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Work Is Four Letters

By some accounts, we spend more than 90,000 hours at work. Some of us less, many of us, unfortunately, more. I'm interested in what people do, how they got there, what they like about it, what they don't like about it — all of it.

Most people think their jobs are boring or pointless or bullshit, but I don't; if you look around you, everything you see was made by someone, somehow, and that's really interesting to me. Work is Four Letters is an occasional series — edited for brevity and clarity — highlighting what people do for work and why they do it.

Interested in talking to me about your work? Get in touch.

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EXTRA The Copper Merchant What are you writing a customer complaint letter for, you should expect to be cheated! Of Clay and Colors As we get older, the creative, artistic spirit gets beaten out of you. You're either told you suck, or you're not gonna make money doing this, and people drop it, or they grow up feeling like they're terrible at it, when it's really just a skill you develop over time The Columnist I perceive myself as being someone who takes the agency of individual people very seriously, and think that It's important to remind ourselves, continuously, that our choices actually do matter a great deal. Dan Does Everything I desperately want the world to be better than it is, and so most of what I make is about that. It's about trying to push us forward toward a future that is better than the shit we're living in. The world's gotta be better than this, like, it really does, we gotta fucking live here. Zeke | Public Defender When I have a good day at work, I get to know that I protected somebody from the system being cruel and racist and unfair and poised to screw up their life, in whatever way it's poised to screw up their life. Kathryn | Emergency Vet I have never really wanted to do anything else. Have you ever read any of the James Herriot books? All Creatures Great and Small? I wanted to be him. HALLOWEEN Nancy | Inpatient Counselor HALLOWEEN Vic | Lecturer and Researcher I don’t think we can defeat death. HALLOWEEN Liz | Skincare Influencer I always like to say that you have to love the skin that you’re in. HALLOWEEN Rennie | Personal Assistant Spiders eat bugs, right? Birds eat spiders, you know? The wolves will eat anything. Jim Dandeneau | Executive Director Our strength is in our relationships. Joe | Software Developer ChatGPT can pump out this code, but that’s not your job. Your job is knowing what code you need to write. Ivy | Urban Planner I watched a lot of towns in southern New Hampshire zone themselves out of existence. Bill | Quality Improvement Social work is, almost inherently, a radical profession. Misty View | Library IT Every single job I’ve had, I’ve had to prove the art and design thing quietly. Bill | CTO If you bang your head against the wall enough times, you will, in fact, make a hole in it, and we have a nice head-shaped hole in the wall where I fit comfortably. Dr. Nova | Medical Science Liaison I always wanted to work in medicine, but I knew I didn't want to work in an office. Karl | Cartoonist, Illustrator Weird things, the weird people you meet, the weird conversations that you fall into in bars, this is what city life was like in the early 21st century. Leo | Tattooer I've tried to do other normal-ish kinds of jobs, and I was very, very bad at them.