Too Proud for Lowly Work

"You're a high-powered corporate attorney. You've spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That's what you're good at, that's what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That's the way the world works. But one day it doesn't. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead."

— World War Z

There are a number of occupations that, despite how important they are to society, receive little to no respect. While some people might be willing to do undesirable work out of necessity or personal gain, others are so prideful that they will refuse to do work that they think of as beneath them. Said reasons might be out of genuine pride or an excuse for laziness, but regardless of the reasons, these people will often refuse to do work that's "beneath them" unless forced by circumstances, and sometimes not even then, with the most extreme examples essentially choosing to live in poverty or even die rather than work a job which they feel isn't good enough for them.

There are numerous types of people who can hold this type of attitude, with some being more common than others. Common examples include:

• An Insufferable Genius might refuse to perform physical labor under the excuse that such work is for Dumb Muscle.
• A person who subscribes to Academia Elitism refusing to take jobs that are beneath their level of education.
• An employee who views certain work as being beneath them might force their co-workers and/or subordinates to take care of the undesirable work.
• A society that has a rigid class/caste system and/or slavery might have people insisting that certain undesirable jobs are the responsibility of the lower classes and/or slaves.
• A beautiful person who uses their looks to avoid work might believe that undesirable work is for people without good looks.
• A rich person might insist on not doing chores for the reason that such work is for the help.
• An immigrant who was a professional in their home country but is unable to transfer previous credentials due to having a Worthless Foreign Degree or leaving behind their wealth, and might be unwilling to accept having to become Ethnic Menial Labor.
• A man who believes in strict gender roles might refuse to learn how to do house chores on the grounds that such things are women's work.
• A person who considers certain jobs socially stigmatized as being for losers with no job skills or career prospects, such as the Burger Fool or Suck E. Cheese's.
• A person who finds the work itself to be unfulfilling or demoralizing, as in a Soul-Crushing Desk Job or Soul-Sucking Retail Job.

Any number of these may result in the person deciding to say "Take This Job and Shove It!" Then again, they should be warned to watch out for Pride Before a Fall or they may wind up Crossing The Burned Bridge.

Compare Entitled Bastard. A character who has to work a Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job may hold these sentiments, either doing the work while complaining all the way, or refusing to do such a job even if it leads to suffering poverty. Often part of a Break the Haughty plot when the refusal to work those jobs gets overridden by necessity. Especially common in situations where Money Is Not Power. Contrast Non-Idle Rich and Frontline General for characters who have no problems doing worth that would ordinarily be beneath their position. Also contrast Paying Their Dues and Waiting for a Break, when it's accepted that lowly, non-glamorous gigs are a necessary first step up the career ladder to Pursue the Dream Job.

Inverted Trope of Happiness in Minimum Wage, when someone has a thankless job but manages to enjoy it all the same. Zig-Zagged by the Almighty Janitor, who is low in rank but high in power.

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Examples:

Animation

• In the Soviet cartoon Robbery, ... style ("Ограбление по..."), the robber in the Italian segment is a guy who needs to feed his family, but insists that a descendant of the Brindisi princes will never soil his hands with work.

Anime & Manga

• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Jack's arrogance and lack of real world knowledge result in him being unable to land a job in Season 2.

Comic Books

• Seven Missionaries: After being captured and Made a Slave by Vikings, Oran the prideful abbot insists his hands were not made for physical labor, even when this gets him beaten by the guards. His arrogance is such that the Vikings are easily convinced they kidnapped a bishop (which Oran intends to become), leading to them demanding a ridiculous high ransom for him and inadvertently setting themselves on the path to conversion.
• Thunderbolts:
  • When the Thunderbolts first broke away from Baron Zemo and had to find ways to make ends meet, they mostly get menial jobs like waitressing or dishwashing. Meteorite, a former psychiatrist, can't bring herself to accept such work, even though all her efforts to get more white-collar jobs end in failure.
  • Zemo himself was once horrified to see Techno dig for a MacGuffin with his cyborg abilities; that was what he enslaved the local population for, and by lowering himself to it, Techno was setting them a bad example.
• Warrior Cats: In the comic Winds of Change, Mudclaw — who would have been Clan leader by that point if not for a last-minute demotion — is particularly irritated about having to help build dens, grumbling about it being "glorified apprentice work."

Comic Strips

• In an old The Dandy comic, Jonah the ugly sailor is offered a part in an epic film which is clearly a parody of Ben Hur. Sadly for him, the part is one of the galley slaves, and he has to do the hard work of operating the oars. Even sadder, the handsome leading star Carey Curtis, despite also playing a galley slave, is too narcissistic and self-centred to row with the rest of the slave actors. Once Jonah (who does not care about Carey's celebrity status) threatens to punch him if he doesn't help out, Carey runs like a wimp, and the ensuing pursuit ends with the ship getting wrecked, the film getting cancelled, and the furious director ordering Carey to eat Humble Pie and chop the remains of the wreck up to make firewood.

Fairy Tales

• In Anchi Abyshka and Kara-Molat, a Shor fairy tale, Kara-Molat's two potential brides, kaans' daughters from Black Lake and Yellow Lake, claim that they don't need to know anything or do any work since their rich parents provide everything for them. Kara-Molat rejects both of them and chooses the humble girl from White Lake.

Fan Works

• The Ranma ½ fanfiction Duty of Care has an indirect example; when Principle Saito informs Genma that Ranma will need an education in order to perform the business aspects of running a martial arts dojo, Genma scoffs at the idea, stating that such duties are "women's work" that Ranma's future wife Akane will handle.
• Vengeance of Dawn: Breaking Dawn was previously Princess Celestia's personal student before being removed from her position due to her laziness and spoiled attitude, and expelled from the School for Gifted Unicorns when she assaulted Twilight for replacing her. In the present, she has to take up multiple Fallen-on-Hard-Times Jobs to pay the rent on a cheap apartment she shares with two friends but gets fired from all of them because she feels being Celestia's former student puts her on a level above other ponies.
  Breaking Dawn: You know what, fine. You want me gone, I'm gone. I was always too good for this place anyway.
  Mr. Price: Like you were too good for all the other places you worked before this? The places you got fired from? I don't know why I kept you on as long as I did, unless it was because I felt sorry for you.
• A variation in Wish Carefully: After Harry Potter and his allies decide To Win Without Fighting and surrender control of Magical Britain to the Death Eaters with all the Light-aligned and Muggleborns leaving the country, the Death Eaters' realize that their membership was comprised mainly of the old money elites and the shady criminal underclass while the middle and working classes (i.e. the business owners, producers of complex goods, and skilled laborers who helped maintain and keep the wheels of society turning smoothly) were primarily made up of either Muggleborns or the Light-aligned. As a result, the economy is gutted, much of the workforce is gone, and it's not long before things start breaking down due to a lack of regular maintenance, and none of the Death Eaters have the skills or knowledge on how to fix these problems. And while the more aristocratic Death Eaters had expected the Death Eaters in the lower social classes to fill out some of the gaps caused by the Light-aligned workers' exodus, it didn't occur to most of them that these minions had become criminals in the first place because they didn't have any useful skills and even if they wanted to improve that, they'd need training to perform those jobs and capital to start a business, neither of which occurred to the Death Eater nobility to provide. Thus, the Death Eaters were forced to rely on expensive goblin artificers to maintain their infrastructure.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Book of Masters, the Thirty-Fourth Bogatyr was fired from his battalion so that the number of the bogatyrs would fit into the metrics of the poem that featured them. He is relegated to watching over Baba Yaga's lake and feels the job is horribly humiliating since he should have been out there doing heroic knightly feats instead... if only he had a weapon. When Ivan offers him a Cool Sword in exchange for the Bogatyr showing him the way to Baba Yaga's hut, the Bogatyr is absolutely elated.
• Coming to America: Wanting to find a woman that would love him for who he is in order to avoid an Arranged Marriage, Prince Akeem, heir to the throne of Zamunda, travels to Queens N.Y. while posing as a goat herder who migrated to the U.S. While Akeem actually enjoys working as an employee of McDowells, his manservant Semi frequently laments that the crown prince and his closest confidant/bodyguard should not have to do the work of lowly peasants.
• Ever After: The final fate of Rodmilla and Marguerite is to be stripped of all rank and become laundry maids, just like they treated Danielle. The former baroness promptly tries to start ordering Marguerite around and claiming that "I'm management", at which Marguerite angrily protests that "You're just the same as me, you big nobody!" and the actual supervisor promptly tosses them both into a vat of dye to teach them a lesson.
• In the 1976 adaptation of King Thrushbeard, when the princess is married off to whom she believes to be a Wandering Minstrel as part of her Break the Haughty punishment, she tries to refuse to work for her living or do the household chores: "I must work?! Me, a king's daughter?" Like in the original fairytale, she fails miserably at basket-weaving and spinning and ends up a kitchenmaid, but unlike the original, the film shows her eventually finding genuine enjoyment in cooking.
• Jupiter Ascending: Discussed during Jupiter's confrontation with Big Bad Balem Abraxas. As Jupiter is - ostensibly - a reincarnation of the late Empress and Balem has massive Mommy Issues, he throws out the claim that she's an Inadequate Inheritor in part due to having spent most of her life up to that point as a toilet-cleaning maid on earth. Jupiter counters that the Empress who was a Death Seeker who used Balem to commit Suicide by Cop would've probably been better adjusted if she had cleaned toilets, implying that the entire House of Abraxas's being a Big, Screwed-Up Family stems partly from their complete disconnect from even the simplest hardships or the satisfaction that comes from a job well done.
• The Legend of Bagger Vance: Discussed at one point when Hardy is venting to Junuh about his father, Frank, a former hardware store owner who took up sweeping after The Great Depression hit. Hardy finds this humiliating and contrasts the father of one of his friends who said he'd rather do nothing than "something beneath his dignity". Junuh, who happens to be an old friend of Frank's, gives him a rather sharp rebuke.
  Junuh: Your daddy is out sweeping streets because he took every last dime he had and used it to pay off every man and woman he owed and every business who worked for him, instead of declaring bankruptcy like everyone else in town, including your best friend Wilbur Charles' dad, Raymond, which is why he's able to sit around all day long on his dignity! Your daddy stared adversity in the eye, Hardy. And he beat it back with a broom.
• In the horror movie Sinister, the main protagonist Ellison Oswalt is a true crime author with a successful book to his name, Kentucky Blood. At the beginning of the movie, he moves his family into a house where the previous family that lived there was hanged from a tree in their backyard. In one scene of the movie, he explains the reason why he's so adamant about writing this new book: partially because he wants to replicate his success with Kentucky Blood; and partially because he refuses to degrade himself by writing college textbooks for a living.
• In Titanic, Rose's mother would rather marry her daughter off to an abusive (but rich) Control Freak than work a menial job. When she talks to Rose about the latter's rebellious behavior that can ruin the engagement, she asks, in a shaky voice, if Rose would rather see her working as a seamstress. We aren't shown what happens to her after Rose is presumed to have died in the sinking.

Literature

• In The Adventures of Petrushka by Margarita Fadeyeva and Anatoly Smirnov, the evil king's Clone Army is given menial jobs after the regime is overthrown. At least several of the king's copies are shown to be very unhappy about it. One of them (a notorious Motor Mouth) starts to say: "Me — digging ditches? I'd better tell you about catching the stars..." — but nobody listens to him.
• In After the Funeral, Miss Gilchrist, who used to have a teashop of her own before it closed due to the war, takes care to explain that she was Cora Lansquenet's companion rather than servant and only did "the cooking and light dusting", but "none of the rough". Her resentment over becoming a servant is what drives her to murder Cora, since Cora unwittingly has a Vermeer in her art collection, and by selling it Miss Gilchrist hopes to set up a teashop again.
• Artemis Fowl: At the end of The Opal Deception, while fleeing from the LEP, Opal Koboi crashlands in an Italian vineyard and uses the last of her magic to mesmerise the owner into believing she's his daughter. When he immediately orders her to start doing manual labor, Opal — an extremely rich and powerful tech mogul in the Lower Elements — is mortified, believing such work to be beneath her. However, without her magic or authority, she has no choice but to comply, and it's noted that by the time the LEP finally catch up to her, she's almost happy to see them.
• In At the Sources of the Night, Betty manages to remain an extremely naive Sheltered Aristocrat well into old age and despite the family's finances falling apart after her son's death. When one of her creditors offers to find her and her grandson Arlen a job should she sell the family estate to cover the debt, Betty is absolutely shocked at the notion of a job and offers to arrange a marriage between Arlen and the creditor's daughter instead.
• Brig Scarlet Flamingo:
  • In one of his A Day in the Limelight prequels, Frank serves in the Navy but gets constantly reprimanded for gambling and lack of discipline. Being a Spoiled Brat, he thinks it's his superiors' fault for not letting him serve where he wants. The final straw comes when he's reassigned from a convoy escort ship to a minor coast guard vessel (the port's captain explains it's the last chance he'll be given). Frank is outraged at what he views as a demeaning job and deserts the Navy to join the pirates.
  • Yvonne, coming from an Impoverished Patrician family, is reluctant to start working as a nurse — though the full conversation concerning it happens off-page, her friend Eua-le is shown advising her to "leave her aristocratic quirks behind". After the first two days at the hospital, she is disgusted and wants to quit, but Eua-le points out that in a country torn by wars, in a region controlled by revolutionaries, a noblewoman in hiding can't exactly hope for a "refined" job.
• In Charmed Life, Gwendolen is outraged when she is forced to do ordinary schoolwork, as she believes a witch as talented as her should be above it.
• His Dark Materials: In The Subtle Knife, Lyra initially refuses to assist Will in the kitchen and wash the dishes, telling him that "In my world servants do the cooking."
• A recurring situation in Max Brooks' works as it's common for him to include an Author Tract about how modern life (especially a liberal arts education and/or creative work in general) doesn't set people up to be useful in a survival situation:
  • In World War Z, an anecdote is told during the rebuilding of California where a casting director ranted at the woman who was teaching her to work in a munitions factory, who happens to be her former cleaner. She claims that she can't believe she's being mistreated this way.
    Before the war, entertainment had been the most valued export of the United States. Now they were being trained as custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting director, exploded. How dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five seasons and she made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lifetimes! She kept addressing that instructor by her first name. "Magda," she kept saying, "Magda, enough already. Magda, please." At first I thought this woman was just being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman's cleaning lady.
  • In Devolution, an extreme case of this is implied to be why Tony and Yvette hide away from everyone else (aside from Sanity Slippage). Both believe they are too good to do any kind of manual work and detest having to take orders from Mostar, who has become the camp's de facto leader. Dr. Reinhardt has no survival skills either, and resents having to learn how to do anything.
• In The Magical Fairytale by Lidia Charskaya, Nadya feels herself above studying and (especially) working for her living, since she is certain she was born for a refined aristocratic life. To clarify, she is the daughter of a minor bank official and is only able to study for free thanks to her aunt having worked at the school, and her older siblings already have jobs of their own to help the family survive. After a massive Break the Haughty Humiliation Conga, she gets better.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!: Zigzagged. A constant source of frustration to Millidiana Claes, mother to Catarina Claes, as well as Keith Claes, Catarina's adoptive brother, is that ever since Catarina suffered a severe blow to the head at eight years old (and, unbeknownst to them awoke memories of a previous life as a Japanese schoolgirl who knew their world as an Otome game), she has been engaging in activities that they see as beneath their noble lineage, like farming. What's worse, from the perspective of Duchess Claes and Keith, is that Catarina is forever dragging in all of their royal and noble acquaintances to assist in said work, which a few of them balk at, but all of them end up doing.
• Implied in The Nanny from Moscow by Ivan Shmelyov. In the Framing Device, the eponymous nanny is talking to an Impoverished Patrician Russian emigree, and though the latter's words are never given, the nanny's replies indicate that the lady deeply bemoans her fate, while the nanny points out that, considering she and her family have well-paying jobs and a home of their own, many emigres have it much worse.
• In Warrior Cats, certain chores (such as gathering fresh bedding and checking the elders for ticks) are expected to be done by the apprentices, and typically young warriors are thrilled not to have to do them anymore after being promoted. However, sometimes when a Clan is short on apprentices, the duties must be shared by the warriors, which typically results in one of them complaining about having to do apprentice work.
• Wayfarers: It's a plot point in Record of a Spaceborn Few that every member of the Exodus Fleet has to spend some time working in sanitation as a reminder that there is no such thing as lowly work.
• The Wheel of Time: The Chosen One sentences the murderous usurper Lady Colavaere to be stripped of her noble titles and exiled to tend the land on a small farm. He means to be merciful, but she promptly hangs herself rather than live as a commoner.

Live-Action TV

• Blackadder: In Blackadder the Third, Edmund Blackadder resents being a butler to the Upper-Class Twit Prince George, certainly considering the position beneath a man with aristocratic ancestry such as himself. In "Amy and Aimability", he is not impressed with Baldrick's suggestion of an alternative job.
  Baldrick: You become a dashing highwayman, then you can pay your bills, and everyone would want to sleep with you.
  Blackadder: Baldrick, I could become a prostitute and pay my bills, and everyone would want to sleep with me, but I do consider certain professions to be beneath me.
• Inverted in Breaking Bad. Walter White, an overqualified and underpaid high school chemistry teacher, is offended when he's given the chance to come back to work for his old business partner Elliott Schwartz's company Gray Matter, a company he helped create only to leave and miss out on its massive growth into a multi-billion dollar success. The way Walt sees it, Elliott is extending the offer out of pity for his cancer and refuses to accept his "charity", instead opting to continue cooking meth. Walt's jealousy over Elliott's success becomes a major driving force behind his cooking meth.
• Cheers: Diane has this attitude about being a waitress at Cheers sometimes, assuming she's not just slacking off to do whatever, or arguing with Sam yet again. At least one instance has her assuring customers she's really just pretending to work there while writing a book (they hadn't asked, by the way). That said, on the occasions she actually does do her supposed job, she's often shown to be pretty terrible at it, and on other occasions it's shown Diane is well aware that despite her pretensions, this is as far as she's gotten.
• Death in Paradise: Charlotte Hamilton, the secretary and treasurer of the Saint Marie Yacht Club from "Murder on Day Of the Dead" holds this view. Despite being secretly flat broke at this point, she considers herself above regular work, flat out stating that someone of her standing can't be expected to get a regular job as if it was a self-obvious fact, to point that she instead embezzled money from the Yacht club to prop herself up. This makes her a suspect in the murder of Daisy Anderson, as she was aware of her theft and was blackmailing Charlotte to help cover up her affair. Charlotte did in fact murder Daisy, but not just over the blackmail. Instead seeing a way back to her former wealth, she convinced Daisy's rich husband she would kill his unfaithful wife for him, in exchange for several millions. Jack even lampshades in his closing remarks how utterly despicable a person you have to be to consider honest work beneath you but cold-blooded murder an acceptable method of gaining money.
• Earthsea: Ged resents being expected to follow his father into the blacksmithing trade given his magical talents. Early in the miniseries, after foreseeing a Kargad raid, he rushes out of the village and his father runs after him to bring him back.
  Father: Oh, more of your wizard nonsense! Well, you're no wizard! You're a blacksmith! Get used to it.
  Ged: I won't "get used to it"! I'm better than that!
  Father: "Better"? You insolent pup! I ought to— [at which point he catches sight of the Kargad raiding party and changes the subject to warning the village]
• Gilligan's Island: Even though his massive fortune is worthless on the island, Thurston Howell III has never done labor like cooking, cleaning, or construction in his life (he made his money as "The Wizard of Wall Street") and he certainly doesn't intend to start now. His wife Eunice "Lovey" Howell is similarly a member of the Idle Rich, but it's downplayed in her case; a few episodes prove that she's more willing to get her hands dirty should the need arise. For example, in one Battle of the Sexes plot, Lovey joins Ginger and Mary-Ann when they leave to establish their own camp and assists in building a shelter and getting it running, while her husband refuses to do the same with the other men.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: While Dennis, Dee and Mac are all willing to work the bar at Paddy's Pub, absolutely any other job needed to keep the bar running (such as catching rats, cleaning the bathrooms and maintaining the site in general) gets relegated to Charlie as "Charlie Work". The episode "Charlie Work" reveals the staggering extent of what Charlie has to do to keep the bar open, due to the others believing such work beneath them. Naturally, considering that this is Sunny, absolutely none of the others realise this.
• M*A*S*H: In the season eight episode "The Yalu Brick Road," most of the 4077th has come down with food poisoning, with Margaret Houlihan and Charles Winchester the only healthy ones. Charles reasons that since the only thing left to do is provide general nursing care for the patients until they recover, and he's a doctor, that meant he could go take a nap in his tent and stick Margaret with all the work. She didn't let him get away with it.
• The Rookie: Feds: On Simone's first day, she assumes she will be assigned to Garza's task force. Instead she is assigned to background checks. She is very open about the fact that she considers it a waste of her talent and forces her way onto the task force.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Subverted in "Emissary". One of Commander Ben Sisko's Establishing Character Moments is when he begins to win over Major Kira by showing he's not above literally rolling up his sleeves to help her clean up the mess the Cardassians left of Deep Space 9's promenade when they pulled out, subverting her expectations of senior Starfleet officers.
• Early on in Star Trek: Voyager the Doctor expressed this opinion. After all, he was an Emergency Medical Hologram programmed with the entire sum of medical knowledge in the Federation. But as Voyager's only remaining medical officer he soon found (to his annoyance) that every illness or injury was his to treat.
  Doctor: So it begins. The trivia of medicine is my domain now. Every runny nose, stubbed toe, pimple on a cheek becomes my responsibility.
• Worzel Gummidge: In one episode, Worzel and Aunt Sally have a Food Fight and then argue over who will clean up the resulting mess. Worzel insists chores are for women, but Aunt Sally insists she's too dignified to clean.

Puppet Shows

• Dinosaurs: In "Nature Calls", Fran grows sick of changing Baby's diapers and decides that diaper changing is now Earl's job. Earl, who is revealed to have never changed a diaper before, doesn't want to and tries many different excuses, one of them being that diaper changing is a woman's job. When Fran points out this is sexist, Earl tries to have Robbie change Baby instead.

Tabletop Games

• Golden Sky Stories: Compared to other henge types, fox henge possess greater wisdom, more powerful magical abilities, and a closer connection to the gods. As a drawback, they dislike performing trivial tasks and prefer to let other henge types handle those.

Video Games

• BioShock:
  • BioShock: This is one of the reasons Rapture failed as a city: it was a city where the best and brightest could do anything they wanted without the city regulating it. Turned out the "best and brightest" didn't want to do anything to actually maintain the city, leading to its deterioration. As Frank Fontaine puts it in one Audio Diary, "Someone had to scrub the toilets."
  • The flying city of Columbia suffered a similar problem in Bioshock Infinite. Billed to its religiously minded residents as a heaven on earth, the founder realized quickly that most people don't go to heaven expecting to do menial labor. His solution was to bring in "a cherub for every chore" — a massive foreign labor force of blacks, Asians and Irishmen, who inevitably rebelled against their poor treatment.
• Fallout 4: During "The Big Dig", one of your possible dialog choices to Bobbi No-Nose once she fills you in on your hired role amounts to this. You're casually chewed out.
  Sole Survivor: Digging? This is a waste of my talents.
  Bobbi: [nonplussed] You want a better job, you gotta work your way up to it, buddy. Show me that can-do attitude!
• In Final Fantasy XIV, Vath Deftarm is among the Vath who start an Adventure Guild in Dravania as a means of fostering communication and business between them, the hunters of Tailfeather, and the settlers in Idyllshire. However, given that his role model and mentor is the Warrior of Light, he comes to the conclusion that adventuring is all guts and glory. So Deftarm is offended when he's instead asked to clear wreckage instead of something more exciting like fighting monsters. You can either gently inform him that you've had worse requests or yell at him to pick up the damn rocks. Either way, Deftarm gets a reality check and agrees that he's fortunate to have work at all.
• Guild Wars 2: During one chapter of the Charr personal story (Blood Legion), your legionnaire is holding a grudge against you and assigns you to carry supplies back from a supply depot. Your sparring partner complains about the demeaning "cub duty", though your character is willing to go through with it.
• Rimworld: Colonists are frequently incapable of performing certain tasks due to their generated backstories. One of these is incapable of "dumb labor", which is a common trait for colonists with affluent, high-ranking, or noble backstories.
• Transformers: Cybertron Adventures: In the first mission of the Decepticon campaign, Megatron orders Starscream to report to Trypticon Station and make sure no orbital debris threatens it, to which Starscream protests, thinking he's above "grunt work," but Megatron intimidates him back in line.
• Two substories in Yakuza 4 has Shun Akiyama checking for this flaw with his Secret Test of Character. On two different occasions, separate women come to him desperate for a loan, and he challenges them to find a job within a few hours. One he fails, and though the woman protests that she "looked everywhere", Akiyama tells her that she could have gotten hired at a massage parlor in the red-light district (and she only needed to get hired to pass, not actually work), but didn't due to her pride. The second, however, he passes, as though the woman didn't get hired within the time limit, she proved willing to do anything, even asking to be allowed to clean toilets if that's what it took.

Web Animation

• Etra chan saw it!: Hiiragi is an arrogant law student who loves to brag about his educational status. He slacks off at his part-time job, with his excuse being that an educated man like him isn't suited for physical labor and that his boss should assign him more intellectual tasks. Unsurprisingly, he later gets fired after his antics get him in hot water.

Webcomics

• The Monstrous Duke's Adopted Daughter: To find a new high priest, the church holds tests to determine worthiness. The candidates are chosen from noble houses (though they used to allow commoners) and deny the use of servants, leading to several candidates quitting because they can't take the menial tasks anymore.

Web Videos

• Dragon Ball Abridged: After Future Trunks kills all of Frieza and King Cold's minions, King Cold complains that they have no one to fly the ship. When Frieza says that he can fly it, King Cold refuses to let him do it stating that "flying is for the help."

Western Animation

• Arcane: Caitlyn comes from an upper-crust family who disapproves of her decision to become an Enforcer and so use their influence to keep her from actually getting her hands dirty, not that it deters her.
• The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3: At the beginning of the episode "Recycled Koopa", Koopa tasks his kids with taking out the garbage. After Kootie Pie lies that she breaks a nail, she insists that someone as gorgeous as her shouldn't be handling garbage duty.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Being both a Small Name, Big Ego and a Lazy Bum, Master Shake whines whenever he's forced to get a job or even do household chores because he finds them beneath him, despite his stupidity and utter lack of talent. For example, his reaction to getting a job at a restaurant is to throw a tantrum.
  Shake: What the hell's this?! I told ya, fireman, astronaut, racecar driver, maybe bikini judge! And this is what I get? Food service? Are you kidding me? This is third world! And I'm from the first! I'm number one baby!
  Frylock: I'm amazed they even hired you.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Zuko regards virtually everything other than being treated as royalty (despite being exiled) is beneath him. He later accepts a job as a waiter in his uncle's tea house.
• Josie and the Pussycats are traveling by tramp steamer to Pago Pago. Since Alex didn't have enough to cover the fare for six, the troupe is compelled to do shipboard work to cover the shortfall. The girls do galley work and start with a sink full of dirty dishes. "What do you want to do, Alexandra? Wash or dry" asks Valerie. Being a thorny and standoffish Cabot, Alexandra's reply is, "Neither. I'll supervise."
• South Park: In the episode "White People Renovating Houses", Darryl Weathers is given a job for the Marshes which is basically him acting as a human Alexa. The irony being his whole schtick is that of the stereotypical redneck who complains about others like immigrants or machines taking jobs from people like him. Subverted, as it's revealed later in the episode he was mad about something else.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Squidward really hates his job as a cashier at the Krusty Krab and considers himself a talented clarinet player (though to anyone who knows his prowess on the instrument best, you might also know that's not the case).
• Thomas & Friends:
  • The bigger tender engines of Sodor, such as Gordon, Henry, and James insist that certain jobs are beneath them, such as having to shunt their own coaches for their passenger trains or having to pull freight trains. This becomes a plot point in "Trouble in the Shed"; when Thomas leaves the shunting yard to run his own branch line, Sir Topham Hatt makes the bigger engines shunt their own coaches until he can find another small tank engine like Thomas to do so. In response, the bigger engines decide to go on strike, leaving Edward to tackle their work by himself. Sir Topham Hatt is inspired to get a new tank engine called Percy to help Edward with the extra work while the bigger engines are punished for going on strike. The bigger engines quickly grow bored of doing nothing and promise to work hard again, no matter what the job if Sir Topham Hatt lets them out.
  • Recurrer Daisy the Diesel Railcar similarly considers herself above pulling freight, being a passenger carrier by design. When first asked to take a single milk wagon along on her route, she flatly refuses and says, "Percy can do it!"

Real Life

• In the Ancien Régime France, nobles were banned from doing manual labor^note however, they could work their lands or the King's or engaging to trade and had to ask the king the suspension of their privileges for doing so.
• Reflecting on the first (British) version of Hell's Kitchen, Gordon Ramsay was clear that he would never, ever repeat the British format with completely inexperienced, egotistic, and entitled people, as it reflected badly on his own professional skills and he was concerned at the damage it could potentially do to his reputation. He singled out a career politician with a sense of entitlement a mile wide — who refused to do what she considered as "menial work" (basic prep — she argued other people should be doing this for her) for special bile.
• In Ancient Sparta, full citizens were not allowed to farm or trade, with their designated role being that of a warrior. Instead, agricultural labor was done by the helots — slaves that outnumbered the citizens, while trading was done by the Perioikoi — second-class citizens.
• This is a recurring problem in many Gulf countries where generous subsidies from oil wealth has allowed many citizens to live comfortably in public sector jobs. This relative comforts fostered an attitude of viewing menial work such as construction and household work as undesirable, facilitating the use of cheap imported labour from southeast Asia who are often looked down upon and abused. As citizenship in the Gulf is gated, with practical absence of naturalisation, the balooning populations of migrant workers began to surpass the number of citizenry, leaving many Gulf leaders concerned about a "demographic imbalance". In combination with wanting to be prepared for Post-Peak Oil, many countries have been trying to get their citizens to change their attitudes towards menial work. Such attempts, however, have yielded mixed results so far.

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