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Read other letters about this article
Most of us do jobs that sooner or later become boring or repetitive or loathsome, but we have to make a living, so we make do until something better comes along, or we retire, or sometimes we die first.
Reviewing anything is one of those jobs that tends to go that way. I should imagine that if I were a television reviewer, I would soon be physically sick at the sight of a TV, and certainly would not want one in my house.
More than 60 years ago, George Orwell discovered the same things about reviewing books for a living, and in an essay called Confessions of a Book Reviewer he wrote:
"...the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash--though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment--but constantly INVENTING reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever..."
"...It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless", while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to." But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they?"
So, yes, our restaurant reviewer has discovered that what some people might imagine to be exciting and glamorous turns out to be drudgery when you have to do it all the time. Possibly this is why prostitutes don't always go to work with a spring in their step--as the author suggests.
OK, its not very profound, and it is not very novel, but this article provokes a little discussion and puts bread on the author's table, and if we weren't reading this, we would be reading something else of no greater merit.
Actually I would like to see more articles about people's work a la Barbara Ehrenreich, but for obvious reasons most of the articles we see where people write about their own work are written by professional writers. They don't have to take time off work to write, you see.
