The Career Path Is (And Has Always Been) a Lie

her since. But first, let's talk about the state of the career path today. So this idea of getting a job straight out of college and staying with the same company until you get a gold watch and cash and that pension. Nobody does that anymore, No, not real. So over, I don't know anybody doing that. I don't even know what a gold watch looks like. What's a watch? I just use my phone to tell the time. So, yeah, millennials,

young people, they're not doing this at all. That's the received wisdom, that's what we read ad nauseam, is that millennials are not catching up to previous generations in terms of how fast they're getting their careers on track. But we're gonna kind of interrogate that a little bit, I think,

because I feel like that's rooted in some misconceptions. Yeah, so it's really easy to just think of the Lena Dunham character on Girls, who is entitled and does what they want and doesn't want to follow this notion of kind of getting on track. But I think in reality, for a lot of young people, it's not something that's as much in their control as we would like to think. Right, It's not necessarily a trait of millennials personalities that's making

them make the choices that they make. There are a lot of external factors, like the difficulty in buying a home being settled with student debt. Yes, student debt is I think one of the biggest issues young people face just unprecedented, did not exist before, and I think that changes the way you think about your career. It's definitely only a reason people live at home. I've interviewed people just out of school who have decent jobs and are just saving the rent money because that rent money can

go straight back to their student debt payment. And the idea that millennials have no company loyalty and don't sort of lock themselves into a career early and then work their way up in a company. Is a little more complicated than it seems at first to write like this isn't strictly a millennial thing. No, young people hop around.

They've always hopped around. I found a pretty interesting number from a Times article about ten years ago that said boomers had ten and a half jobs between baby boomers between the ages eighteen and forty. Young people are just figuring out what they want to do, right, So we're also jumping around from a job is the best way to make more money. Annual raises especially now just don't

cut it. You have to get a promotion or move up, right, So like finding a new job is the best way to cement salary increases, and so it's actually can be a smart career choice. And what you're saying is that people have always operated this way when they're young. They've moved from job to job. It's not some sudden shift in the way young people think about the value of work. The other thing that has changed is the sort of

implied social contract between businesses and their employees. So there was a really interesting story on NPRS marketplace about the rise of the idea of shareholder value and the economist Milton Friedman's ideas that companies should think more about profits than either doing good in the world or doing right by the people that work for them, And what it led to was a huge soaring stock market in the eighties in the seventies and eighties, as companies trim their

expenses and restructured and became a little bit more ruthless about providing value sharehold there's and meeting analysts estimates every quarter. But it also led to things like the demise of pension plans and the sort of withering away of employee benefits, and the kind of general sense that that you had job security if you went to a company and did a good job and worked your way up through the ranks. So it's almost like companies started this, like they were

the ones that changed the deal. And it feels a little unfair to blame millennials or young people for not keeping up their end of the bargain by being loyal to companies. Yeah, I mean, I really think that I don't get the idea of being loyal to your company at all. I think that people should work hard, and should do the jobs that they're hired for, and should

try not to screw people over. But we're almost brainwashed into this idea that you're doing something wrong if you act in your own interests by taking another job that pays better and gives you better opportunities. Whereas, like who said, your company can't fire you any time they want from

most anything. Yeah, companies have shifted to this buzzy word of the culture, so like you have these relationships with your coworkers and you feel a sense of belonging, like that's a reason to stick around, which is a pretty lousy replacement for financial security when you're old, right, And coincidentally, it's a lot cheaper for companies to instill a sense of corporate culture than it is to invest in your

retirement income. Right. And we've seen the rise of empty ish perks as a way to keep and attract employees, which I guess they work in a sense, but obviously not that well because people are jumping around. We've been talking about sort of the difference between finding a career path and settling into it early and then just kind

of doggedly working your way up the ladder. And sort of floating around aimlessly like a typical millennial, and just making decisions based on your whims or what what sparks your soul. And it might be a good time to talk about our guests career path. So our guest has had the following jobs. She was a key girl at a public pool. She was a cashier at a costume shop. She drove a milk chuck for a dairy farm. She was a cheese factory worker, dishwasher, and worked the register

to a department store. So she had a lot of jobs before now being a copy editor. What a classic aimless millennial. Actually. Mary Norris has been with The New Yorker since. She's not only a copy editor, but she's something of a grammar celebrity. She wrote a best seller Between You and Me, Confessions of a Comic Queen, and hosts the popular web series also called Commic Queen, where

each week she dives into our favorite grammar questions. We're going to start out by addressing the all important question of the serial comma. The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma, is the common before and in a series of three or more, there's a famous one. We invited the stripper jf K and Stalin. If it were we invited the strippers Comma, JFK, Comma and Stalin, then

you wouldn't mistake JFK and Stalin for strippers. So if you don't want to use the serial Comma, save it for some time when it really means something, when it really makes a difference. Okay, Mary, thanks so much for coming on our show today. Pleasure to be here. So, before you got to the New Yorker, where you've been for some time, we talked about some of your early jobs. Why don't you tell us about some of those in your experience before settling in Well, my very first job

ever was checking feet. Had a public pool in Cleveland. We've had this tradition in Cleveland. I think a lot of great lake cities did have it where you had to use this bench and um put one foot at a time upon this foot shaped platform and use your fingers to spread out your toes and what you were doing. What I was doing was making sure no one got into the pool who had athletes foot. We were trying to stem the spread of athletes foot in the city

of Cleveland. This doesn't sound like a job that you were led to by your passion for stemming athletes foot your passion feet. I did not have a foot fetish, and it was not what you'd call a career move right. I was fifteen and a half and I just wanted some spending money, you know, a teenager wants that. So that was my very first job. And I always wanted to have a little financial independence, and so I took what jobs I could get as a teenager. I worked

in a discount store in Cleveland, marking clothing. My first job when I got out of college was in a costume company in Cleveland. Then I got a job driving a milk truck and that was the best job I've ever had. What was so great about it? Well, I liked cows and any job that had to do with cows even remotely. But I did believe in in milk and cut What did you like about cows, Um, They're so placid and contented and productive. You know, they gave milk.

You have written about all of these different jobs that you've taken that seem largely unconnected, but it sort of seems like you've made a lot of decisions that were driven by um wanting financial independence or just needing a job and then been able to kind of find the meaning in the job once you got there. Was that? Is that accurate? Well, I knew that I was looking for experience too. Yes, I wanted to be a writer

from the very beginning. Um after those couple of jobs in Cleveland, I went back to graduate school at the University of Vermont. There again I was following the cows, and I got an m a. In English literature there English and American literature, and I learned to milk University cows. And my first job after that was in a mazzarella plant, she's fa actory where we packaged mozzarella. And I remember I had wanted to write fiction as a graduate student.

I thought I could do a master's thesis that was a collection of stories. But they wouldn't let me do that, and they even said I didn't have enough experience to be writing fiction. And then the funny thing was that one of the professors I had had after I got the job and the cheese factory, said well, now you'll have some experience. So the themes so far running through your career cows, dairy and writing. Yes, yes, that's about right. But then you moved to New York, a place that

has a notable lack of cows. Why don't you tell us about that decision and where that took your career. At the time, I had a sibling living in New York who had become friends with a woman who was in his um portraiture class, and it turned out that she her name was Jeanne flush Shman. It turned out she was married to Peter Fleishman, who was the chairman of the board of the New Yorker, who was the

son of Raoul Fleishman, one of the original founders. And I got to know them, and I started to think, well, maybe I could live in New York. Indeed, my sibling did suggest she was going to Paris. She had a wonderful career herself as a musician or big job was that she played the harp and a bear costume. I guess costumes were a family thing, and mammals costume of mammals.

She had this nice gig playing the harp in a bare suit outside of one of the gates of Central Park, and she she told me, well, you could probably get some kind of job in publishing. So I came to New York Peter Fleshman was a wonderful friend to me. He was on the business side, of course, and in those days, business and editorial did not mix. So he actually could not get me a job at The New Yorker. But he could call the executive editor and say I was going to call and would like to talk to him.

So Peter arranged that. Yeah, that seems like a pretty big thing, a connection. People talk about that now, how important that is to getting jobs. So I guess things haven't changed that much. But so then you eventually do get a job at the New Yorker. Obviously, Yes, there was no opening that first time I talked to this editor, but I called back. I'd been washing dishes in Patterson, I'd done statistical typing as a temp, and I'd been a temporary cashier at a discount store e J Corvettes.

You probably don't remember. That was a long time ago, and I was going to try to get a hack license and drive a cab. I still add my chauffeur's license from having driven the milk truck, so I thought that would be a natural But in fact I did not know my way around in New York, and it would have been a total disaster if I had tried to drive a cab. So Peter said, why don't you call them back and see if there are any openings.

And there were. There was an opening in the typing pool and one and what it's called the editor I live Prairie. I failed the test for the typing pool. There was an electric typewriter, and you know, I'd only had a manual up to that point, and that was my excuse anyway, that the typewriter just kind of took off without me. But in the editorial library was a little more primitive that manual typewriters, and we typed summaries

of stories, even poems and nonfiction pieces. Type this summaries on index cards and indexed every piece, you know, by author, by subject. Every person who was mentioned in the piece would go into the file because those people might want to know where what piece they were in someday and they'd call up and ask. The cartoons were all indexed. You know, cartoon about a bird. Somebody might remember that they had seen a cartoon about a bird that laid a square egg, and they wanted a copy of that

issue so they could call. And we had the an index where we could find that under birds. So you eventually ended up you finished the training. Yes, um, I did that for a little while, and then I learned another job called collating. And we had this proof reader, a grammarian who was legendary named Eleanor Gould, and she read everything in Galley, not the fiction, but everything else.

You had to move her changes on to a clean proof, and there were loads of them, and I came to understand, or at least I came to study what she would do. And I began to internalize all that stuff, and I learned in biasmosis. So when there was an opening that on the copy desk, that's when I finally got to

work on copy myself. When manuscripts would come through and you know, and get to reach on Updyke and John McPhee and Pauline Kale and wonderful stuff Harold Brodkey, I remember, and I would get to see what the editors did. And after many many years of that, I moved on to become query proof reader myself, the sort of thing

that Eleanor Gould did. And did you have a moment where you knew you'd found your thing, where you were in your element and you sort of expected you'd stay there for a long time, or did you never really think that way about your career? Well, as soon as I got any job, as soon as I got the foot in the door at the New Yorker, I felt like this, well, this is probably it. I'm certainly not going to find a magazine that's better than this to

work at. And I wanted to be a writer. But ever since I was a kid, I've known you know, I came from a working class family, and I knew that that I needed to paycheck and I had no rich father to ask for money except once in a while. And you are a writer. You've written a book confession. Yes, yes, and that's this is wonderful bit, you know, even once you had a book, even once you've had a book on the best seller list, and Between You and Me was the best seller list for five weeks, not that

I was counting. You still need a day job. It surprised me, But in a way you fulfill that prophecy of your teacher, where you all of your experience led to the material for you to write the book which is called Between You and Me Confessions of a Commic Queen. Right, I should say the whole title. I did not expect to get a book out of my day job, and you have a lot to say about commas. Surprisingly I do. Yeah,

I was kind of surprised myself. So in addition to having published a book, now you also have this web series, comic Queen, which has a cult following, including fans like me and Fancesca. Was that unexpected? And how do you feel about your new role. Well, that's something that I agreed to do in order to help publicize the book. I was not really eager to make videos. It was not my idea, but the New Yorker and content asked in general, wanted to have more of an online presence.

Doing videos was the hip thing to do, and I agreed to do it. And that again surprised me that people were really interested in that stuff. You know, we think copy editors very quiet, retiring lives. You know, to be a celebrity copy editors to be an oxymoron if there ever was one. So that has changed things around the office a bit. Some of the writers have gotten a little wary of me because they're afraid I'm going to use one of their sentences is well, well, thank

you so much. For coming and talking to us today. Was really great having you. It was fun talking Thank you for having me. So what do we learn about career paths from talking to Mary, who was successful but in a way that she never imagined. Well, first of all, I learned that Mary is a delight. Oh yeah, she's so so great. I loved her. So here's somebody with this really specific career path like nobody else. She didn't follow in anyone's footsteps. No one else has that exactly

the same sequence. It's like, I really want to be a dairy farmer or maybe a copy editor and and and a scholar of James Thurber in between. Yeah. I think there are kind of two lessons from that. One is to understand that everything you're doing could give you some sort of skill for something later that you don't

know you'll even need it for. Like I mean, her big example was saying that she had a lot to say about Commas, like decades worth of stuff to say about Commas, that so many people cared about that now she is a Commas celebrity, right, And she's a published writer, which ironically in a way, is the thing she always wanted to be. Like she was trying to get published and trying to find the subject matter that was that was perfect for her all throughout her career, and in

the end it ended up being her day job. So the day job wasn't this irrelevant side act in her life. It was the thing that got her to her final goal. Yeah. I do wonder if at the time, at times she was more frustrated than she is now. It's easy to look back and say, like, oh, all the all those

copy editing times paid off. But it's nice to be able to see that perspective from somebody and to know that, like your own frustrations with not achieving the things you're trying to achieve in the moment might look very different when you're looking back on it all. And I mean,

I've certainly I had a total change in careers. I became a journalist only after spending about five or six years after college pursuing being a researcher, and that feels like a very different career path, and going to journalism school and then starting as a journalist felt a lot like starting over and kind of resetting. And it certainly was that from a salary perspective, and it was that from the perspective of being like a few years older

than everybody that I worked with. But I realized now how much about kind of studying anthropology and being a researcher is completely relevant to journalism and thinking about research and how to interpret it, knowing how to interview people and basically write about what they say, which is what both researchers and journalists do. You know, I wasn't ever acquiring those skills and the interests of becoming a journalist, but I certainly use skills. I even use skills that

I used what I was an acting student. Yeah, you do, I act really interested in some conversations. And on that note, let's take it to half baked takes, halfy fake takes, halfy takes, half big takes is where we have opinions about things that important. Opinions aren't quite fully formed enough for anything besides us talking about it right here, right now.

So Francesca, tell me your half big take. Okay, this week's half big take is about one of the most insidious and misused phrases in the English language, possibly, and that's no worries. You're using no worries wrong, probably, or you know someone who has Yeah, I think it's not only an annoying phrase, but ever since you pointed this out to me, people are also using it around. It's

both it's annoying even when you use it right. So no worries is like I think it's like an Australian originated uh idiom that's just like whenever, don't worry about it, no problem, no big thing, and it's it seems really useful in conversation. But one of the most passive aggressive things that people can do is use it. Basically, you're like forgiving somebody when you say no worries. So there's a lot of ways you can use it. That turned

out to be really kind of uncool and rude. So I sat across from somebody at a desk who had restless leg syndrome, and I assume, I don't know if he was officially diagnosed, but that's I'm going to go ahead and diagnose it with that. He was very fidgety and he would just thrash his legs around under the desk and they would kick mine and I was bruised in the shins by the end of the day. And so after putting up with it silently or kind of

grumpily by sighing loudly for a month or two. I finally went up to him and I was like, I don't know if you know this, but you're kicking me under the desk when you move your feet around, and it's it's just if you could just watch it. And he goes, oh, no worries, and I was like, yeah, what, No, I'm not worried. You should be worried, Like you can't worried. The correct thing to say is I'm so sorry I didn't realize I'll stop doing wow. Yeah, And and people

use it like that's really a lot. They really, they really do. It's become a tick. So if you ever want to be really passive aggressive and somebody tries to call you out for something that you don't think you should be called out for, just respond to them with no worries and it will enrage them to the point of having to say something about it on a podcast. What's your half? By take? My half big take is that I love my sad dusk salad. I think there's

this whole movement against the sad dusk salad. I think there are some books written about sad dusk sealing. There was a tumbler or a blog. I think tumbler A book deal happened. So a sad dust salad is what it sounds like. It's it's the epitome of cubical life. It's just staring glumly at your screen while you shove a healthy, green, gross meal into your mouth while you pretend to do work or scroll through the internet. I understand the symbolism and why it seems horrible. But I

make a really good salad at home. It's really easy to do. You just buy like two or three kind of fun ingredients like am okay beats or hearts of palm. It's so easy. I buy tofu. Do you make it in the morning. I make it in the morning, put it in a tupperware and it's delightful and lovely and healthy. And you know what, I really like it, and stop shaming me. So you look forward to the moment in your day where you get your sad disk salad. But

this is my question. The salad sounds great, thank you, but wouldn't it be better if it were not in a temper were but on a nice ceramic plate, and not at your desk, but at a picnic table. Or an outdoor fresco dining environment. Exactly, everyone's eating that. Somebody leaves and sits somewhere nice and eats. So but we don't call it sad dusk burrito because like we're it's like brito for the salad. Yeah, it's a happy desk salad.

So I think that that. So the implication of the of the sad desk salad is that you're not only a workaholic who can't leave their desk and who has no more joy in their life, but you've also eliminated the the fun, calorie filled foods that you might be eating from that time. So basically you're miserable and you resent that and frankly think it's slightly sexist. It's true.

It's are always criticized for being salad eaters, like it's the one time I know I'm going to eat greens today, and as a woman, I can say I hate salad. So just sucking at stereotype right there. So let me eat my salad and stop saying no worries unless you're actually apologizing for something. And this has been half big takes, half baked takes. Thanks for listening to game Plan for more You can find me on Twitter at rs Greenfield. Our guest Mary Norris is at Mary Norris t n Y.

And I'm at Francesco today. See you next week. I want to do it. I have a half big take about bananas. Bananas are so genetically engineered. Why do we still have to deal with this garbage booger thing that you can't get rid of, and it never it always ends up like somewhere on your desk. It's really gross.