“Dead End Job At The Dead Letter Office” is an early Modest Mouse demo remastered for “Live From Nowhere Near You, Vol. II”.

The title is a reference to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall Street”. The narrator is a lawyer and he talks about the eccentricities of clerks he has had, saying that the strangest one was Bartleby: a man who worked really hard but then spontaneously just stopped doing anything, responding to every request with “I would prefer not to”. The lawyer keeps him around for a while just out of curiosity but then fires him and he ends up in jail for vagrancy where he dies because he preferred not to even eat. The narrator learns that Bartleby’s former position was that he was a clerk at a dead letter office, and he concludes that this was probably the cause of Bartleby’s despair.

The whole story is very Modest Mouse™ in its themes of overall depression and specific despair at automated and monotonous modern life.