Bad Jobs: My Last Shift at Albert Wong's Pagoda and Other Ugly Tales of the Workplace

Rating:
Summary: Not one of my favorite 'real-world' books...
Review: Some of the employment horror stories are funny but several chapters were quite honestly, vulgar. This book is loaded with graphic, sexual content and strong language. When reading the chapters I felt that some of the supposed "real-life experiences" were exaggerated or even fabricated. I have heard better "on-the-job-horror-stories" from my co-workers than what I read in this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Vital New Literary Form
Review: This is a very cool collection of stories, comics, and photographs depict, in gory true-life detail, examples of bad jobs. Included is the tale of a phone sex operator who routinely brings men to orgasm while reading Ms Magazine, the stripper who performs her first-and last-routine to Aretha Franklin's "R-E-S-P-E-C-T", and the factory worker who knows firsthand what goes into "Crushed Party Ice." Truth is alternately more irritating and stranger that fiction as with the story of the applicant whose interviewers end up breathing real hard through their noses, until she points out that half of their interview questions are illegal or an environmental canvasser who turns up in the local paper's "Crimewatch" column - and considers turning himself in for the reward money. By turns beautiful, surreal, hilarious, and awful, BAD JOBS brings together a plurality to the aesthetic responses to each author's 'true stories' just as some forms of badness require different remedies. The stories in this collection mix subversive laughter at absurdity with the sadness, frustrations and failed hopes that makeup many workplace experience. Perhaps best of all Bad Jobs is a vital and welcomed new model for complaint and renewal in storytelling from the rare perspective of the bottom up.