About work

I’m not perfect, and even if I was you’d find something wrong with me.

Because it’s the human condition to eventually designate something as the intolerable problem. That’s the ‘job complaint syndrome’, also; no matter what job you have you eventually settle on something as the biggest aggravation, and that’s your complaint. You find the squeaky wheel in whatever your situation. So there’s always something to complain about, and the same thing happens in a relationship. It’s just *not* human nature to say that everything’s OK, and leave it at that. That’s uncomfortable.

And it's an odd thing is how trivial some of the work problems can be, especially in hindsight, but they are major triggers at the time nonetheless. Compare these two examples from my experience…

When I worked on banking software if our system went down in a live bank production environment, and I was on call, most of our management would be aware of the problem immmediately through a series of phone calls, and the bank executives would mostly all be aware they had trouble, and their on-call staff would be heading in to work in the middle of the night…all waiting to hear what I found and how I fixed it. On the other hand, as a dishwasher, if one more person had the French onion soup tonight I’m going through the roof! Y’know?

Just depends on where you are.

Another thing about jobs is the Repeat Cycle. How long does it take before you’ve done everything once, and now you’re on repeat? A job like dishwashing, you get the basics in 15-20 minutes, and at the end of the night you get the one-time, end-of-the-night tasks, and that’s it. On a construction job you’ve got all the phases of house construction to go through, and that takes months anyway, and not every house is the same, so you could easily go a year before you really feel like you’ve seen everything once. It could be a few years before it feels repetitive. Then, something like programming on software that costs over $1M *never* got repetitive because of the size and complexity of what we worked on. Always a new twist, whether creating or maintaining code. Probably any job where you have “clients” will never repeat…but that’s good. Those are the jobs you can stay with.

I should acknowledge that while building houses is largely repetitive, there are clients to keep you hopping, and technology and materials evolve constantly so you’re always learning. No offense.