Basic Trope: A character is stated to have some kind of job, but the audience rarely, if ever, witnesses it.
- Straight: Alice is mentioned as being a high-profile attorney, but the audience only ever sees her working when the weekly shenanigan calls for it, which is rarely.
- Exaggerated:
- No one knows what Alice's job actually is, or how she can afford the Big Fancy House she lives in.
- Alice is one of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.
- Downplayed: Alice is occasionally seen at the end of her workday, finishing up some paperwork. She will sometimes reference her job, but only in vague terms.
- Justified:
- Alice is a casual worker.
- Alice keeps her professional and personal lives separate because Being Personal Isn't Professional.
- Alice does the majority of her work from home, and only occasionally goes into her firm's office.
- Alice has a sinecure job: she gets a title and a paycheck, but doesn't actually do work.
- Inverted:
- Ostensibly, Alice has a personal and social life outside of work, but she only ever seems to be at work.
- Alice is sometimes shown working, despite supposedly being unemployed.
- Subverted: Alice turns out to have lost her job for repeatedly neglecting her duties.
- Double Subverted: Alice begs for her job back, and continues to neglect her duties without consequence.
- Parodied: Alice literally works for only one hour of each week.
- Zig Zagged: New Job as the Plot Demands
- Averted:
- All employed characters spend a realistic amount of time working.
- Every character in the work is unemployed.
- The characters are living off of inheritances or trust funds and don't need full time jobs.
- Enforced: Being a lawyer actually isn't as exciting as Hollywood Law would have the audience believe; most of the day involves large volumes of paperwork and sifting through dusty old books. Since no one would want to watch that, the focus is placed on more exciting aspects of Alice's life.
- Lampshaded: "I probably should be at work, but what the heck...you only live once!"
- Invoked:
- Alice's law firm allows her to do the paperwork from home, and come to the office less often. So she has all this extra time to spend with her family, or do whatever she likes.
- Alice knows she isn't monitored very much, so she takes time out of her workday to do non-work-related things like shopping.
- Exploited: This is a way of having Alice Kicked Upstairs.
- Defied: Alice finds the home environment too distracting to do her work in, so she goes to the office to get her work done.
- Alice is caught doing non-work-related stuff on company time, or taking excessive time off/extended breaks, and she is fired for it.
- Alice chooses to work on a per-diem schedule, because it allows her greater flexibility.
- Discussed: "What? You thought I had a job? How could I go on all these adventures and be employed?"
- Conversed: "What does Alice do again?" "Who cares? It's not worth watching on TV!"
- Untwisted: In one episode, Alice is seen at a computer in a generic office setting, but it turns out that she is doing something unrelated to work.
- Implied: Every time Alice hangs out with her friends she complains how difficult her work is, how exhausted she is, and how glad she is to be finished. Given that Alice tends to show up at odd hours on short notice it's possible she is not being entirely honest about how busy she is.
You should probably report back to One-Hour Work Week, otherwise the boss might forget you're here.
