Review: Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante by Ayun Halliday
Theater major, zine publisher (the long running The East Village Inky), massage therapist Ayun Halliday (that’s “Ayun,” not any of the other names she’s been mistakenly addressed by at jobs: Pam, Anna, Amy… Raquelle?) finds the perverse humor in looking back on low-paying, back breaking, mentally demoralizing jobs of her youth to early thirties in Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-market Dilettante (Seal Press).

Job Hopper is not another I-hate-my-job grudge project, like the late zine Temp Slave or the web sites The Stained Apron and Customers Suck. Because Halliday understands the equation “pain + time = humor,” the book is not a mean spirited, vengeful collection of work-related sabotage and bitterness. (Sure, there is some spitting in a complaining customer’s manicotti, but it wasn’t she who expectorated.) Instead, Halliday chooses to focus on the truly weird aspects of her previous careers: cleaning Easter bunny costumes, stunningly boring office assignments, squatting nude (with arm extended), and trapped in a Sesame Street “Bert” oversized costume while mobbed by hyperactive toddlers and their even more hyper mothers. While it certainly was frustrating to telemarket tickets to a “Yakut theater performance” at the time, it’s very amusing from a safe distance.

Halliday quickly discovers the quirky unpaid benefits of these jobs: thousands of photocopies on the sly for her own projects, free theater tickets, unlimited office supplies, free food, costume “rentals,” and purloined review copies of books. She works with many talented, fun, downright nice people, who she always mentions positively.

As in her zine The East Village Inky, Halliday’s writing style is witty and engaging. While she’s not always a model employee (crouching behind the sales counter eating shrimp fried rice instead of pushing hippie clothing; lifting endless Sharpie markers for use by her theater group), you pull for her to finally find a job working at something she doesn’t hate. She discovers it in her thirties, when she goes back to school to become a massage therapist, which she loves.

Inevitably, some of the more cranky types out there (such as those people who freely complain about Wal-Mart, yet can afford not to shop there) will squawk that Halliday has no “right” to laugh about her low-paying employment history since millions of people still work in those low-paying jobs every day. Still other cranky types will squabble, “What did she expect, being a theater major?” What all these cranky types are forgetting is that these are her indignities alone, she freely chose these indignities (mostly, anyway), and she’s free to do what she wants with them. Halliday doesn’t degrade her fellow co-workers or bosses – unless they really deserve it, usually for treating others like something they just scraped off their shoe. Jerk customers and heiniehole management are shown no mercy. In the end, she fully acknowledges:

“I like to think that picking up another’s shit is where I draw the line, although I know there are people who do – usually unskilled laborers who haven’t had the luxury of going to theater school before embarking on a life of professional drudgery. Whatever they’re making, it isn’t enough.”

Overall, Job Hopper is a highly enjoyable and a recommended read. Especially at work.

Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-market Dilettante by Ayun Halliday. Seal Press.
- posted by Synd-e @ 9:41 AM