Menial Tasks Quotes

I've done everything. Selling door-to-door fire extinguishers... In bars, I used to repair those machines that have 10 different buttons on them to spray club soda and seltzer.

[Describing the vice presidency:] ... inside work with no heavy lifting.

Jesus specialized in menial tasks that everyone else tried to avoid: washing feet, helping children, fixing breakfast, and serving lepers. Nothing was beneath him, because he came to serve.

If you're co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do. If you don't do your chores, the company won't succeed. No task is too menial.

I wouldn't want to be reincarnated as a butler. I couldn't for the life of me do the job in real life.

I would make tea for Joni Mitchell or clean her car, anything to be in the studio and watch her work.

The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.

Pretty much everyone's career starts the same way: with grunt work. Not just the cliched fetching of coffee, but other lowly tasks: taking notes in meetings, preparing paperwork, scheduling, intensive research - even flat-out doing our bosses' work for them.

I had the most boring office job in the world...I used to clean the windows on envelopes.

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?

I had a Saturday job in a chemist. The pay was something ridiculous like £2 an hour - it was slave labour - and I spent all day cleaning shelves. On my first day an actress from Eldorado, which was on telly at the time, came in and said, 'Can I have some Replense please?' I didn't know what it was, so I had to ask her and she had to say, 'It's vaginal moisturiser,' in front of a massive queue of people. After one day I was like, 'I don't want to do this job any more, it's just boring.'

I had a lot of bad jobs but the one big internship I had is I interned for 'SNL' when I was 21 years old and that was the joke. You intern there and you think man, I'm going to be with the writers and the great comedians. Then you're getting everybody sandwiches and then the doors close and then all the great creatives are doing the work.

domestic work is the most elementary form of labor. It is suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. All it requires is cleanlines, tidiness and quickness - not moral or intellectual qualities at all, but merely the outward and visible signs of health.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.'

My dad worked - f - k if I know - seven jobs? He painted a house. He would deliver toilets. He drove a cab, delivered pizzas. Whatever he could do, he did.

When I was young, I had minimum wage jobs as a busboy, flipping burgers and parking cars.

One of the most humbling gigs I've ever had was I was paid by a neighbor to go get a dead bird out of her house. She was kind of a high up in the music business, and she knew that I needed cash, and I used to do some yard work for her.

When I became an actor, it was disappointing to show up on set and be handed a coffee. You know. I'd pick up cables and get told off.

After college, I went to San Francisco and worked as a secretary in a reinsurance company. That was a pretty dismal job. It was a real small place. Guys would come in, and they'd sort of stick out their arms like wings so I could take their coats off. They'd tell me, 'Two,' and I'd put two lumps of sugar in their coffee.

I cleaned toilets and shined shoes.

Work is the province of cattle.

I shined shoes; I did windows.

I started at an agency called Intertalent. You copy scripts, you pick up people's dry cleaning, you take their dogs to the vet, you deliver packages, you do whatever they want you to do.

I'll sweep the floors. I've picked up napkins in the men's room. I'm not above anything.

You know, when you're a producer, you're a bit of a lackey. You're just making cups of tea and making sure they've got newspaper, stuff like that.