Thread by @thetimes

Are dead-end jobs good for the soul?

The actor Simon Pegg seems to think so: he says that his three years working at Debenhams after graduating “made me who I am”. But is that just nostalgia talking? Three Times writers weigh in
thetimes.co.uk/article/dead-e…

"I got £1 an hour, and raw knuckles"

For columnist Robert Crampton, his less-than-glamorous job at a bicycle factory in Hull came before university – and lasted just six months

His experience was so salutary that it persuaded him to take his A-levels, aged 21, and then apply to Oxford:

“£1 an hour, 8am to 4.30pm five days a week, with half an hour’s unpaid break for a chip butty, is no fun at all…apart from the butty.”

It didn’t help that he was also useless at making BMXs, and was eventually relegated to smoothing sticky logos onto bike crossbars. But it did teach Crampton never to look down on those who do prosaic, tiring, poorly paid jobs

"Low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity"

Features writer Helen Rumbelow was halfway through a year of working as a waitress at a wine bar when she attended her first, and last, school reunion

She says that the decision to go was not so much a mistake as an act of bleak self-harm

Graduating in the midst of a financial crisis, with unemployment at 10%, options were limited: she tried the usual escape routes: a procrastination MA; living in America for a few years; finding the love of her life

Yet life still hadn’t really started

She went to her school reunion in her mid-twenties out of sheer loneliness

Suddenly those she’d written off as “no-hopers” as a teenager were performing life-saving medical procedures, or were on schemes with the word “fast-track” in their title

“Yeah, back living at home,” she had to mumble when asked about her life

But, Rumbelow says, her experience taught her something:

“I thought that only young people pretended their way through life, but here I was with people twice my age, and we were all pretending.”

"This was three years of my life"

Deputy books editor James Marriott spent three years post-graduation working in an antiquarian bookshop - found for him by a well-intentioned tutor who evidently had him down as a bit weird, old-fashioned and unsuited to real life

One of his principal tasks was “collating” the books, which meant counting each individual page to check they were all there.

Marriott was always trying to escape the job, but was trapped by his finances

Both two potential escape routes were closed:

Doing an internship was impossible because none of them paid and he couldn’t afford the cost of any of the Masters courses he was accepted onto

“Thank God I spent those three years writing journalism in my spare time”
thetimes.co.uk/article/dead-e…