When Leigh Claire La Berge was 18, she got fired from a Taco Bell in New Hampshire for using the wrong soda cup. She realized in that moment that her natural reluctance to grant the premise could lead to professional trouble. Then she took a job with the thinnest premise imaginable and everything got whacky in the way that it so frequently did in the late 1990s.
In Fake Work, La Berge recalls the lucrative entropy of late-1990s corporate America while describing with oddly affecting specificity the work of doing work about work[1]. The result is a treatise on what it means to find meaning in jobs that don’t mean much and the stories we tell ourselves in order to clock in.
Upper Middle spoke to La Berge about fake work, real fraud, and language as a workplace. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Your book is both a treatise on the meaning of work and a funny story about you having the world’s silliest corporate job. How did you get a job doing fake work?
After school, I got hired by a headhunting agency to work with Arthur Andersen consultants on their Y2K audit. The work wasn’t even data entry – it was checking other peoples’ data entry – and the premise that running an audit would be prophylactic for a Y2K meltdown never made sense. At that time, Arthur Anderson was also signing off on Enron audits that led to the single largest bankruptcy in American corporate history. So I was doing fake work solving a fake problem for a fake company. But it was all deeply meaningful to me.
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