So my friend has a job walking around a building making sure it isn’t on fire. It is an old building and is no longer up to fire code. So untill the building gets renovated in 2-3 years 3 people have to walk the halls and make sure it isn’t on fire.

Chris Blattman found a Reddit thread of some of the most pointless jobs in existence, and there are a lot of gems. There is also a long discussion about why you can’t pump your own gas in New Jersey and Oregon. [Thanks to our pal Jon Custer for the pointer.]

Photo: DVS

TO: LOGAN
FROM: BEVERLY
SUBJECT: AM I EFFING UP
I don’t understand how I have such bad luck. Everyone I know is getting jobs, and I’ve been applying for jobs for over a year and I’ve gotten no jobs. Interviews, but no jobs. Statistically it seems impossible that I haven’t had one single job offer. Is it impossible?

I just looked at Facebook and this kid I went to college with posted that he got an account executive job at the best ad firm in the city and and I slammed my hands down on my desk and hung my head so dramatically that the secretary asked if I was ok. (I have a job right now, it’s just a horrible job and I hate it.)

Why everyone else. Why not me.

TO: BEVERLY
FROM: LOGAN
SUBJECT: RE: AM I EFFING UP (no)

I’m going to skip the part where I ask if there’s something wrong with you. You’re a smart person. You know what you’re qualified for, you know what you can exaggerate being qualified for. You know how to spell your name on your resume. You’re doing great, you’re just not getting jobs.

You aren’t getting the jobs you are applying for because those jobs never really existed, for you or anyone else. They hired someone internally. They hired a client’s kid. They hired somebody’s friend’s friend. They hired the boss’s niece. Or maybe they really did hire from the pool of applicants, in which case: They got a million applications and interviewed the first five that came in and went with the person who went to the same school as the interviewer.

This is how people get jobs. This is how you are going to get a job.

The past year you’ve spent applying to jobs has not been a waste of time. Some might argue that it has been but I will argue that it has not been. It’s practice. Builds character. Keeps you on your toes. Gives you some hope, even if it does end up dashing it mostly.

Most of the interviews you go on are with someone’s assistant or a low-level HR person who can’t help you. But one day one of those low-level HR people are going to leave to work at a new company, and when that company is talking about a new position they need, and everyone is scraping their brain about who they know that they can put up for it, she is going to remember you, this swell gal she interviewed for this “open position” that went to the founding partner’s neighbor’s son, but maybe she’s still looking now, wonder if she is. And then that’ll be your job and you’ll live happily ever after until one of your friends offers you double the salary to come work for them.

So keep applying for jobs. Make sure everyone who knows and loves you and even people who don’t but would still like to be the one to raise their hand in a meeting and say, “I know just the person for that, sir,” know that you want a new job. Go to bars. Ask people out for coffee. Meet as many people as you can. Eventually one of them will know someone who will know someone who will offer you a job. That’s how it works.

As far as comparing yourself to others: Stop that. What a waste. Every now and then, sure, have a little hissy fit, that’s fine, but then take a shower, wash that shit off, and move on. Those other people have nothing to do with you. NOTHING. They just knew someone who knew someone. Soon, you’ll know someone, too.

How did you land your position at Uber?

I was living in Chicago at the time, and I knew that Chicago was on the roadmap to be one of the first cities launched that year. So, I started hounding people at Uber — to try to get on the launch team for Chicago. I just showed up places where I knew Ryan Graves (Uber’s head of operations) would be, followed him on Twitter and shot him emails over the course of a few months — in general I just tried to convince him that I was the right fit. They were looking for that hustler, go-getter attitude and I was able to convince him that I could be a valuable part of the team.

Max Crowley got his job at Uber in Chicago as a senior community manager by being very persistent. But he explains to Mashable that there is a fine line between being persistent and a creepy stalker. Crowley figured out which networking events Uber founder Ryan Graves would be at and showed up. A creepy stalker probably would have figured out where Graves was having dinner with his family and then “just happened” to have the table next to him at the same time. Actually, that sounds like an episode of Mad Men.

Thursday is a great day to do that 1 thing you don’t want to do but also don’t want to continue thinking about doing.

It’s been … some weeks since we’ve last met in this space, this space being a blog post where I tell you that 1 thing I’m going to get done that I have to get done, and then you, if you play along, tell me the 1 thing you got done that you have to get done, and then we all feel satisfied and accomplished for a day, or a moment, or no time at all. This column’s (“column”) hiatus has been an exercise in … not caring about getting things done or wanting to get things done or getting things done. Even this blog post has been something I haven’t been able to get done. Do none things. But I’m back!

And here’s my 1 thing that has been 1 thing for ages: I got a second job. In a restaurant, on the weekends. I’ll get paid weekly and it’s the daytime shift and it’s hostessing so it won’t be crazy money, but it should be like, at least $500 a month that I don’t currently have. The first plan will be to not run out of money any more. The second plan will be to make bigger payments to the card I currently have in payoff mode. The third plan is to allow myself to go to dinner by myself once a month because it’s my favorite thing to do, and I miss it.

I’m just going to count this as my 1 thing for the past 3 weeks. Basking. What have you been up 2?

MARY HIGGINS CLARK
Back in 1966, the young romance author was trying to sell a story she called “Journey Back to Love.” It didn’t go well, however; her submission to Redbook came back with a rejection from the editors, stating “We found the heroine as boring as her husband had.” Ouch! The piece was eventually run as a two-part serial in an English magazine, and Mary Higgins Clark currently boasts forty-two bestselling novels.

Mental Floss has a list of best-selling authors and their experiences with rejection. I remember being rejected from a paid internship I really wanted when I was a fresh-faced graduate. You get used to seeing rejections when you’re young and starting out, but this one particularly hurt because I had interviewed with four of the senior editors in the office, and had my hopes up. Years later, the same company contacted me and offered me a staff job, which I turned down because I was already happy with what I was doing. Rejection is not the end of the world, though it can feel like it at the time.

Our pals at Planet Money asked a bunch of economists to give some graduation advice to the batch of college graduates who will be applying for jobs and entering the workforce soon. Much of the advice is pretty solid. Justin Wolfers:

This pattern of hopping between jobs while young, before settling down, is in remarkably common. And it makes sense, too. Romantic success never follows from trying to improve your partner; it follows from moving on and finding a better match. The same is true in the world of work.

Some other advice I’m too sure about. Kenneth French: “And if things don’t turn out so well, you can always change jobs or, better yet, go to business school.” Tim Harford: “A year’s delay would do no harm—might I suggest signing up for a master’s degree?”

As we’ve been cautioned, graduate school should be what people choose after careful consideration—especially if it results in taking on student loans. Godspeed Class of 2013!

Photo: COD newsroom

FAA rules are that a cabin crew can’t be in the air longer than 12 hours. So if my boss scheduled a two-week trip to Indonesia, we’ll stop in Hawaii to refuel and switch crews. I’m dropped off in Hawaii for 10 days, the new crew goes on to Indonesia until they come back. My expenses are paid while I’m grounded.

Michael Worth is a 25-year-old chef who was offered a job cooking meals for a prominent hedge fund manager on a private Gulfstream G550. He talked to Cincinnati magazine about what his job is like, and how the job is allowing him to pay off his student loans much faster than he thought it would be paid off.

After graduating college, I pulled together a poetry tour of the East Coast with three friends. We couch-surfed and split small sums from homemade book sales and venue entry fees. Our biggest check—$2,000—came from working with a small city’s public library. That money made it possible for us to break even after a month on the road, but only just. It was a start, we thought.

Years later, one friend is in graduate school for archival science; another is in school to become a Unitarian Universalist minister; and the third works at cash-for-gold stand in the mall. I schedule appointments at the office of a moving company.

None of us have been able to rely on writing as a sole source of income. None of us have jobs in the arts that pay our rent. There was a time when this would have surprised me.

I initially went to school to be a painter. Well-meaning family members gave unsolicited advice on how to better use my talents. (“Go into graphic design!”) Concerned parties were relieved when I switched my focus to writing: writers can become teachers, at least. Nevermind shrinking public school budgets and layoffs: my family had already built a new dream for me that involved circle time and oak tag.

I let them have their dream. But my dream had to do with the actual making. I wanted to be a working artist. I self-published poetry chapbooks and wrote every single day. My hopes for after graduation were a modest lifestyle and a communal apartment. I was fairly certain I’d have to get a non-art-related job in order to make ends meet, but that seemed like a temporary thing until my art became more profitable. I knew art would never make me rich. But I thought that it could get me by.

There was definitely cognitive dissonance at play—I never had a financial safety net. I did not study something practical, yet I was convinced I’d be able to make it work, just as an artist. In school, I saw a lot of people perform who seemingly were making a living off of their art. But I never asked the practical questions. How did they do it? I now know how they did it: a combination of some teaching, some incidental art money from sporadic gigs, some flexible service jobs, some family money.

Three years after graduation, it has become clear that being an artist is not something that will ever provide me with a living wage.

After graduation and after the poetry tour, I moved in with my sister, paying a quarter of the rent while working two full-time food service jobs. I started submitting my poetry and fiction to literary magazines and journals. I edited poetry submissions for free for a small magazine and wrote a weekly column for their website. I twice received modest checks—under $50–from literary journals that published my writing. I was on food stamps for a little over a year with no savings and two maxed-out credit cards with high interest rates.

I considered an MFA, hoping that a stable teaching position could sustain a concurrent creative career, but only a handful of MFA programs provide full-funding for their graduate students, and most of the writing programs in major cities charge exorbitant application fees. And after, the options are scarcely better: Many MFA writing graduates end up as adjunct professors with low salaries, no benefits, and little job security.

The harsh reality of making art in America is that there simply aren’t enough resources to go around. Grants are highly competitive and unevenly distributed. Upstart presses require their authors to organize and execute national book tours on their own dime in order to promote their own titles. Staff and contributors of most literary journals go unpaid for the efforts, no matter how high the quality. The magazines that do pay charge a reading fee to support themselves, unable to count on donations and subscriptions alone.

Residencies charge application fees for consideration; many programs do not provide stipends or cost-free housing during an artist’s tenure there. Workshops, festivals, and retreats are just as bad in terms of financial accessibility. Attendance requires a flexible work schedule, or a job that you can disappear from for months at a time without consequence.

Nearly three years post-college, I am just now nearing my first continuous year with a stable job including salary, insurance, and paid vacation days. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I want to be doing with my life. I perform my cubicle duties from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each weekday. I edit creative pieces on my lunch break, send out submissions to literary magazines and article pitches to editors in between fielding phone calls. At night I write, or paint, or photograph paintings for my Etsy store. If I’m honest, the amount of money my art makes me—and costs me—renders it an unsustainable career path. I still consider it the most important work I do, though it has been—and may always be—relegated to a secondary position.

Emily O’Neill lives in Somerville, Mass.

Carson Daly’s got it, and Ryan Seacrest doesn’t. (Daly: “I choose to have a family … I don’t know how he has a minute in his day.”)

Meanwhile this guy in the WSJ thinks it’s impossible (“Asked in a interview with The Wall Street Journal if the company has a work-life balance, the 57-year-old billionaire, a former coal trader, says: ‘No. We work. You don’t come here to take life easy. And we all got rich from it, so, you know, there’s a benefit from it.’”)

Lapham’s Quarterly’s “Worst Jobs in the World Matrix” is fun to look at—even if I know I would have totally been a “Spit Boy” in 1530.