Yet Another Frustrated Employee

From the daily calendar:

A flop as a lawyer, Franz Kafka tried his hand at insurance.  He took a job as claims manager at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Bohemia, but the hours were brutal and the conditions stultifying.  He spent most of his time drawing severed, mangled, and truncated fingers to document defective apparatus and malfunctioning machines.  As he wrote to his friend and fellow writer Max Brod: You have no idea how busy I am.  People tumble off scaffolds and into machines as if they all were drunk, all planks tip over, all embankments collapse, all ladders slip, whatever gets put up comes down, whatever gets put down trips somebody up.  And all the young girls in china factories who constantly hurl themselves down whole flights of stairs with mountains of crockery give me a headache.”

Kafka’s work has been very influential in modern literature.  You remember reading some of his more famous short stories in high school – specifically The Metamorphosis.  Apparently, he also had a witty sense of humor.