The paper asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics how Rhode Islanders spend their working day, and the Bureau answered with a table of fifty occupations, ranked by headcount, May 2025. The paper then did what the Bureau will not do: gave each job its real title.

By headcount the state's largest line of work is selling overpriced stuff. Fast food and counter workers lead the table at 13,310, retail salespersons follow at 12,830, and with waiters, cashiers, bartenders, wholesale reps and the rest, nine of the top fifty jobs come to 66,800 people, a quarter of everyone on the list. The coffee is too much. The people handing it over did not set the price.

Then come performing care (nurses, home health aides, teaching assistants), making things up (accountants, software developers, bookkeepers, marketing specialists), blurting excuses (receptionists, secretaries, human resources), and standing around, which is the title for the first-line supervisors and the security guards and is meant as a description of the posture, not the effort. Janitors and cleaners, 7,270 of them, are retitled doing genuinely noble work. Restaurant cooks, 6,950, are retitled narcissist rager, which the cooks will tell you is fair. General and operations managers, 9,150, are retitled blaming subordinates.

That is the bottom of the building. The top of the building is smaller and has one job.

At the top, the job is saying things. It is the job of the 460 chief executives the Bureau finds in the state, and it is, as far as this desk can determine, the whole of the job of the governor and the mayor. Saying things does not appear in any description. The description is the saying.

A resident asked this desk what saying things is. What kind of things are said. The desk put the question to a sayer of things, who answered:

"Just tidbits, just things that I want to express, some just thoughts. You know, I woke up this morning and had a coffee. And uh, yeah, you know, like I graduated uh, first in my class in high school. And, uh, you know, I'm really optimistic about our economy."

The coffee in that answer was bought from the bottom of the building.

The desk notes one row it did not retitle: the people who move freight, stock and material by hand, 6,760 of them, the thirteenth-largest job in the state. Their backs pay the physical therapists and the chiropractors and the pharmacists. That is not a joke about the movers. It is a line item in somebody else's budget, and somebody at the top of the building has said things about it.