Zhang Wei is 30 years old and has just lost his 19th job. The range is wide: sales, field marketing, customer service, censorship, operator for the public hotline 12345… The early riser required him to get up at 4 a.m., the later at 10 p.m. . The longest job lasted eight months, the shortest three days. The highest paid brought in 7,000 yuan per month (871 Swiss francs, roughly the median salary in China)the lowest paid 1000 yuan. He had to consult his tax application to remember all his jobs. Whatever it was, and without exception, they were all “stupid jobs”, bullshit jobs.
After leaving his 19th position, Zhang Wei wrote:
“As I walked down the street, my heart was filled with two paradoxical feelings: on the one hand, the sadness of having lost my livelihood and the devastation of having to start from scratch again. On the other hand, the dazzling joy of being out of the job market again and no longer having to think about the office, as well as the satisfaction of finally being back in my comfort zone.”
“I wrote the number ’19’ in my cell phone notes, for the 19th job I lost. Compared to those who fear leaving their job, I have two strong points, the job interview and leaving. The only problem is what’s in the middle: the job itself.”
Zhang Wei has worked in a bar, in a pastry shop, and in a bookstore. In the book store, some customers naively asked: “When you have book time, you have to read all the time, right?” But there was no free time. A working day at the bookstore consisted of a multitude of micro-tasks, but it was never easy. The bookstore had three floors. Every day he changed it.
-Sometimes he went to the second floor to stock the shelves and replace sold copies, which required climbing up and down the ladder. Every two hours, he would go around the store to put aside the misplaced books. Sometimes, on the second floor, he had to take care of the coffee section, make hot drinks, reheat sandwiches or fruit waffles, take out frozen mousse cakes. The hardest part was preparing the smoothies with their layers of colors. At the bottom, the fruit juice, in the middle the sparkling water which continued to fizz, so that the slightest movement could cause the top layer, the granita, to submerge. It was then necessary to redo everything.
When customers ordered directly from the second floor, he had to prepare the order on the ground floor and take it into the elevator on a rickety tray. Meanwhile, three or four other orders had piled up. You needed real skills for the company to keep you. He ended up getting kicked out because he never managed to make latte artthese little drawings in the coffee cups.
When he was a bartender, he never knew when he would finish the job. Some customers were drinking until 3 or 4 a.m. He had to stay until they left. By this time he was generally starving, but all the food stores were closed. So he walked 25 minutes to the room he rented in a house without heat or gas, and lay down hungry under a good layer of blankets.
Credit seller
He worked as a loan officer and a debt collector. The first cost him 1000 yuan (120 Swiss francs). He first had to buy 1,500 “resource” numbers of potential customers to approach over the phone. Perhaps I hung up on Zhang Wei after receiving an unexpected call and after just one sentence: “Hello, do you need urgent credit?”. Of the 1500 numbers he called, 1400 hung up in this way, 90 waited a few sentences, and 10 agreed to be added to WeChat, the Chinese Whatsapp. Of those, seven didn’t work out, two never responded to messages, and the last one indicated he would consider taking out credit, which means no.
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