The Bartender Event Horizon

Regular blog readers know that one of my pet peeves is characters who either don't seem to work in any appreciable way (and yet are never short of cash at the Obligatory Urban Fantasy Bar) or have one of two or three acceptably 'cool' jobs. One of the issues with this is the lack of people who do jobs that don't fall under 'Acceptably Cool Job' or 'bartender/innkeeper'.  For the purposes of this post, I'll call the phenomenon the Bartender Event Horizon, as the entire economy of Urban Fantasyland seems to be taken up with food service and private detectives, and no other sectors, except maybe the stray cab driver, cop, or member of the clergy. One possibility is that you are writing about a dystopian society which has actually reached the Bartender Event Horizon, and everyone is drowning their sorrows together.

If you aren't, there's an immediate realism problem. Even if your character has some glamorous job, we should see the workings of the world around them. Presumably your fictional requires thousands of different specialised or semi-specialised professions to make it work (seriously, someone's got to distill all that booze for your troubled private eye to drink), and your character will probably know people who have a wide variety of occupations. If you don't, the audience doesn't really get to see how your fictional society works. Letting the reader see how the ordinary--and extraordinary-- aspects of your setting work is a critical part of moving your story out of generic Urban Fantasyland and into it's own unique world.