DG

Sure. This came from my own work, of asking people to send me testimonies. I assembled several hundred testimonies from people who had bullshit jobs. I asked people, “What’s your most pointless job you ever had? Tell me all about it; how do you think it happened, what’s the dynamics, did your boss know?” I got that kind of information. I did little interviews with people afterwards, follow-up stuff. And so, in a way, we came up with category-systems together. People would suggest ideas to me, and gradually it came together to five categories.

As you say, we have, first, the flunkies. That’s kind of self-evident. A flunky exists only to make someone else look good. Or feel good about themselves, in some cases. We all know what kind of jobs they are, but an obvious example would be, say, a receptionist at a place that doesn’t actually need a receptionist. Some places obviously do need receptionists, who are busy all the time. Some places the phone rings maybe once a day. But you still have to someone — sometimes two people — sitting there, looking important. So, I don’t have to call somebody on the phone, I’ll have someone who will just say, “There is a very important broker who wants to speak to you.” That’s a flunky.

A goon is a little subtler. But I kind of had to make this category because people kept telling me they felt that their jobs were bullshit — if they were a telemarketer, if they were a corporate lawyer, if they were in PR, marketing, things like that. I had to come to terms with why it was they felt that way.

The pattern seemed to be that these are jobs that are actually useful in many cases for the companies they work for, but they felt the entire industry shouldn’t exist. They’re basically people there to annoy you, to push you around in some way. And insofar as it is necessary, it’s only necessary because other people have them. You don’t need a corporate lawyer if your competitor doesn’t have a corporate lawyer. You don’t need a telemarketer at all, but insofar as you can make up an excuse to say you need them, it’s because the other guys got one. Alright, so that’s easy enough.

Duct-tapers are people who are there to solve problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place. At my old university, we only seemed to have one carpenter, and it was really hard to get them. There was a point where the shelf collapsed in my office at the university where I was working in England. The carpenter was supposed to come, and there was a huge hole in the wall, you could look at the damage. And he never seemed to show up, he always had something else to do. We finally figured out that there was this one guy sitting there all day, apologizing for the fact that the carpenter never came.

He’s very good at the job, he’s very likable follow who always seemed a little sad and melancholy, and it was very hard to get angry at him, which is of course what his job was. Be a flak-catcher, effectively. But at one point I thought, if they fired that guy and hired another carpenter, they wouldn’t need him. So, that’s a classic example of a duct-taper.