Month: March 2019

Kate Bush’s ‘Lily’

Photographer Gitte Morten has started a blog titled One Kiss In Apple Blossom. It features women who are Kate Bush fans describing their favourite Kate song, and Gitte’s photographic response to them and the song.

Being a major Kate Bush fan, as soon as I heard this idea, I was all over it. However, Gitte lives in Somerset, England, and I am in British Columbia, Canada. Being about 4500 miles away made a photo session a bit of a challenge. But thanks to FaceTime and Gitte’s willingness to experiment with photographing a computer screen, she made it happen – and it was a great deal of fun. Here are the results, and my thoughts on Kate’s song “Lily”.

Fiona: Lily (1993)

All About Work’s 7th Anniversary

March 18 marks seven years since I started All About Work. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but I guess time really does fly when you’re having fun.

On every anniversary, I compile a list of the five blog posts that have received the most hits ever on All About Work. The list hasn’t changed significantly over time, but it’s nice to see that people are still finding and enjoying these posts.

Thanks to everyone who reads, posts, and comments! I appreciate the support.

The All-Time Top Five Posts on “All About Work” (more…)

Good Jobs and Bullshit Jobs

Recently, the New York Times Magazine had a special theme issue on “The Future of Work: What Makes a ‘Good Job’ Good?”. As it happened, the issue came out while I was reading the new book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by anthropologist David Graeber. This was a lovely bit of symmetry, because both the book and the articles in the magazine address similar questions: with more automation in the workplace, why are we not working fewer hours? If we know as much as we do about organizations and work, why are so many workers so unhappy? Shouldn’t work be getting better, instead of getting worse?

These are very big questions with complex answers. I won’t try to cover everything that’s discussed in the book and the magazine articles, and have a wide-ranging but superficial discussion; I recommend that you read the book and the articles for yourself. But I’m going to pull out a couple of themes that I found particularly fascinating.

Both the book and the articles look at the worsening relationships between workers and employers and show that this trend isn’t just anecdotal. Surveys of job satisfaction over time show (more…)