Vorspeisenplatte

Der Wecker klingelte sehr früh, damit ich vor der Arbeit noch bei der Hausärztin das Rezept für mein Migränemedikament holen konnte, auch Urlaubsvorbereitung.

Über den Tag wurde es unangenehm heiß, auf dem Heimweg mit ein paar Besorgungen tropfte ich.

Geht gerade rum, auch ich machte Bekanntschaft mit einer gefälschten YouPorn-Rechnung.

Abends begann die Herausforderung: Der Ernteanteil dieser Woche, mitten in der höchsten Erntesaison, muss in 2,3 Tagen verfuttert werden. Denn dann sind wir weg.

Wir begannen mit einer großen Salatschüssel (Blattsalat, Tomaten, Gurke – mit Tahinidressing) und panierten Auberginenscheiben.

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Sehr gern gelesen habe ich diesen Artikel über erfundene Berufe von Anthropologie-Professor David Graeber (vielleicht werde ich in meinem nächsten Leben doch nicht Tänzer/Tänzerin, sondern befasse mich hauptberuflich mit Anthropologie):
“Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs”.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

(…)

… rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

(…)

According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

(…)

… in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.

Überlegen Sie allein mal, wie viele Job es inzwischen allein in der Meta-meta-Branche “Change Management” gibt, innerhalb von Unternehmen und als externe Beratungsfirmen!

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Giardino hat Schiffsurlaub um schottische Inseln gemacht (selbst bezahlt, das muss man ja inzwischen explizit ergänzen) und die Reise in mehreren Teilen verbloggt – mit atemberaubenden Bildern.
Hier geht’s los.