What's Your Job IRL?

Amen, brother. Hope your client makes it...

 

Not just dark...emergency room dark.

I have a vise (it's in the garage). It's only been used for woodwork, not mutilation.

That raises a tangential topic--avocations (unpaid but at times extreme work) & what they do for/and to people. For me, woodwork, typically of rather large built-in stuff of my own design, was all-consuming, fanatical, literally self-destructive (orthopedic stuff). Why all the compulsive effort? Not really sure....I felt compelled. I do know if anyone had paid me $$ to do woodwork, my head & creativity would've imploded in short order. Some things just aren't for sale.

Another fanatical avocation is writing. That actually is for sale (it's how I make my living). Still, compulsion plays a part in writing, at least for me: over a typical year's time, I write as least as much for free as for pay.

These things all join in the realization that some of us (many, I suspect) do work for individual reasons far removed from monetary compensation. Behavioral psychology has a term, "consummatory behavior," describing behaviors we engage in for no reason other than experience of doing so: we "consume" these behaviors.

 

Damnit, Wilson, you're one of the people in the world that makes a difference. Maybe sometimes you think you didn't, but you still tried.

I have a lot of respect for people like you.

 

Was: IT Technical Support

Now: IT Technical Trainer

Just started new job a couple of weeks ago working for the same healthcare company. Kind of a promotion of sorts. More money and no taking calls all day. I just get to teach people how to use software and now working from home permanently!

 

I'm with this. I've been a musician for most of my life. I'm not particularly disciplined but if you enjoy it enough to put in some time and effort, even in a meandering way, it seems that people notice. Over the years people have often raved to me about how talented I am and that with all of the time I put in, I should do something with that. I don't want to be a working musician. I hate the idea of having my livelihood tethered to my creative output. It is an extension of my love for music. Growing up I loved guitar driven music, so I picked up guitar, just to enjoy it that much more. I don't want to reduce something that I love and has at times kept me alive in ways jobs can't, to something that gets me by monetarily. Most people around me just don't seem to get that. They think I'm crazy, or scared, or just stuck-up. I have a ton of respect for successful musicians. They know what they do better than me. I don't have it in me to reach for all of the extra things you have to do to make the money. I don't want it or need it in my life.

I think those people are the crazy ones, believing that one can/should only be motivated to work for material gain and that somehow anything else is a waste of time. I've been asked where my book is for a long time. I joke that I've already written it and moved on... the implication being that it has already fulfilled its purpose simply by being written. I don't need others to see or reciprocate value.

So writing is another one. And I also play with saws, drill presses and routers. I practice photography. At this point I have a decently wide skill pool, most of which pays zero dollars. Put money in front of those things and I just lose the will. I don't think I could actually perform well at those things with money involved. It's not the same. I am no longer choosing it because something within me calls me to, but rather because something beyond me does. Of course, the former is always going to be more fulfilling. To mix them almost feels like self-bastardization.

It's funny, too... any job I've enjoyed, I didn't think about the money. I like working with my hands and being sort of buried in a problem. So I work in HVAC and currently serve as a maintenance man for a rather large, old facility. No two days are the same. I spend a lot of time working at problems that are physically and mentally demanding. The pay and benefits are such that while I can't live extravagantly, I worry for little. And that's kind of where I like to be. At this job I am able to focus on the work simply for the sake of doing it. I put in a lot of effort, and there is a lot of satisfaction. People there often compliment me for being level and working hard. What they don't realize is that I'm not an especially strong or hardworking person... I just know where my bread and butter is when it comes to what motivates me as much as or more than money. Plenty of other jobs where I was the lazy asshole. And the work was easier! What I'm doing now would be a nightmare grind to people who outperformed me there.

Even with that, repair is something I do anyway. I've always been fixing things, taking them apart, sizing up how things around me work. On my own time. For friends. Just kind of thinking to myself that I've found an interesting problem to dig into. It's something I'll do just to do. So I don't have to worry about working hard at my job. Whether I'm there or not I'm going to be doing that.

So I suppose there is some nuance to it. It is apparent to me that it is possible to mix effort for monetary gain with effort for its own sake. I think everybody has things like that. But we're sort of conditioned not to focus on those things. Our value and the value of our lives is largely monetary. And with money being so hard to get, I think most people figure you should save your efforts for that. The best compromise is a healthy marriage of the two.

Money can't buy happiness - it only eases burdens. And by easing those burdens you become freer to devote more of your efforts to things that make you happy. I think people actually do understand this. People want to make a lot of money, hoping to get to the point where any work that they put in is all for them. I think the misery comes from giving up all of your effort for that, without ever really getting to the good part. Caught-up in the whirl of working life, people forget that the value and meaning in your effort is not strictly monetary.

 

IMO we're really getting somewhere in this thread. I say that because "work" is one of those constructs (along with "money," "success," and "love") that contains seemingly infinite depth & complexity.

(all that complicated human stuff)

 

I think I've already said that there was never a day when, if presented with a private income, I wouldn't have walked out of work never to return. That doesn't mean that there was never a day when I didn't enjoy the job.

I've done my story before, but briefly...

Career 1: I fell in to a job (where others needed stuff like degrees in art history) in a greeting-card publishing company, working in the publishing department. Pleasant commodity, fun, interesting people to work with. Totally eccentric company where, if you fitted, you fitted.

Career 2: Self-taught systems management. I learnt Unix easily, because I found it fascinating. I enjoyed a lot of the work.

So yeah... Work, no thanks. But did I enjoy it? Oh sure, some days were great.

But there's this. And I have to admit that it can bring a tear to my eye. After reading @Wilson's post yesterday, I happened to read an article by a front-line emergency nurse. And I honestly wish that I hadn't been a bloody lazy kid, and had worked, and had done medicine. Because some people make a difference, and my working life... well, not much.

Do I have regrets? Oh sure. I miss-managed several things in life, and I might not even have finished that yet! Hey, next time round...

 

Quite amazing. My current job is unpleasant but super stable. My plan was to leave in 2021 because management there is frustratingly incapable of planning.

I have already been invited back at my previous two jobs. One of them is also super stable. I am lucky I have options, that is certain.

 

The seasons rotate with juberous indifference like a printing press fingering its mark along a rotary wheel caked in decades of organic dereliction. Summer's index ultimately clanks into place and the drunken echo of its impression chanters through the gaping maw of squealing pilgrims that flood this commercial conventicle. Wild breasts swing with abandonment beneath a tormented black sun that longs to see the skin bubble and retch away. And here I sit outside of it, sandwiched between a mountain of dubious gas tanks and a smoldering ashtray. The stench of the building's grease trap rising beneath my feet from a manhole cover like the vapors of a punctured colon. Dozens of flies whirl around my body in their native dance of defecation. I have ten minutes to enjoy this repose in purgatory from the greater horror happening inside. As I flail away the flies the cool confection in my hand reads "escape into paradise" and I laugh.

 

WAIT! I've worked for a publisher. We had our own printing works, litho and letterpress, and no, printing presses don't do that.

I liked the bit about wild breasts, though.

 

Imagine this:



But still chugging along from the early 80's.

 

I'd rather not. It's nothing like any printing press I've ever seen. And some of ours had been chugging for a lot more than forty years. One or two of the printers had been too.

Anyway, I'm too busy. Imagining the wild breasts swinging with abandonment.

 

When flies are shitting on you--it's time to move.

 

Lest we forget the males in that imagery.

 

More like "Taste of Malaria in the Tropics"

The "wild beasts swinging with abandonment" prompts a dark memory of one of the worst jobs I ever had...

Background: My twin brother & I were 15, not able to drive, needing summer income badly. So we got jobs as dishwashers at a vividly in-decline resort hotel/bar/restaurant in a nearby town. We hitch-hiked to this dump everyday. The place was actively decaying at this point: prostitutes sometimes worked the rooms; NYC "businessmen" dumped their wives there so they could go further upstate to boink their girlfriends; and many of the "staff" were drug addicts, alcoholics, recently paroled jailbirds.

It was a typical day: high summer, high-90s, kitchen not air-conditioned, no fans other than those on the ovens. My job was hauling 5 gallon buckets of slops to a dumpster 75 yards from the kitchen (so the stink & vermin would [hopefully] not reach the rooms on upper floors). Walking through the sun-blasted backyard, junked cars & garbage strewn everywhere, I heard a high-pitched animal sound from under one of the junkers. It sounded bad, so I put down the bucket & got down on hands and knees to see what was causing it. The ruckus came from 2 cats f'ing under the car (the bottom one was not happy).

I remember standing up, dizzy with heat & the sudden realization that every single thing about the scene was wrong, inhuman--things no one should see, hell masquerading as a decaying resort. I was anchored in the morass by the stinking evil of it all. Went back inside in time to see the sous chef du jour (recently arrived from skid-row on a bus -- bum-dump every Saturday) explode into violent D.T.s, flopping around in a wild seizure on the floor. Ambulance called...more slops to dump.

I'd rather not have this memory, but that's not things work...

 

Bottle flies. Carrion nearby?
Pestilence & ecological storytelling; this thread's trending miasmal.

 

Points for "miasmal" (terrific word)

 

The psychic horror, to me, isn't in the fly-swarmed drink as much as the photo above it. This scene is everywhere, it has a feeling, everyone knows it, but not everyone has inhabited a space like this for an extended time. I once did as a teen. First summer job. There's a downward pressure that gets exerted on you in places like this - gas stations, quick stops, dying grocers or the chains that replace them - that are built to be temporary for everyone else except the workers they manage to keep. Even for them, this social and economic peristalsis rotates you out, for one reason or another, as I saw with the adult coworkers I had over the seasons.

The highway town details evoke the same feeling, amenable to similar community-as-corpus analogy, with probably similar effects & pressures for the inhabitants. I grew up in a place like this, too. Escaped by luck. May you find the same, @YEEEEGZ.

 

I think the whole point is we can never fully escape these places. We're trapped in them forever, courtesy of the amber known as "memory."