April 04th, 2026

               We Need Another Factotum, i.e. a Book with Soul About Working Crappy Jobs
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Most people hate their jobs. And most people also love to read about other people performing their shitty jobs. Figure that one out. Maybe it’s a bit like the old Patton Oswalt bit about why he enjoyed watching Cops: watching other people endure misery helps you endure your own, maybe especially if their lots are even more miserable than yours. We even get a loanword from the German to describe this feeling: Schadenfreude.
There are enough books on working crappy jobs for various subgenres to have developed within the main body of the genre. There’s the story of a socially conscious journalist slumming for a year or two, working crappy jobs and keeping notes before writing their book. Usually these works mix field reporting and personal observations with hard data and quotes from more academic sources. The other main subgenre (which I prefer) consists of firsthand accounts of people working various crap jobs not out of sociological interest or class solidarity but simply because they have no choice. These people tend to be overeducated, underemployed types who dream of being professional writers or at least tenure-track professors. A lot of times they got their MFA in the hopes of writing the Great American Novel. In the meantime, though, they’re saddled with a ton of student debt and they have to do something to avoid ending up on the streets.
My favorite of these books is probably Iain Levison’s A Working Stiff’s Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can’t Remember. Its subtitle should give you a sense of its darkly humorous tone. Levison was an extremely talented, insightful and acerbic writer. I say “was” because the guy hasn’t written anything besides a handful of articles in years. The last I heard, he fled to China and is teaching English to Chinese kids there. Why is it that the most talented writers are almost always the least prolific?
Getting back to the book: Levison’s description of his various crap jobs—the physical pains, the sometimes dangerous mishaps—evoke laughter but also push the reader toward tears. Whether you’re still working a crap job or you’ve escaped it (or you’re one of those lucky souls who never endured the grind) you’ll still feel for the man.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but some of the scenes were so vivid that even years later they remain fresh in my mind: like the time he served wine at a toney party but kept cutting his hand with the corkscrew and ended up getting his blood mixed in with the drinks; or that time he was delivering home heating oil via truck to large mansions and—thanks to some confusing instructions from dispatch—ended blowing the head off a statue with a blast of hot oil from a hose; or working an offshore fishing rig and having netfuls of stinking mackerel dumped on his head while he attempted to shovel his way free.
Of course, the granddaddy of all crap job books is Skid Row poet laureate Charles Bukowski’s Factotum. The book follows the peregrinations of young Hank Chinaski from one Greyhound station to another as he seeks work while trying to make it as a writer. He works at a dog biscuit factory, as a janitor, as a “ball bearing man,” and at a million other sundry shit gigs all while remaining either blackout drunk or enduring the agonies of an excruciating hangover. Reprieves come in the form of trips to the horse racing track and making love to equally sloshed and shabby women in seedy rooming houses. It’s a bitterly funny-sad book whose point appears to be that the average life at the lower social rungs is mostly pointless. Scene follows scene with no connecting thread except that Hank—somehow—remains alive despite a strong self-destructive streak…
I suppose people are still writing books about their crap lives and crap jobs, but I haven’t read anything on the subject lately. It’s a shame, as I feel that the genre is long overdue not only for an update, but for a book on the subject to outdo everything that came before. Not that the aforementioned books weren’t great in their own way, it’s just that the labor market has become even crappier since those books were written, the situation of your average prole even more desperate.
Yes, Bukowski had endured the Great Depression, but Factotum took place in the Forties, during the war boom when jobs were plentiful, especially for young, able-bodied men. It’s debatable how able-bodied the heavy-drinking Buk was, but with all the non-4F (draft deferred) youngsters overseas, getting a job was fairly easy even for him.
In the intervening decades—especially since the Dotcom boom and bust, as well as the opening of the immigration floodgates—competition for even the worst jobs has grown only more fierce. It’s not just that, but most of the gains have been for management and the owners at the expense of the workers. The game is rigged thanks to all kinds of legal and linguistic legerdemain, as well, designed to keep you from getting even the meagerest benefits. You’re not an employee, you’re an associate, or subcontractor. People no longer have jobs, they work gigs. Octogenarians who should be doting on grandchildren in living rooms are struggling to keep smiles on their faces while stocking shelves or serving burgers to obese ingrates; Amazon fulfillment centers that look like concentration camps sprout over the countryside and fleets of blue panel trucks comb the land delivering sex toys to shut-ins. People who were in war-torn nations last week bring orders of fast food and recreational marijuana edibles to the doors of young girls masturbating via webcam for men old enough to be their fathers.
It’s all quite hellish—hellish enough, in fact, for new words, concepts, and neologisms to have emerged in hopes of describing or dealing with this monstrous society we’ve created. The “precariat” slave away in a “techno-feudalist” system ruled by billionaires who dream of leaving Earth behind for Mars and implanting microchips in our heads (ostensibly for our own good, but probably for their own, nefarious purposes. After all, turnover in slave mines is probably pretty high and those rare earths and cobalt are not going to dig themselves up.)
The people who run the show grow ever more detached from the people they rule over, as well. Rather than wearing giant wigs and powdering their faces with arsenic-soaked puffs like the elite of a bygone era, our rulers go to ski resorts and talk about installing internet kill-switches to keep the rabble in line, or achieving the singularity and uploading their consciousnesses onto deathless electronic platforms.
The only good part about such a terrifying situation is that there are still some people out there strong enough to laugh, and perceptive enough to find the beauty in all that ugliness. Brave, enough also to look their situation in the eye and describe it as it is—without meaning or purpose besides what little they might give it with their words.
I can’t help but think about the person who could do it, come out and finally say it for the rest of us, an avatar for a whole class of people who tend to get overlooked. A young man or woman who dreamed of becoming a writer but is now currently pushing a forklift. Tomorrow they’ll be delivering Chipotle for Uber Eats or driving a bagful of groceries for Door Dash in their tiny Prius. The next day they’ll be stocking shelves at a vape shop run by an Indian berating them for moving too slow. Maybe they’ll even sign up to be a subject of medical testing just to add a touch of novelty to the agonizing grind.
At night, body aching, mind numbed, soul almost without hope, this person will return to their apartment they share with three equally hopeless roommates. They’ll go to their room, sit down in front of a PC and force themselves to write a thousand words or so. Slowly—through excruciating trial and error—they will learn to be a good writer. They will learn what to leave out and what to put in, how to hold a reader’s interest, how to make reading about hell less than hellish, or even enjoyable.
Hopefully it leads to a good book, and hopefully they have the balls to send it out into the world. Hopefully also some publishing house picks it up. But if not, I hope they self-publish the work and don’t worry about it being perceived as a “vanity” project.
Hell, part of vanity is caring what other people think, which makes most established, well-respected writers vainer than any kid out there willing to circumvent the “Big Six” and take the DIY route.
One thing I know for sure, though.
I’m not going to be the one to write that book, as those days of busting my ass for shareholders and owners I’ll never meet are far in my rearview. I busted my ass hard enough in the Army, and if this writing shit doesn’t work out for me, I’ll go live under a bridge somewhere. Roast rats on a wooden spit over a barrel fire during the day while nodding out on fentanyl in my little canvas tent at night.
Maybe—assuming I don’t overdose—I’ll even write a book about it.