Difficult Jobs

One of my favorite pieces in our January issue is Mishele Maron’s terrific “Bad Lunch,” an essay in which she describes a challenging job preparing meals for guests on a luxury yacht. Difficult jobs—or great jobs, or bad jobs, or downright horrible jobs—are familiar to many of us, and they’ve certainly had their place in The Sun over the years. Below are some standouts from our archives.

Take care and read well,
Derek Askey

Readers Write

Hard Work

By Our Readers August 2004

Sun readers have an intriguing and expansive view of what constitutes hard work: hauling hundreds of crates of live lobsters a day, administering morphine to a dying patient, even powering through an opaque passage of Sigmund Freud’s writing.

Poetry

Looking For Work

By Alison Luterman September 2007

It’s one thing to complain about a difficult job or a lousy boss; another thing entirely to be out of work and applying. With her customary wit and keen eye, Alison Luterman has a poem for those “Looking for Work.”

Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Dirty Work

By Nancy Matson May 2017

On her first day working at an animal shelter—hired after being asked by the interviewer if she was OK with euthanizing animals, and, in need of a job, responding in the affirmative—author Nancy Matson notices that the newspaper “in the break room was usually folded open to the want ads.” Things don’t get much better after that.

Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Real Work

By Joseph Bathanti February 2012

I’ve long admired Joseph Bathanti’s candid, revealing prose—and he’s a hell of a poet, too—and I especially love this glimpse of his last summer in his (and my) hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when he worked a grueling manual-labor job for his uncle. It’s a wonderful look at a young man caught between, and only half-belonging, to two worlds.