Day Job: A Workplace Reader for the Restless Age

This refreshing approach to the conventional business book, a combination of text and illustrations in an unusual format, is guaranteed to grab the reader's attention--and may furnish some insights, chuckles and a lesson or two about satisfaction in the job market. Mark Thornton, whose notes about his job and his life form the basis of the story, is your typical recent college grad. He's got a useless political science degree and tons of student debts and has landed a job as a customer rep for a graphics company in the throes of Total Quality Management (TQM) training. TQM has driven Lon Baffert, Mark's boss, bonkers, so that he periodically pops into people's cubicles and tells them to ""get psyched."" Mark has latched onto management's limitless appetite for psychological fixes by getting the company to underwrite his Syscorp Journal program. Offered by a rival to TQM, Syscorp's morale and retraining program requires that, for a day, Mark jot down random observations on his life. Baird, who has been a magazine art director, gives the ostensible results of this project a distinctive journal-like look by rendering much of the text as though it's a typed manuscript-in-progress, including marginal doodles, sidebars (for instance, ""a Select Inventory of Management Office Furnishings,"" listing the baffling knickknacks with which middle-managers tend to clutter their offices) and an array of quotations from such masters as Nietzsche and Steven Covey (of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People fame). The trick by which Mark gets to join the design department is the funny payoff for this quirky look at workplace anomie in the 1990s. (Sept.) FYI: The publisher intends to distribute this book only through college and independent bookstores and the Internet, avoiding the chains. Readers are encouraged to interact with the author and publisher at www.dayjob.com. or jbaird@a-os.com, or lallen@a-os.com.