Crap Jobs: 100 Tales of Workplace Hell

I've laughed myself to tears over numerous pages in this book. Each job description includes little emoticons which provide a shorthand assessment of the job. A head with a hatchet buried in it denotes "dangerous", a head with devil horns coming out of it means "immoral", and so on. The book is not for prudish goody-two shoes of the world, but man, is it funny.

Okay, so almost every story is British. Big whoop. If you've ever worked a McJob, you can identify. Mostly. Welcome to 100 of the nastiest jobs you've ever heard of, the kind you couldn't pay Mike Rowe to profile. Maggot wrangler. Pie-hole puncher (even less interesting than it sounds). Chili sauce bottler. Editorial assistant (one wonders from her story if she wasn't singlehandedly responsible for the nickname "Grauniad"). Door to door salesman (one of which involved the supervisor passing out free lines of cocaine to whoever was falling asleep on their feet). It's all bad news, and good reading. (It would probably go nicely with a copy of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.) One downside: the cartoonist, who signs as Gwyn, is awful -- utterly lacking in artistic talent, and with no discernible sense of humor. Thus a 4-star review rather than 5-star.