I'm 90% sure the title isn't ironic: "The Pleasure of a Working Life" by Michael Deagler" (O.Henry Awards 2025)

It's a good idea in general to be on the lookout for irony when you're dealing with a title as triumphant-sounding as Michael Deagler's "The Pleasure of a Working Life." One good reason to be wary is that's exactly often how good literature works. You think you're going to get a paean to working-class life, and maybe the story does dangle some distractions at you to get you to think that's really what it's about, but really, it's about how capital takes advantage of this very idealization of working life in order to extract maximum value from labor without paying a fair wage in return. I was especially on guard for this because "capital takes advantage of labor" seems like the more likely political stance a story in a literary fiction anthology would take. 

But I think that actually, the opposite is happening. I think the story is using the instinctive wariness of irony among its readers, coupled with a number of characters who are skeptical about the value of a working life, to throw the reader off. We are expecting another takedown of capital, but really, the story is, without offering any real opinion on the battle between capital and labor, simply reaffirming an old belief in the value of work.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker

An occupation is given for almost every character in "Pleasure." Rather than being dehumanizing, reducing people to the work they do, this has a humanizing effect. Nearly everyone in the story gets to demonstrate at least some level of individuality, and the means by which they do it is primarily through work. Here are some of the people, and the work they do:

-Gary Monihan, the main character, who delivers mail until bad health forces him to run the small post office in Kilntown, PA. Gary could be seen as alienated labor. He never really liked carrying mail, and he always wanted to do something else, like write.

-Chuck Feeney, Gary's friend who is higher up in the post office, and who tries to advise Gary on how to be politically savvy. 

-Gary's pair of malcontent employees at the Kilntown post office, Marla and Alondra. Alondra complains more, but Marla outdoes Alondra in terms of malfeasance, as she eventually gets caught trying to pull off a worker's comp scheme.

-Adman Jeremy Krukowski, who fashions himself a wheeler-dealer but who seems mostly to be bad at his job. He wears loud suits. He imagines he's an old-time business man, making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms, but he is mostly just failing, and his wife has noticed. John Candy would have played him in a movie, if John Candy had ever wanted to make the jump from comedy to tragi-comedy. 

-Gary's wife, Claire, who keeps books for a screw and bolt manufacturer, along with their daughter Caitlain, who has a degree in communications and their son, Colin, who works in medical software along with his significant other. 

-Unnamed construction workers Gary sees through his window as they work on a ditch. 

-The nuns Mary Elizabeth and Agnes Marie, with whom Gary makes jokes. 

-Two unnamed postal employees, one of whom seems to really love his job.

"Pleasure" acknowledges that work is work

One of the red herrings the story throws at readers that might make them think this is actually critical of the idealization of work comes when Gary looks out the window of the Kilntown post office. (Even the name of the tiny town where Gary works gets its name from the kind of work that was once done there.) He sees construction workers. He imagines some ill-informed people thinking that it might be nice to work outside on a day like today, and he extrapolates to something he also heard when he was carrying the mail:

For thirty years, people had said to Gary, "At least you’re getting exercise," even as he stood before them in all his heaviness, growing wider by the season. It was a hot day for early May, with the sort of heat that a person walking in and out of buildings might mistake for beautiful weather. Anyone who had to dig a ditch would never mistake a hot day for anything other than what it was.

I've heard similar complaints from people I knew who worked outdoors. Everyone sees them outside on a sunny, sixty-eight-degree day and thinks, oh, I wish I had your job, but they don't notice when it's a hundred and muggy or when it's four below. People do have a tendency to imagine jobs are better than they are, especially when they're jobs they don't themselves do. Everyone envies teachers being off in the summer, but anyone who thinks this is unfair is welcome to go become a teacher if they want, and yet few do. Jeremy the adman think Gary's life as postmaster seems pretty good, because Gary has enough time to sit and read books, but Jeremy wasn't there all those years when Gary was slogging from one house to the next, slowly getting bad hips. Jeremy comments on how it would be great to slow down like Gary does, but does he? No, he prefers to keep on keeping on with his get-rich-quick schemes that don't pan out.

 

"Pleasure" doesn't ignore the cold and hot days. It doesn't overly glamorize work. Its characters go to their jobs with debilitating medical conditions, like lupus, a herniated disc, and diabetes. They struggle with seeing the meaning in all of it. They feel alienated, because they can easily imagine things they'd rather be doing. Gary acknowledges that there are seasons in life, and some of them, like when you've got young kids and you're struggling with work and family, are the hard part of life, and there's just no getting around it being hard.

"Pleasure" manages to avoid both extremes of work as either paradise or purgatory. 

But work still has value, and it might even be allowable to enjoy it

In spite of the very real challenges of work, "Pleasure" still holds out hope that a working life can be a pleasure without irony. It shows us a number of ways people deal with the hardships of a working life, all of which I'm sure we have all seen examples of in real life, and all of which, on a given day, I'm sure I've done to some extent. There is the complainer in Alondra, who never meets with a work condition she can't kvetch about. There's the scammer Marla, who gets tired of seeing her cousin make what looks like easy money, and decides to try to make some of her own. There's the dreamer Jeremy Krukowski, who thinks the key to making working life succeed is to have the right connections, leading to the right golden opportunity. There's even the "I love my job" guy, shredding the postcards at the end, and the woman with him, who seems to enjoy the social aspects of work, along with her frequent smoke breaks. 

Then there's the main character, Gary. Gary was a guy who slogged ahead, in spite of not wanting to, and near the end of his career, while his old, broken-down body is struggling to shovel snow out of the parking lot, he chastises himself for not having picked one of the other strategies: 

He had been a fool to think there would be an early departure, a special dispensation that would excuse him from his work, his real work, before they had gotten everything they needed from his body. He ws only--had only ever been--a set of arms and feet, a back to lift and haul. A shoveler. A carrier like his father. A smarter man would have played his hand better. Cut corners, made a fuss, found a scam. He'd lacked the imagination for that. 

This is a nearly Marxist way of viewing his labor. He's been a schmuck, used by callous, cynical capital, who saw him only as an expendable bag of bones to be exploited until there was no more value to be squeezed from him. Against such a view of labor, it's natural to think it's okay to pull off a worker's comp scam, or just to have been as underproductive as he could get away with, complaining and taking smoke breaks as often as possible. 

Community and solidarity

But Gary's father, who had also been a mail carrier and who originally got Gary his job, had an entirely different way of looking at work. His father, on the last day he carried mail, put a letter in the mailbox of every customer he had served. The letter was all about how his job had at times been difficult, but "the people on his mail route were a source of fulfillment." Gary's father had considered being among these people to be "the pleasure of (his) working life." 

There are two senses the story gives us in which work may not be utterly futile. By far, the biggest is the way works makes us part of the community we serve. When we ring a register, dig a ditch, or build software, we become part of the lives of the people our labor serves. Gary learned about the letter his father wrote when one of his father's former customers gave it to Gary at his father's funeral. Gary is later astonished at how meaningful it is to the family of a woman he once delivered mail to that he went to her wake. "He delivered mail to Mom for ten years!" the son announces. When the adman dies, Gary cannot understand why his wife thinks he should go to the funeral. He wonders why anyone would care that he sold stamps to the dead guy, but his wife thinks it might matter to the family. Most of us never get to achieve immortality through fame or far-reaching deeds, so the closest we get is in the links we make in the work we do every day. If we repaired a driveway so well it'll still be in good shape three owners of the house from now, that's all most of us get. In Gary's case, he's been fortunate in that by delivering mail, he's impacted a wide number of people in a small way every day. His work has an effect in ways he can't quite see, down to even the (presumably unemployed) homeless people who sleep in the warmth of the post office he now heads. 

Work binds employee to customer, but it also binds one employee to another. When Gary is out struggling to clear the sidewalk, he hears the "sympathetic scrape" of a shovel from the McDonald's parking lot as another, much younger worker with his whole working life ahead of him struggles through the same task. Through work communities are brought together, but also there is a universal solidarity of working people that is made stronger. Work sucks, but it sucks for the guy next to you in the same way it sucks for you, and so by working, you join a family of people worldwide who are trying to get from one day to the next. 

I don't think we HAVE to come to an especially rosy picture of work by the end. We don't have to be the "just happy to be here" guy at the end of the story, the one who drives us all crazy to be around in our jobs. It's understandable if we spend most of our working lives wishing we could be doing something else, if we regret the time not spent with family, the time not invested in doing activities that better our spirits. A college professor of mine once said that we are taught that there is dignity in work, but in reality, there is only dignity in labor. We don't have to abandon our critiques of capitalism as wage slavery, but neither should we shut out all possibility of finding some meaning in work. Gary, who spent much of his life wanting to be a writer, finally dedicates himself to reading during his easy postmaster job, and he finds that it, too, is work. He eventually gets better at it, as all people do at just about anything they stick with, but he seems to miss the point. The final lines of the story are of Gary having meant to sent his customers a letter like the one his father sent, but he forgot, and when he thought of it, the moment had passed. Gary's moment of finding something redeeming in his working life, some pleasure, has almost passed him by, too. 

Possible objections

I can see a reader with deep Marxist commitments, or possibly just one who really hates their job, finding fault with the story.  Gary's father was a boomer, and work paid back boomers much better than it did future generations. Gary's job is also a throwback, one of the few jobs that still provides a pension, that has little chance of a layoff, and which accommodated Gary when his health became poor. Most people don't have jobs that good anymore, and if they do, it's only because labor fought for those conditions and capital hasn't yet been able to wrest those benefits back yet. Work still often consists of the many being taken advantage of by the few. 

I don't think "Pleasure" totally avoids those issues, and to the extent it does, it's because it's dealing with work less as a philosophical and political issue than as a close-to-home issue nearly all of us have to face day to day, starting often from the moment we wake up. It's not looking at work primarily from a social perspective, from from an individual one, asking not how to make work better for most workers, but how to survive your job as you find it today. I don't think every story needs to examine every aspect of the themes it's working with in order to succeed. "Pleasure" is a good reminder that the thing most of us spend more time doing than anything else still has some possibilities for enjoyment.