Imagine having a job that pays you £12,000 to write a two-page report for a big company meeting where the document is never discussed. Or a job that requires you to rent a car and drive up to 500km to oversee a person’s computer being moved five metres from one room to another. What about being a receptionist in a publishing company where the phone rings once a day and your only other tasks are filling a dish with mints and winding a grandfather clock once a week?
These nuggets are strewn through David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, a provocative, funny and engaging book that claims the world has been engulfed by a rising tide of pointless work.
This is a curious charge to hear at a time of rising anxiety about keeping one’s job safe from a robot, or the indignities of the gig economy and sweeping technological disruption. Yet it clearly has appeal.