The Daily Grind. Reading & Questions

The Daily Grind

Reading Comprehension

Sonido

Give us this day our daily grind

We love to hate our jobs. But if they're so terrible, why do we carry on doing them?

Alice Wignall

Monday February 6, 2006

The Guardian

Oh, we all hate work, don't we? Just can't stand it. Did I ever tell you about the time I called in sick for a week because I couldn't stand looking at my boss for one more moment? Or mention the time I cut my own arm off so there was no way they could make me take minutes in the meeting that day? How about the time I faked my own death to avoid the commute?

If you were in any doubt about just how much we loathe employment, you could take another look at lifelong.disappointement.com, a website we at Office Hours recommended recently for those wanting to vent their spleen about workplace miscreants.

One infuriated contributor writes about their boss: Mark reminded me of the kind of bloke who drives an unlicensed minicab for the sole purpose of raping drunken passengers. His minuscule IQ was matched by the number of baths he had a year.

Working in a factory can be a dull job at the best of times, but Mark managed the quite amazing feat of being both dull and infuriating at the same time. I'd find myself grinding my teeth into anger-powder at his banal and bigoted comments, while simultaneously berating myself for letting such a degraded Hobbit get to me in the first place.

And that is one of the more restrained entries.

While you're trawling the ¡Things we hate about work! bit of the internet (which you do all day, because you just hate your job so much, remember!) you could also take a look at jobsworth cards: greetings cards bearing slogans such as Helen had solved ´the boss problem. Now, where to hide the body? And James had finally worked out how to turn the damn thing off beneath a picture of a man bludgeoning his computer with a rock.

The site and the cards are both funny, or course. You'd be slightly weird never to wonder if there was a way to make your boss disappear. Nor can there be a person on the planet, relying on a computer for some essential and urgent piece of work, who hasn't within five minutes wanted to hurl the thing off the nearest cliff.

No one could deny that a day in the office is a feast of irritation, frustration and sheer wonderment at the ridiculous things that you fellow human beings can say and do with, apparently, no sense of shame.

But is that a problem with work or with life? If you spent all day, every day in your own house, you'd be Googling for a website where you could record rants about home life before lunch on day one. Why does the postman always have to make such a racket? Who is this lobotomised streak of inanity that has somehow got a job presenting a national radio programme? Why are the streets filled with people whose default speed is slow shuffle between 9am and 5pm every weekday?

Most things in life are just annoying, especially if you don't have much choice about them, if they are repetitive, and if they require interaction with people you haven't personally selected for the purpose beforehand. It's just that we spend more time at work than anywhere else, so we think it's the fault of the job when in fact it's just the fault of, well, the world in general.

Questions

A. Read the text carefully and explain the meaning of the words in bold:

B. Complete the sentences regarding the text with the correct answer A, B, C, D

C. Answer the following questions in your own words.