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"the proportion of the workforce made up of actual waiters, barbers, salesclerks, and the like was really quite small. It also remained remarkably steady over time."

"part of the reason no one has noticed is that people simply refused to believe that capitalism could produce such results—even if that meant writing off their own experiences or those of their friends and family"

"the fact that so many people are being paid to do nothing at all defies all our common assumptions about how market economies are supposed to work."

They terrify because they menace not just your body, but also your soul. This is presumably why adolescents in particular are drawn to them: adolescence is precisely when most of us are first confronted with the challenge of how not to become the monsters we despise.

It's hard to imagine anything more soul destroying than, as Meena put it, being forced to commit acts of arbitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one's will. To become the face of the machine that one despises... the most frightening monsters in popular fiction do not simply threaten to rend or torture or kill you but to turn you into a monster yourself: think here of vampires, zombies, werewolves.

Putting on the suit and coming to the office was, he felt, just an elaborate sacrificial ritual.

ME TOO!

Performance reviews, Finn admits, are bullshit, explaining, "Everyone already knows who the slackers are."

(me) Yeah, but in order to get rid of them, you have to have documentation, thus the need for the performance reviews.

When I started working on those banners, I had patience for the process. Once I realized that the task was more or less meaningless, all that patience evaporated. It takes effort to overcome cognitive dissonance—to actually care about the process while pretending to care about the result.

Other people expect me to help them and organize things and give them the confidence that people usually look to a Project Manager for because I've been given that title. But I have no authority and no control over anything.

The one thing that could never, apparently, happen, is for anyone to actually say, "Basically, you're just here in case of emergencies. Otherwise, do what you like and try not to get in anybody's way."

I also always made sure to have at least two projects run by different bosses, so that I could tell both of them that I was spending a lot of time on the other project.

I installed Lynx, a text-oly Web browser that basically looks like a DOS window. No images, no Flash, no JavaScript—just monospaced text on an endless black background. My absentminded browsing of the internet now appeared to be the work of a skilled technician, the Web browser a terminal into which diligently typed commands signaled my endless productivity.

To state the matter bluntly: the company really just needed to have a team of engineers to come in every morning to check if the air conditioners were working and then hang around in case something broke... the firm invented an endless array of forms, drills, and box-ticking rituals calculated to keep them busy eight hours a day.

We then kicked back, proud of what we'd accomplished, pausing perhaps to smoke a cigarette or scarf ourselves a scampi—until, of course, the boss showed up to ask us what the hell we were doing just lounging around... Of course, we learned our lesson: if you're on the clock, do not be too efficient. You will not be rewarded... Instead, you'll be punished with meaningless busywork.

I was one of three teenage boys hired at the start of the summer season, and the first time there was a mad rush, we naturally made a game of it, determined to prove that we were the very best and most heroic dishwashers of all time, pulling together into a machine of lightning efficiency, producing a vast and sparkling pile of dishes in record time.

The middle classes came to see the poor as poor largely because they lacked time discipline; they spent their time recklessly, just as they gambled away their money.

time was simultaneously a fixed grid, and a possession. Everyone was encouraged to see time as did the medieval merchant: as a finite property to be carefully budgeted and disposed of, much like money... over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting in England, the old episodic style of working came increasingly to be viewed as a social problem.

By the fourteenth century, most European towns had created clock towers—usually funded and encouraged by the local merchant guild.

In places without clocks, time is measured by actions, rather than action being measured by time.

ME: I'm not sure that this is correct. We do have some record of people being paid a day's wages (presumably for a day's labor). In particular I remember Christ's parable about the dude who showed up like an hour before quitting time and got paid the same as everybody else. When the other laborers complained, they were told that they got what they were promised. I can't help wondering what happened the next day....

As a result, the overwhelming majority of examples of wage labor that we do encounter in the ancient world are of people who are already slaves: a slave potter might indeed arrange with his master to work in a ceramics factory, sending half the wages to his master and keeping the rest for himself.

To be a slave, to be forced to surrender one's free will and become the mere instrument of another, even temporarily, was considered the most degrading thing that could possibly befall a human being.

The closest he would have likely been able to come would be the idea of renting the potter as a slave for a certain limited time period—a day, for instance—during which time the potter would, like any slave, be obliged to do whatever his master ordered. But for this very reason, he would probably find it impossible to locate a potter willing to enter into such an arrangement.

As the great classicist Moses Finley pointed out: if an ancient Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots... But he would have been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter's time.

"Idle fingers knit sweaters for the devil," my great-grandmother used to warn her daughter back in Poland. But this kind of traditional moralizing is actually quite different from the modern "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean," because its underlying is not that you should be working, but that you shouldn't be doing anything else.

This is in part because most people who have ever existed assumed that normal human work patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again toward another intense bout.

In other words, the traditional student's pattern of lackadaisical study leading up to intense cramming before exams and then slacking off again—I like to refer to it as "punctuated hysteria"—is typical of how human beings have always tended to go about necessary tasks if no one forces them to act otherwise.

Children come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from the world around them, largely by coming to understand that "they" are the thing which just caused something to happen—the proof of which is the fact that they can make it happen again.

"The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they'll take it."

"Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that... People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don't actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs."