List No 1
Does your job wilfully ignore your true talents and boundless creativity? Ride roughshod over your childhood dreams? Is it, in fact, rubbish? Cheer up, you’re in good company…
‘Of all the damnable waste of
human life that ever was invented,
clerking is the worst’
– George Bernard Shaw
Douglas Adams: chicken-shed cleaner
Simon Armitage: shelf stacker
Iain Banks: dustman
Bill Bryson: dropped out of university to work in a mental asylum
Raymond Carver: door-to-door dictionary salesman
Miguel de Cervantes: tax collector
Daniel Defoe: set up an ill-fated business breeding civet cats
Charles Dickens: worked in a shoe blacking factory
James Ellroy: golf caddy
Michel Houellebecq: debugged computers in the French parliament
Ted Hughes: zoo attendant
Kazuo Ishiguro: grouse beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral
James Joyce: bank clerk
John Keats: dresser of wounds
AL Kennedy: double glazing telesales irritant
David Mitchell: once turned down for a job in McDonalds
Terry Pratchett: press officer for the electricity board
Philip Pullman: worked in Moss Bross
Ian Rankin: swineherd
JD Salinger: worked as an apprentice at a slaughterhouse
John Steinbeck: bricklayer
Hunter S Thompson: wrote for a Puerto Rican bowling magazine
Fay Weldon: wrote the problem page for the Daily Mirror
Irvine Welsh: TV repairman
Jeanette Winterson: make-up artist in a funeral parlour
