You've written a lot of really good "I hate work" themed songs, what was your LEAST favorite job you've had?
JF: It is an idea I lean on but maybe because I think of it as a universal, relatable topic.
But let me complain--I had a couple of freelance graphic jobs that were so fully repetitive it felt a bit like working in an Amazon fulfillment center, but I also was kind of depressed about where I was at in general so maybe I wasn't up for the tasks at hand. As a teenager I worked as a bus boy and that was unrewarding in every way--beyond the "split shift" set up where you essentially worked 12 hours but got paid for eight, it was also physically exhausting.
For a couple of years I worked as a surveyor for Metro North, counting passengers on trains and at stations and in Grand Central Station. While this probably sounds like a potentially miserable job, we actually had a fair bit of "dead" time waiting for twenty minutes or more for the next counting task, so there was a lot of time to space out, putter around the stations and think.
