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What do a life coach and an aromatherapist have in common? They're both listed in Stanley Bing's 100 Bullshit Jobs…And How to Get Them. If you do mind-numbing work for mind-blowingly low pay wondering how much better life is for a glamorous ad executive, celebrity stylist or TV meteorologist, then this book should mildly amuse you. But if you hold any of the occupations outlined in the book -- and you likely do -- you'll find this read full of crap. Case in point, bullshit job no. 96: writer of this book. "Writing about bullshit is serious work," the Fortune columnist writes. And so are many of the so-called full-of-it jobs he writes about (see lawyer, no. 54).
A crash course in calculating the bullshit quotient of your job begins the book. Do the math, Bing explains, to figure out how much bullshit content each gig involves and to figure out which crappy time-sucker might be best suited for you. The book then offers an alphabetized pile of bullshit professions and how much you can earn, how much bullshit each entails, skills required, duties performed, examples of famous people who have held those jobs, how to get them, the upside, the downside, the dark side and what your future might hold. Curious what an escort makes? "If you stay upright, several hundred dollars for the evening; a spanking can go for as much as $1,000 in Framingham, Massachusetts." Not too shabby for a little companionship.
This isn't exactly a guide for the working person, as the title suggests; you're not going to find your next career move among these pages. The skills required to be a backup dancer surely take more than just having a nice butt and marrying a pop tart (which itself is bullshit job no. 76). But what it does offer is a tongue-in-cheek look at some of those head-scratching positions your lazy friends make money in and that make you consider giving your two weeks' notice…till you realize your job is just as bullshit as theirs. (Book reviewer does not appear on this list.)
BOOK REVIEW ARCHIVE
- The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8
- Omaha Steaks' The Great American Grilling Book
- For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond
- Skyscrapers of the Midwest
- True Norwegian Black Metal
- That Salty Air
- Bonk
- Ghosts at the Table
- Don't Blame It on Rio
- The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts
- The Runner
- Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica
- Working Sex: Sex Workers Write about a Changing Industry
- Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
- boink: College Sex by the People Having It
- The Deviant's Pocket Guide to the Outlandish Sexual Desires Barely Contained in Your Subconscious
- The Star Machine
- Laura Warholic or, The Sexual Intellectual
- R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions
- My View from the Corner
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier
- The Contenders: Hillary, John, Al, Dennis, Barack, et al.
- No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth
- How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
- Bets, Drugs, and Rock & Roll
- Dirty Diplomacy
- Black and White and Blue
- The Nightly News
- Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist
- Spook Country
- Runoff
- Enter the Past Tense: My Secret Life as a CIA Assassin
- The Other Side
- DMZ, volumes 1 and 2
- It's Not News, It's Fark: How the Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News
- Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar
- Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, & How Hip Hop Became a Southern Thing
- Dishwasher
- Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived
- The Salon
- The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger
- The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything
- A Fighter's Heart
- The Scorpion's Sweet Venom
- Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
- Alternadad
- Absolute Sandman, Volume 1
- Absolute DC: The New Frontier
- Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album
- Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes
- Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.
- Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
- Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones
- Lost Girls
- The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGBs: A Secret History of Jewish Punk
- The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
- Al Pacino: In Conversation With Lawrence Grobel
- Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist
- The Discomfort Zone
- Sloth
- The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer
- I Hate Myself and Want to Die
- Cross Country
- The Nasty Bits
- 100 Bullshit Jobs
- Eat This Book
- How March Became Madness
- Jimbo's Inferno
- Made to Break
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