his field – in 1 day! Why, because all he did was till his field; he didn’t have to do a business plan and environmental scan, he didn’t have to hire a project manager, surveyor or tilling expert to make sure he was doing it right, he didn’t have to report (in triplicate on 5 different computer systems to 7 different supervisors and sub-managers and department heads), he didn’t have to have a OHS expert approve his hoe (read: “industry standard sharpened soil turning implement – un powered”) …. he just tilled his field!
So, bullshit jobs exist to support other bullshit jobs and although the work gets done, there was really no work in the first place – no fields got tilled, nothing grows in most of these bullshit jobs. They are self creating and self perpetuating and if there isn’t enough bullshit work to fill a bullshit job we have corporate training, seminars and most of all the internet on every desk so if all else fails we can check our Facebook and watch porn!
I don’t know how you escape from a society that seems to thrive with bullshit jobs. Has the industrial revolution and the technological revolution (which we haven’t seen anywhere near where we are going with that one) saved us time and effort – the answer is YES!
But, we have filled in the time that the ‘spinning jenni’ and the computer saved us with bullshit.
Are the poor starving less, is the world free of disease, have we cured cancer, is art more beautify, NO, because we have to get the correct coversheet on the memo to be hand delivered to the boss in the non existent paperless office.
I read in the Advertiser this morning that a survey of South Australia Police found that:
76 per cent felt workloads had either increased or largely increased in the past three years.
75 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed that management would listen to their concerns.
67 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed that management conducted adequate assessment before announcing the reforms.
66 per cent believed there were insufficient staff numbers.
64 per cent said service delivery will be worse to much worse under the reforms.
55 per cent felt positive or extremely motivated to go to work.
So, lets look at that at this survey using the ‘bullshit jobs’ methodology.
Firstly (and only really when you consider all the above results from the survey) one 
would presume that most joined the Police to make a difference and serve society. This is a good start to their employment – it is the thought they are going to be cops, doing cop stuff. Then they find that they are required to spend the bulk of their time on tasks they don’t like and they are not particularly good at (and most certainly haven’t been trained for) which is administration, typing and continuous reporting to micromanagers.
So they find that they joined the Police to be cops and spend most of their time being clerks. Most of these administrative jobs don’t actually need to be done, or a least could be done cheaper and more efficiently (e.g. your average cop types at about 25 word per minute and earns about $80,000 a year – your average typist types at 80+ words a minute and gets paid $35,000 a year – this is easy maths by the way!)
So, in the end everyone ends up doing more clerical work that cop stuff – it gets to the point where they all become obsessed with clerical work (doing the statistics, reporting to the boss, building a CV) that in the end they actually resent anyone doing cop stuff because they are not doing their share of clerical bullshit – in the end they are all competing to do more clerical bullshit than cop stuff. As a matter of fact the entire organisation is now geared to bullshit clerical jobs instead of cops being cops.
By the way – reorganisation doesn’t fix this – organisational culture, which created it is the only way to fix it.
How can a cop be proud of being a cop, wanting to go to work being a cop, be proud of his/her work as a cop, when they spend all of their time being clerks doing bullshit jobs?
So where does that leave us.
I think of it this way…. if all the telemarketers, political secretaries, public relations officers, mortgage brokers, financial planners etc etc, just didn’t go to work for a week, would we notice, would we be worse off – or perhaps better off, but, if all the cops, doctors, school teachers etc etc didn’t go to work, what would happen?
The answer is simple.
The child of the bullshit jobs are bullshit jobs – all offspring are still born, to live a life as aimless zombies, eating our brains, stifling our curiosity, destroying our imagination, cramping invention and eventually, draining our actual spirit.
We must prevent their birth (abstinence worked once but birth control is more efficient) 
or if during a time of passion, of uncontrolled optimism in the boardroom or at a meeting where emotions run high and we decide to give birth to another bullshit job and it is conceived – have it aborted as soon as possible, you know it will grow up to be no good and just end up breeding with other bullshit jobs to create a ghetto of office cubicles and industry seminars.
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