by JULIET WATERS

While reading Job Hopper by Ayun Halliday I couldn't help recalling golden moments from my own crappy job years: the time I served Celine Dion at Red Lobster; that Saturday morning shift I had at a local tavern and all the great guys who come in to drink at 10 a.m.; the year I was in such fine physical shape, sucking up car exhaust as a bike courier; that Boxing Day working the cash at Sam the Record Man.

Mostly I remember the sheer existential terror. If you're that rare combination of low-esteem and competence that enables you to thrive reasonably well at terrible job after terrible job, you never really know what life holds for you. In prison they at least give you a timeline.

It's hard to imagine anyone being nostalgic for this time, but it happens. Look at the success of The Office. It's like war stories. Some people never want to go back there. Some people never quite forget the unique camaraderie of hell. Halliday is a particularly good (or bad, depending on how you look at these things) case of this. This book is both very funny and very thorough in its travels through some of the more excruciating jobs out there. The boring jobs (museum security guard, artist's model), the degrading jobs (department store stand-in for Bert from Sesame Street, cocktail waitress at a club called Clubland), the lonely jobs (temp), the horrifying jobs (substitute teacher), the freak-magnet jobs (receptionist at an alternative weekly.)

Halliday is now fairly safe from being sucked back in. Her husband, Greg Kotis, co-creator of the Broadway hit musical Urinetown, is that extremely rare thing: the fringe theatre guy who's made it very big. She has her own successful projects: publisher of popular New York zine East Village Inky, and two other books - a travel book, No touch Monkey!, and a book on motherhood, The Big Rumpus.

Yet she doesn't seem to have forgotten much from those years. She has a keen memory for that God-I-wish-I-was-finishing-this-shift-instead-of-starting-it feeling, and sharp insights, like the way in which getting drunk on rounds of peach kamikaze shots at Clubland mirrored the six stages of death. The hellish moments are vividly hellish, but there is the rare oasis. As every crappy job veteran knows, there is that rare no-brainer job where the boss is smart and cool, the atmosphere is laid back and the money is actually good. But even these jobs are problematic in their way. If such jobs actually were heaven, Halliday might still be working at Dave's Italian Kitchen.

Brains and some ambition will inevitably begin their rituals of inner torture. To her credit, Halliday spends very little time indulging any neurosis about being meant for better things. Perhaps because the thing she thought she was meant for, acting, doesn't seem to have been it. She takes each job at face value, does her best and sets her absurdity radar on medium high. None of these essays are going to become classics of the form, like, let's say, David Sedaris's tortured Christmas Elf story. Each one in itself is too anecdotal. Take the time to stop after each story and ask just why we're being told this story, and there probably isn't much of an answer.

That these stories don't aspire to be too much, however, ends up being part of their charm. Halliday writes in her introduction that she has never been one of those people whose identity was defined by what she did for a living. You believe her on this the more you read. It takes a strong person to take a job no matter what it is, do one's reasonable best, and complain only as much as the job merits. There's a Zen to the crappy job years, and Halliday seems to have competently mastered that too.

Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante by Ayun Halliday, Seal Books, pb, 217pp, $17.99