Worktogs

Do you dress for the job you want? Submit a photo and we'll find out.

[worktogs]

A psychopharmicologist. You received an Early Career Research Award for your work in psilocybin micro-dosing, with help from significant personal experience in undergrad. Your pockets are strategic. In case a volunteer presents themselves, you’ll be ready. 

[worktogs]

A vocal ensemble accompanist. If someone had told you 20 years ago that your New York club career would land you in a job where a one night stand equaled a short-term theater engagement, you’d have spat at their feet. Nevertheless, your private lessons keep things interesting enough. Some of those kids will be good one day, and you wait for the Grammy speech dedicated to you. You have played Bring in the Clowns more times than should be legal, and your hands ache at the end of the day. Still, hours of practicing left hand piano skills, hyper-focus on your singers, and attentive flexibility double their utility in the bedroom, and your un-rehearsed performances are undoubtedly some of your best. 

[worktogs]

A high school etymology teacher and bowling coach. You picked up the finger loop phone holder at a gas station; it reminds you of the league championship where you used the fingertip grip for your winning strike. The free word order of Latin enthralled you as a sixth-grader, though such fascination did you no favors getting a date to a middle-school dance. A vocabulary of nearly 40,000 words didn’t help with a prom date, either, but it got you noticed by a linguistics student in college who you married after graduation. The orthopedic sandals help your feet recover after having had more than a few house balls dropped on your toes. Myriad pants pockets hold anything from painkillers (yours) to Pokémon cards (your son’s). An oversized hoodie helps complete the look, lest anyone mistake you for the someone who still cares.

[worktogs]

A visual merchandiser at IKEA. You’re best known for the 2016 decision to include real children’s drawings on the SKADIS pegboard collection to be prominently featured in the display rooms. A first glance past a sterile ECKBACKEN countertop is brought back around by the carefully placed construction paper creations of employees’ kindergarteners. You have been  courted by other companies and considered a move to Anthropologie, but ultimately decided a shift from practical, bright, open concept space to expensive tattiness wasn’t worth the salary increase. BONUS: lifetime supply of Swedish meatballs and lingonberry jam.

[worktogs]

A stunt double. On set for a remake of Breaking Away, you’ve just met the leading man, a 17-year old Hollywood brat who calls you bro. The opportunity to advise the director on which model Strada you prefer to ride tempers the kid’s personality. Yesterday’s filming of the highway truck ride-behind scene was interrupted by wind gusts, and tomorrow looks like rain. You don’t mind the extra time to hang out with the on-set bike mechanic, however. She bears a striking resemblance to your ex, but without the running judgmental commentary.

[worktogs]

A personal assistant. Your employer has never received a paycheck herself, but being the wife of a principal at the architecture firm that built every suburb within 50 miles is still a full-time job. You were hired for your energy, but are retained for your non-judgmental discretion. Picking up the artfully framed boudoir portraits or the prescription tranquilizers is as straightforward as reserving a tennis court or making an appointment to have the cat put down. You perform your duties with efficiency and moral distance and are fittingly compensated. Accompanying the boss to Aspen opened your eyes to the possibilities of doing for others what they can very well do for themselves. As long as you can keep your tasks outside the architect’s handsy reach, this job could see you a ways into the future where your entrepreneurial skills might just franchise this thing. 

[worktogs]

A private vegan chef. Winter finds you foraging for Hairy Bitter Cress and Purple Dead Nettle on a private estate in Oconee County, GA. The landlord, an early investor in Pay-per-view television, visits the grounds twice a year to hunt dove and quail. His fourth wife, however, eschews the omnivorous lifestyle, which is where you come in. Collecting greens in the brisk air with the Mrs. has secured your position as indispensable, both for your award-winning wild pestos and your indulgences of her appetites not otherwise satiated. The snag in your long underwear resulted from a recent indiscretion while the two of you collected Spice Bush twigs for a tantric tea. You didn’t go into debt at the New England Culinary Institute just to make cheese out of cashews.

[worktogs]

A philanthropic software entrepreneur. As a kid you benefited from chess camps and discovered the pleasures of the flesh in the one sex Ed class where they grossly underestimated the lasting impact of 1980′s after-school specials. Your head for numbers easily translated to coding and where you saw an opportunity to make things easier than they already were for the artfully wealthy, venture capitalists eagerly fluffed your vintage skirts. Marriage to Zuckerberg’s third cousin didn’t hurt, but it didn’t make any substantive difference either. 

[worktogs]

A textile artist. Your career almost met a premature end when a younger sibling choked on one of your ubiquitous pompoms. No aunt or uncle, no matter how obscure, went without a birthday offering from you. Rag rugs, paper mache ashtrays (fire hazard), plaster of Paris paper weights, and vinyl lanyards for every occasion were in constant production until you found a collection of Foxfire books at a yard sale and subsequently earned a coveted internship at Penland in what is now called a gap year. A lucrative side hustle of a non-fibrous hemp product helped to purchase your new Gilmakra floor loom. 

[worktogs]

A Montessori teacher and author of the trifold, Kid Gloves: How to Survive your Child’s Puberty. You thought you were at a friend’s wine and cheese party when you learned it was a women’s clothing pyramid scheme. They say the shirt style hides your hot spots, but the coffee cake crumbs and tea stains draw the eye away from your hips anyway. The running shoes give you needed support during class and provide an aura, though faint, of a coveted and unattained athleticism.

[worktogs]

The owner of a boutique for outdoor enthusiast fashionistas. As the daughter of a regional director for the Boy Scouts, you could set a bone break with tent poles at a young age, but let REI handle the gear. You make your money in the sweet spot where athleisure meets corporate Fridays. You’ve had to learn through trial and error that inventory shouldn’t rely solely on personal taste, although you don’t really see why not, given the exquisite nature of your own. Your 2002 photo submission of a back country trip in the Smokies was deemed too pedestrian by the Patagonia catalog, so you sell Columbia and Arc’teryx instead. In-home pedicures are weekly ever since an extended trek in the Everglades cost you a toenail.

[worktogs]

Humane Society volunteer. Yearbook and jazz band keep you occupied on week day afternoons, not to mention the mathlete competitions, which you could crush in your sleep. But Saturdays, Saturdays are for the felines. To the elitist dog-walkers, Cat Corner is just a nasal-gouging industrial grey room with carpeted scratching posts and wild-eyed, ear-clipped cats waiting to savage moles and sparrows. But to you, Cat Corner is a calming, quiet refuge where you can bask in the adoration of these soft sleek creatures. And best of all, because she’s allergic, you can escape the weekend visits of your mealy-mouthed step-sister and her violent Why Don’t We obsession.

[worktogs]

A pet psychic. Even as a child, you knew the pacing leopard at the zoo was trying to connect with you. Sparky, your beagle mix sang to you from the depths of his soul (when hungry), and provided a conspiratorial comfort when Sandy Mclaughlin broke your prom date to go instead with the head football team towel boy. You did study animal behavior in college, but mostly through close observation of the fraternity houses. Though deluded, you are a genuinely gentle soul who communes with clients well enough to make a living in a Santa Fe suburb.

[worktogs]

A professional food photographer. Your 2005 Facebook post of poutine at the Milwaukee Burger Company and subsequent digital series of cheese curdcentric meals has been credited with starting the horribly derided pre-bite snapshot familiar to anyone who has dined in a restaurant in the past decade and a half. To some you are a hero, seen as illuminating the mundane in a society that craves the phenomenal. To others, a pariah, blamed in part for the obesity epidemic among smartphone early adopters. A traumatic but beneficial accident with a steaming bowl of pho left a large portion of your tastebuds permanently singed, helping to combat the extra calories your vocation might invite.

[worktogs]

A Duracell heir. You don’t have to work, but what better way to piss off the old man than to build digital campaigns for alternative energy companies. The Wednesday night dad-band you started has more momentum than you’d imagined. Your fans would be devastated to know that it was your current wife who sewed those patches onto your jeans.

[worktogs]

A stager in Berkeley, CA. Winnifred, your Cairn Terrier, accompanies you everywhere and is trained to bark when linoleum is found covering hard-wood floors. You are known for emphasizing natural light, placing blue bowls of lemons in dining rooms, and topping all toilet tanks with select vintage Golden Books. You’ll retire early thanks to an impulse investment the first day Etsy launched its IPO.

[worktogs]

A clown college dropout turned ultrarunner. Both enabled by a trust fund; both born of spiritual seeking; both doomed for the previously stated reasons. You thought you’d harness your dramatic leanings with the art of clowning, an art form that has been disappointing families with lofty ambitions for their children since as early as the 5th century. Even though the dregs of your own inheritance were long ago passed over to Ringling Bros., your fortunate marriage to a Colorado molybdenum mining heiress, makes it (mostly) inconsequential that even the local Foot Locker has declined to give you more than a half box of out-of-date Gu packets for your upcoming attempt at the Hideaway Hundred 100 miler.