It’s Labor Day weekend, a good time to think about work (note: I said ‘think about’ it, not actually do it — party on, amigos). I’ve been fortunate: most of my working life has been spent in a job I really liked, and did pretty well at — teaching at the university level. Most of my other jobs have centered on writing, which I also really like, no matter the task. Nonetheless, I’ve had a few jobs that qualified for a major suckage award.
Certainly, all jobs suck some of the time (e.g., sudden deadlines, pointless meetings, impossible clients/students) and all jobs have sucky aspects (e.g., minimal-to-zero raises, commuting time, paperwork sinkholes). In addition, each of us has a mental list of jobs-to-be-avoided-at-all-costs-even-if-it means-hawking-squeegee-services-at-intersections. For me, that would include anything related to the health field (blood makes me faint, as do shots), mass child care (love my own child; don’t love random children in big snotty groups), or anything to do with truly hard labor (my muscle mass is lower than the growth rate of my IRA, so I would suck abysmally at brawny employment, which therefore would be sucky employment pour moi).
My work history, in sum, has been quite privileged. I never had to take a job I knew I’d detest or at which I’d be overwhelmingly likely to fail. But I have held two jobs that were absolutely awful, and I was absolutely awful at.
Travel Agent Travails
As a very young military wife in Okinawa, I became bored quickly with officers’ wives’ tea parties and general neocolonial lassitude. I thus decided to get a job ‘off-post’ (not a decision enthusiastically endorsed by the military brass, but it was the Vietnam era, so who cared). Because my father had founded an incentive travel agency, I applied to American Express Travel (Okinawa) to be a travel agent. I was immediately hired, as I was not Japanese/Okinawan, and it was thought that I’d interact better with the military wives who were the agency’s main clientele.
What a disaster. Since I couldn’t speak decent or even fractured-but-understandable Japanese, it was very hard to book flights on the airlines serving the island. I had to depend on my lower-paid and understandably resentful Okinawan colleagues to do just about anything . . . or I would run a couple of blocks to the local airline office and try to explain (or draw, or point out in the IATA catalogue) what a client wanted to book. Result? Unhappy clients, unhappy co-workers, unhappy boss, unhappy me. I considered quitting, but quitting a job was something that never had occurred to me. Of course it hadn’t: I’d had decent part-time or summer jobs as a teenager (at a book store, at a radio station), and I hadn’t needed to quit them because they were self-limiting (hello college!).
I did quit this job, but not for the above reasons. I got tired of, and irritated at, my clients. The officers’ wives — and senior non-coms’ wives — swooping into the office ordered me around as if I were . . . an Okinawan! To be fair to my much younger self, my umbrage was not ‘racially’ motivated as much as it was class motivated. My parents were not even approaching rich, but as educated adults in a small Wisconsin town, they were socially accepted, even sought after. And I’d assimilated enough of military rank protocol to bridle at women whose husbands held lower ranks than mine barking commands at me or berating me as if I was their maid. (I hope that being upset at the way they ignored my extremely capable and linguistically talented co-workers was part of my malaise, but I can't -- after all this time -- be sure that it was, to my discredit.)
I’m not proud of the reasons why I quit, but I’m glad that I did. I soon got a much more congenial job as editor/writer/art director of a local weekly magazine . . . and I learned that one can resign from a job without the world coming to an end.
Tax Scut
I still don’t understand what motivated me to ASK for tax-season work at a friend’s accounting firm. Background: my mother had just died, I had previously taken early retirement from the professoriat in order to help care for her, and I was at loose ends. So I guess this request made sense at the time.
But whoa — how eye-opening! For eight dollars an hour, I assembled forms, addressed envelopes, called clients, entered data, answered phones (badly, as I couldn’t ever figure out that office’s phone system), ignored suppurating paper cuts, filed client folders, and never got any feedback except that I stapled things somewhat sloppily. After putting in my time, I’d return home physically exhausted (yes, I know this is not hard labor, but it’s a lot of hours on your feet doing repetitive tasks) and mentally numbed. Hours at work, and nothing, NOTHING, interesting had happened. Even when I tried to point out a potential problem or anomaly in a file I was assembling, I was dismissed (occasionally, I caught an actual accounting error — this would be corrected silently, and my eagle-eyed-ness was never acknowledged). Even more so when I tried to suggest how a task could be performed more efficiently. I was a tax scut, nothing more. (And yes, I can understand why my attempts at ‘professional relevance’ were ignored — the firm had hired a scut, not an unasked-for and probably unqualified and no-doubt irritating self-styled problem solver.)
What struck me like an IRS audit summons was that jobs like this — bottom-level ‘white collar jobs’ — are soul-suckers. The pay is awful, the respect is non-existent, the opportunities for career growth are slim-to-none. I was used to decades of pretty much being able to design and implement my own professional life. Many (maybe most) people, I learned at an age (that would be: older) when the lesson really hit home, do not. Their jobs suck.
So on this labor day, I salute all my still-working friends and those who are advocating better conditions (wages, hours, benefits, unions) for working Americans. My job history is not typical, I know. But it is varied enough, even given my privileges and opportunities, to be able to say that some jobs truly suck. I fear that there seems to be inadequate political will to change, or at least modify, some modifiable working conditions for jobs ranging from professional to 'unskilled.' I sincerely hope I’m mistaken.
Happy Labor Day!
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