
The jobs people have and the work they do can tell us a lot about what it was like to live during different times in human history. The technologies and philosophies. The hopes and dreams. The haves and have-nots. But what about the UK now, today, in our machine-led age of brands, connectivity, the internet, and social media? What kind of work is out there, and what does it tell us about the experience of living and working in 2019?
Roving reporter Jamie Andrew waded into the workforce to find out.
Davey Johnson, 46, Salt-of-the-Earth Compliance Officer, Alloa, Scotland
Iâm a no-nonsense, tells-it-like-it-is, salt-of-the-earth type, and my job is to make sure that the rest of the world knows it. I carry out most of my work on the threads underneath articles shared on social media by local news organisations.
Itâs exhausting work. Iâm there, first thing in the morning, desperately trying to find ways to put a right-wing spin on the more gentle and whimsical articles with which these outlets tend to start the day. It can be tough. You know, I might have to find something militant to say about, say, a wee boy winning a prize for drawing a nice picture of a rabbit at his school. Iâll do it in baby steps, start off with a, âWisnae like that in my dayâ, maybe follow it up with a, âThese snowflakes and their pictures â I was shooting rabbits at his ageâ, and before I know it, Iâve slam-dunked it with a âWonder if theyâll still let us draw rabbits come the Muslim caliphate, eh?â
By lunch-time itâs easy. Me, Iâm feeling like Neo fae the Matrix: whoosh, bam, kaplow! Everythingâs just happening, like magic. Iâm skimming the headlines or the wee prompts by the page admin, and the replies are just boominâ out of meâŠ
âShould kids start school at 10am instead of 8am?â BOOM! Should they FUCK! âWhat do you think about smacking children?â BLAM! Dae it as hard as possible. Never did me ony harm! âBreast-feeding in public?â SLAP! Tits oot for the lads, absolutely NOT tits oot at my dinner table, ya manky bastards. âWhat do you think about the governmentâs initiative to lower the murder rate in our cities? âBASH! Bloody pansies! My grandfather murdered me when I was 12. And it never did me ony harm!â
The trick is to sound a bit like youâre in that Monty Pythonâs Yorkshireman sketch, but eighty per cent more racist.
Iâm bloody good at my job. Science, solidarity and compassion are no match for the angry, knee-jerk opinions of working-class, salt-of-the-earth types like me.
Randall McCallum, 31 Dinner Photographer, Bangor, NI
Not everyone can afford a new car or a dream home to rub in their followers faces on Facebook or Twitter. You donât need that. These days, the battle to win over hearts and minds â well, the battle to make hearts and minds seethe with rage and envy â is being fought at the dinner table. Thatâs where I come in.
Forget fortune. You donât need a new car to make Elspeth who used to be in your class at school jealous as fuck. The new signifier of social sophistication is food. Or, as I like to say, Duck LâOrange is the new hatchback.
All you need is a really snobby meal slapped on a dinner plate and snapped artistically, perhaps with some augmentation filter added in so the food looks like itâs glowing or glistening â just as long as you donât use the wrong filter and end up accidentally attaching donkey ears to your Colombian goat-loin curry.
Iâm so good at what I do I can make waffles look like a meal Gordon Ramsay might one day demand to impregnate. I drape parsley over them, sexily â so bloody sexy that it seems like Leo Di Caprio might paint it â then I tag it with something like #FreshPotatoGriddles, maybe even translate it to French first, because French makes everything shit sound really good, you know, with the possible exception of Citreon and Renault.
Before I got in to dinner-plate photography, I was in the wine business. I used to snap pictures of womenâs hands clutching wine glasses, and then Iâd add captions in post-production like, âWINE OâCLOCKâ, âBEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS ALL DAYâ, and âOBLIGATORY AIRPORT PHOTOâ, you know. The work dried up, though, mainly because my clients didnât. They all died of cirrhosis.
For the future, Iâm thinking about going into business with my cousin, Tristan, the world-famous âDick-Pic Stylistâ. Super talented guy, he used to have Wayne Rooney and Leslie Grantham on retainer.
Jeremy Phillipston, 23 Professional Netflix Content Absorber, Cardiff, Wales
The best part about my job is when Iâm talking to someone, and theyâre telling me that theyâve heard about this great new series thatâs just arrived on Netflix, and I get to cut them off with, âYeah, I finished it last night, itâs great, you should watch it.â I love that.I love watching their little smiles become hyphens.
The Haunting of Hill House, the Ted Bundy Tapes, the new season of Daredevil, sixteen new films that were only dropped on Netflix last night â before youâve even had a chance to hear about them, Iâve fucking seen them. All of them.
Not everyone appreciates what I do. Parents with young children, people who work, people who donât sit in their pyjamas for entire days at a time eating nothing but crisps â they all resent me. Itâs not my fault theyâre lazy, though. They should get their priorities straight. Problem they have is, theyâre spending too much time playing with their children. Too much time talking to their partners. In short, too much chilling, not enough Netflix. If I can make people feel inadequate and excluded enough that they feel driven to binge-watch television to the exclusion of all else in their lives, then job done.Youâre welcome, society.
This job was recommended to me because of my interest in my grandfatherâs career. He was a Full-time Plot Spoiler, and he was bloody good at it. Heâd walk out of elevators with a big mobile phone clamped to his ear shouting things like, âYEAH, YEAH, BRUCE WILLIS WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME, I KNOW, I KNOW, WHAT A FUCKING TWIST.â He once took out a full-page ad in The Times that said, YOU KNOW THAT MOVIE âSAWâ? WELL, THE DEAD GUY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS THE BADDIE. PS: STONE ME, DARTH VADER IS LUKEâS FATHER.
Theyâre making the story of his life into a 12-part series on Netflix next year, which Iâve already seen last week.You should watch it.
Sharon Grantham, 35 Worker in a GIF factory, Huddersfield, England
Me mam worked in a factory supplying funny pictures of cats and husbands to Bella and Thatâs Life magazines from 1969 to 1998, so I guess this sort of thingâs in me blood â along with the diabetes.
I started off in the Meme Warehouse, but most of me friends ,last few years, said the money was in GIFs â well, they pay more, in them GIF factories, âcause itâs more dangerous anâ that. Some of them GIFs â they donât look big on the screen, or, like, when you use them on your phone, do they? â but some of them are, like, the size of cardboard boxes, you know, them great big ones. The big boxes youâd use if you were movinâ house and that. And heavy. I knew a lass who got crushed to death by a GIF of a dancing beaver, just splatted her face off, it did. Bits of her brains all over me shoe. Worse, though, them that ordered the GIF deleted it almost as soon as they put it on Facebook, cause what they wanted was actually a GIF of a dancing Diva, but the predictive thingy put the wrong word, so me friend died for fook all, which is a shame. Still, the boss donated a nice GIF for her funeral, it was a flower all growing fast in fast motion, like it were speeded up, so the flower started off hanging down then jumped up and out, you know. I thought it were nice, but Jimmy who works the line with me was like, Christ, Sharon, thatâs the GIF me and me mates use if we wanna say a womanâs given us a stiffy, and I said oh my God, and heâs like, well, I guess she is a stiffy now, so maybe itâs alright?
Itâs dead hard in the GIF factory. We can be on the production line, and the big hornâll go off, and the boss will say over the loudspeaker, heâll shout something like: âERE, YOU, YOU LAZY BITCHES, THERE A WOMAN ON A GROUP IN FACEBOOK WHOâS NOT âAPPY ABOUT SOMETHING, SO SHE NEEDS A GIF OF A BIG BLACK LADY WAGGLINâ âER FINGER. NOT TOO SASSY IN THE FACE CAUSE SHEâS ANGRY, BUT SHEâS NOT âANGRYâ ANGRY, IF YOU KNOW WHAT AH MEAN. ALSO, âOW WE GETTINâ ON WITH THE BATCH OF GIFS OF ALL DIFFERENT PEOPLE BEING SICK? NEED IT FAST, PIERS MORGANâS ABOUT TO GO ON AIR.â
Iâm proud of it, cause the boss says most folk just talk in GIFs now anyway, like, cause itâs easier and more fun, and you can say lots more than you can with words, and there wonât be any words left by this time next year cause of Brexit, cause once we run out of words we wonât be able to get any more sent in from Sweden or wherever they come from. Where is it we get words from again?
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