It's Time to Relax, You've Worked Your Arse Off

If you don't read Aunt Snow's blog, you are doing yourself a disservice. Aunt Snow has been waging a one-woman campaign against Beauty Deficit Disorder for the past five years. Anyway, her post yesterday had me pondering how terrible conditions are for Joe and Jane Schmo, who really just want to earn a decent living and have a little left over so they can enjoy themselves and provide for the education of their children. Instead, we have yet another factory in Asia collapsing and killing workers, we have a war on overtime pay here in the States, and we have a Congress which is doing everything but working on a jobs bill.

On the homefront, I had a long conversation with one of the IT guys (incidentally, the guy who trained me on my first day on the job before he transferred to the Main Office), and he was lamenting the fact that he'd have to take comp. time instead of overtime pay for working a big event this weekend. Myself, I'm doing okay, but a lot of my job satisfaction has to do with the fact that I work in a setting of incredible beauty, no matter which site I am assigned to. Reading Aunt Snow's post reminded me of one of my favorite uptempo sad songs, the Jam's Smithers-Jones, a melancholy bit of workaday social realism penned by the band's bassist Bruce Foxton (this video seems to be a post-Jam Foxton vehicle):





It's time to relax, now you've worked your arse off,
But the only one smiling is the suntanned boss.
Work, and work, and work 'til you die
There's plenty more fish in the sea to fry.


Here's an acoustic take on the number by Mr Foxton and some friends from other punk and new wave bands (including the inimitable Jake Burns from Stiff Little Fingers, a band which performed the song while Mr Foxton did his turn as their bass player.