Saturday Morning News

'Gig' Offers a Closer Look at Americans and their Jobs

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: You may be surprised at the types of jobs that are out there. Our guest this morning has written a book about it, too. Here's the book. It's called "Gig," and in it Americans talk about their jobs at the turn of the century. The author, John Bowe, joins us from New York bright and early and he's wide awake, right John?

JOHN BOWE, AUTHOR, "GIG": Absolutely. Ready to go.

PHILLIPS: All right, hey, let's talk about the inspiration behind this book. I like this. You were in college, you got bored, you started hitchhiking around the world, the next thing you know, boom.

BOWE: Well, yeah, with a couple of bumps along the way I'd say that's the story. The book came about because I was working at a Web site called Word.com with my sister Marisa (ph) and she kept saying over and over oh, we should do interviews like the ones in Studs Terkel's book, "Working." And she's my big sister by six years so I would kind of go OK, whatever, like you do with your big sister.

And we were at a party one night and we met an ambulance driver and she said go, interview this guy. So I did. And he ended up being pretty good and pretty interesting and I started doing more and they started to get better and better. And then a third guy joined us, Sabin Streeter (ph), and he started editing some of these things. And I got better at interviewing and Sabin got better at editing and we just kind of kept evolving and we started finding more and more that people, you know, it wasn't just a job. It wasn't just like this interesting collection of interesting jobs.

It was, it started turning into a map of the whole society of the United States because everybody was so different. We had people from the northeast, people from the Southeast, people from out West, you know?

PHILLIPS: Let's talk about the diversity. From what to what? Kind of give us a glimpse. You have interviews with?

BOWE: Oh, we've got the CEO of a $120 billion insurance company. We've got a drug dealer. We've got a call girl in Wichita. We've got a gay congressman. We've got supermodel Heidi Klume, the actress Debra Messing from "Will and Grace," two spare rib chefs from Kansas City, a Prozac salesman. You know, it doesn't stop. PHILLIPS: Oh, I need to read that one. What did you, for you, what was the most interesting, an interview that really wowed you?

BOWE: You know, I've got, I'm starting to caution myself because I keep saying the same thing, but a couple of my favorites were there's a homicide detective, this black woman in her mid-'50s from Detroit who was, for whatever reasons, my personal favorite. Like we're friends now. We talk on the phone.

PHILLIPS: Why was it your favorite?

BOWE: She was funny. She was really smart. She was really good at her job. She wasn't just some Pollyanna person. She's talking about talking to these killers and how clueless they were. They would have killed someone and they would go off dreaming, you know, after they were already convicted. And I'd say, you know, I think I want to be an architect when I get out of here. And she was really, you know, you're not coming out of here until you're in a pine box, son. What are you talking about? And then I'd just be like yeah, whatever, you know? I think you're cool, Monica. That's her name.

PHILLIPS: Do you think people choose their jobs? Is it, did you find that people basically as kids think OK, I want to be this and I'm going to go to college, I'm going to major in this and that's what I'm going to be? Was that the norm?

BOWE: There really, there was no common thread. I mean that's what's so interesting about the book is everyone has a new story, everyone is different. As many people who grew up saying I want to do this, I mean the journalists grew up saying this is what I'm going to do. But as many people as there were like that, there were tons of people who totally fell into what they were doing and some of them were miserable about it and some of them were, ended up being happier than they could have planned.

PHILLIPS: Did you find people were more happy or disappointed with their jobs in the year 2000?

BOWE: You mean compared to back in Studs Turkel's days?

PHILLIPS: Exactly.

BOWE: I don't think people were more happy or more disappointed. I think that they were happy and sad about different things. People back in Studs Turkel's day seemed to be more often mad at the system or the man or the corporation or whatever. And now people don't seem to be made about things like that but they do seem to be working harder and longer hours and they're more addle brained from too many e-mails and too many phone calls and too many answering machines and too many things.

You know, if I had to make some generalization, that would be the one that I would make. But really, you would find so much diversity in people's reactions that the interesting thing about the book is these little weird details you get.

PHILLIPS: Like the clutter consultant?

BOWE: The clutter consultant, right. There were no clutter consultants back in 1972 and working on it. There were no black anchorwomen. There were no gay congressman. There were no Cuban financial advisers. One of the interesting details from the book is the Prozac salesman talks about how the biggest territories for him are Beverly Hills and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which are the two richest zip codes in the country. And the way that they divvy up the territories for Prozac is by dollar size. So the one mile by two mile area of the Upper East Side of Manhattan equals five states in the Midwest as far as Prozac sales.

PHILLIPS: Wow.

BOWE: So I don't know what that tells you, but it's more interesting than what a pundit would tell you about the state of America. I don't know what that means. I just think it's fascinating.

PHILLIPS: Journalists weren't thrown in there, huh?

BOWE: Journalist, there was a journalist in there. Brian...

PHILLIPS: I say about with regard to Prozac.

BOWE: Oh, I didn't ask Brian McGrory (ph), he's the guy at the "Boston Globe." I didn't ask him if he was on Prozac but...

PHILLIPS: Yeah, OK. Moving onto another subject. Well, did you definitely find that everybody has a story? A lot of folks, I hear this while I'm out and about, thinking oh, that person's boring or they don't have an interesting job, but did this prove that no matter who you are or what you do, where you're from, there was always something really interesting to hear in a conversation?

BOWE: Well, this is going to sound like something you would say just because you're on TV, but it really was true for me. I never met anybody who was boring on this subject and whether they were highly educated or not, or whether they were happy or not, people have very interesting thoughts about how you're going to make your way in the world and how, you know, you wake up, you're born and you kind of have to start working not too long after and everybody has all these strategies for how they're going to do it, how they want to do it in a way that's meaningful or maybe they're in a hurry to get rich or, you know, maybe they have limitations to overcome.

But there's no, yes, there are certain people who are more interesting than other people. But I didn't meet anyone who I thought was boring.

PHILLIPS: John Bowe, you definitely are not boring. Thanks for sharing the book "Gig" with us this morning.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com