Excerpt from On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

They concluded these employed about 47 percent of the US workforce. So what does "in the weeds" mean to you?

To people with education and influence, "in the weeds" is something academic, about small, unimportant details. It's the footnotes. It's something you observe from the outside.

To everybody else, "in the weeds" is something you experience. It's something you feel. It's your life.

It's easy to make fun of that righteously indignant teenager at her first job. Readers to whom this all seems obvious may find the adult me just as naive. I was shocked by the pain-medication vending machines at Amazon, for example, while people familiar with warehousing work might roll their eyes. That's fine. For you, this book may be useful as an exploration of how much better people have it on the other side. Because every white-collar person I've mentioned those vending machines to was just as horrified — and they wouldn't put up with any of this for a second.


* Well, sort of.
** My own few years of informal polling support this.
*** And that's with every benefit of the doubt for good intentions.
**** Nothing wrong with those things, of course! By the time I started scooping ice cream, I'd maxed out the math classes at my high school, and I've always found the tidiness of problem sets to be a bit of a relief compared to the chaos of things like writing and makeouts and ... you know, life.

† I'm married to a neuroscientist, and the number of things about the brain where the scientific consensus is still ¯\_(?)_/¯ is astonishing.

Excerpted from On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger . Copyright © 2019 by Emily Guendelsberger . Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.