Norman Rush: "Labors": The New Yorker Surveying my motley history of impromptu efforts to make money, I see something like a vast mural by Hieronymus Bosch in which all the victim characters distributed across the terrain of Hell are me. Many of my employers were decent people. Some were demons, but mostly my discomforts came from the nature of the work itself. After college, and after I had determined on being a writer, my choices of stopgap employment were shaped by the need to preserve free time to write. It was my bad luck to learn absolutely nothing from any category of work. Wait, that's wrong. I did learn that picking cherries for a week turns your hands almost indelibly black, and that my wife could pick cherries as fast as my brother and me combined. To be accurate, I learned that there's pathos almost everywhere in the world of work. Before leaving for college, I spent a period assisting my father in his endeavors as a salesman of primitive photocopying and laminating equipment to small offices. In demonstrating the laminator to a business in Modesto, California, he was proudly handed a letter to the owner of the firm, praising the owner for some service or other, and signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The letter emerged from the laminator perfectly encased in plastic, with the signature gone. . . .