I agree that Fast Food Nation is a really good book, but I don’t really know if you’d be able to finish it all quick-like. It talks about how they make atrificial flavor, meat plants, McDonald’s, the development and history of fast food, and it’s effect on the US.
The most demeaning job I’ve ever had. Hmmmmm.
Telephone poller or working in a Starbuck’s in a grocery store. People are so RUDE.
Wow, maidservice is demeaning? Thats nothing.
THE most demeaning job on earth is a nursing assistant in a retirement home. You spend all day bathing old people and wiping their asses for $1.25/hr more than you would make at McDonalds. i went to visit one and it was disgusting, 90 year olds would shit on the floor and the nursing assistant would have to clean it up.
Slight nitpick, this depends on the floor. My wife always cleans floors on her hands and knees on the first visit to a new client and whenever it needs it after that. She has one client with some kind of cork floor that she has to clean on hands and knees every time.
My cleaner is a godsend. I couldn’t travel 50%+ and work ungodly hours, and still have any remote resemblence of a home life if I didn’t have someone to do the shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc. Damn straight I appreciate it.
My employer is a 50 year-old female. Her husband’s salary is $500,000/year (tax attorney), so basically, the office I work in is just “for show” really.
Anyway, she’s had my co-worker go to her house recently to do the following personal things:
a) take a black magic marker, and color-in the letter " Y " on the placemat sitting on the front porch (their last name starts with “Y”, and she determined that the “Y” on the mat should be black instead of brown).
b) determine how many chairs should sit around the dining room table - 4 or 6 (couldn’t figure out which “looked better”).
c) dispose of cobwebs in basement
d) pack their suitcases (underwear included) for family trip to Arizona.
I could go on and on. . .quite unbelievable, really.
If you’re going down the maid route, I’d recommend you read “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich.
It’s a very good book about trying to survive on the minimum wage in America, Ehernreich takes a job as a maid for a while, and some of the stories of what people had to put up with are atrocious. (Like carrying a heavy vacuum pack on their backs while having a broken ankle because they can’t afford to take a day off work to go and get it seen to or the kids wont eat).
Frightning stuff.
Can you give us any examples?
On second thought, maybe I don’t really want to know.