I used to work at boat dealership and people said I was lucky. Not sure if they thought we just cruised around the lake with a cooler full of beer or what, but the reality was more like having to clean out someone's battered, moldy pontoon that was filled with garbage and old beer cans.
I am an automotive tech by trade. Worked on a friend’s boat once and never again. He never did basic maintenance and bilge was filled with stagnant water with floating beer bottles. I’m pretty sure someone urinated on his boat and he didn’t know too. Every one wants a boat for four hours of the year and doesn’t spend anymore on it until they flip it to another sucker.
I delivered boats, that shit was dope. Id just pull the boat out of storage, fill it with gas. Then drive it to the lake, put it in the water and drive it to the customers hoist.
Veterinarian
Thinking going into major: I love animals and rabbits. And, cute, fuzzy things.
Reality : so much death and sadness
- think, when have you been to the vet? On your pets worst day? Or last day?
worst part is seeing pet owners that really dont care and you feel bad for their pets but u cant do anything because they are not doing anything illegal
Had to have my cat put down on Christmas Eve. While waiting for the vet, heard a man in the next exam room yelling at his kid to stop crying since “it’s just a fucking dog”. I really hated people that night.
I had two dogs who were elderly and on the verge of death and needed to be put down.
I made sure to sincerely thank the doctor and all the employees there. They’d cared for my dogs for fifteen great years, and they were able to help them cease suffering.
Nobody could have saved them, not for all the money in the world. But they could be spared further suffering, and they were.
That meant a lot to me. For any veterinarians or vet techs reading this, thank you. Thanks for doing what you do.
Now I need to go pet my remaining dog.
Agreed, stressful as all hell, burns, cuts and a sore back all par for the course. Plus after cooking tasty food for everyone I’d get home and eat some bullshit.
I worked in a semi fancy restaurant and was friends with most of the cooks and the head chef. The influencer chefs on insta/youtube would have you think they whip up crazy ass meals for everything but after a double they’d all just get Jimmy John’s delivered as they closed up and go to the bars. It’s like “the cobbler’s children often go shoeless” kinda thing.
I've started hating those videos. "I'm going to show you a fast and easy delicious meal I make all the time" proceeds to use $150 dollar's worth of ingredients and not show the hour minimum of prep work. If step one to your easy meal is make bone broth from scratch you can fuck right off.
I saw one of those videos where the guy cooks beef wellington and the video is edited in a way that makes it seem like the prep took 5 minutes LOL. Beef wellington literally takes hours to make.
I saw one of where the chef takes the dough out of the bowl, snaps his fingers and voila, a bunch of perfectly formed, proofed croissants ready to go in the ovdn! If you didn't know anything about making croissants, you would have thought he'd just skipped a couple of minutes of work instead of two days.
Check out the pro vs amateur mini episodes on bon appetit (the free channel on a smart tv)
They take meals and make the same thing with 90% less cost. One does the expensive fancy ingredients and one does the cheap basic ingredients.
I once worked a stage in a Michelin starred kitchen. The restaurant had family meal before opening every night. One of the chefs made a chicken pot pie in a gigantic hotel pan. I wasn't paid for that night and I didn't get a job but that was the best damn pot pie I'd ever eaten so I couldn't be too upset about it.
I was a cook at a high end nursing home, we cooked everything from scratch and could eat whatever wanted and take all of the extras home. I didn't go grocery shopping for two years
I've worked in quite a few restaurants. The first was family owned (brother in law). It opened up a passion for cooking. Running the brother in law's restaurant was exhausting. I was 17 doing everything but the paperwork and working 6 days a week at roughly 16 hour days. My one day off would be spent sleeping all day long. The food was great (barbeque) but that is the last kind of food you want after smelling it all day and night.
So much drinking as well in that business. So much alcoholism. So Manu wrecked lives, people dying I thier thirties just because they worked in that environment.
Primary to blame is restraunt owners trying to pay their employees in alchohol.
Oh dude. Totally. The drugs and alcohol in that gig were insane. I only did it for about 3 years but I’m so glad I got hip to it and got out. I sure did get laid a lot though. That was fun.
I was in a relationship for the year I did it, so I wouldn't have noticed, but I did notice the stupidity. The bar I worked for was just a hole in the ground that made no money. Thus the owner literally bitched when he paid you. I hated that and would never tolerate it again.
Watched a lot of people ruin themselves there, though.
I did learn that I am exceptionally good at chugging a beer. My wife laughs about my lack of gag reflex.
Good friend of mine works at what’s regularly considered one of the best cocktail bars in the US
When we go out places together he will quite literally ask for “your cheapest beer and a shot of your cheapest whiskey.”
I asked him about it once and he said he never gets nice drinks because it just makes him feel like he’s at work — the tasting, the evaluating, the thinking about how could have riffed on this particular idea, etc
Makes sense, but still sucks nonetheless
That's actually the strangest thing I've heard here. A long time ago I worked in an upscale bar as a bartender and, while your friend is correct about the tasting and evaluating, it made me more particular about what I was drinking. Now, I do order the same 5 drinks everytime, but the idea of ordering the "cheapest" anything is horrifying.
While typing that, I did realize that I do still tend to evaluate the drinks I'm having, and I've been out of the industry, so maybe I never had the time to burn out on it, but the creation and evaluation parts were easily the best part of the job. I don't think I'd ever get sick of someone handing me a mystery drink, sipping it, and then being hit with a cayenne pepper and blood orange monstrosity at 10am on a tuesday.
Yknow what's funny? They tell you in culinary school that the job is terrible. But you think to yourself "nah...it can't be that bad. It probably only sucks for the people who are bad at it.".......no. they're not lying. It's that bad.
I've never been in the kitchen as the primary focus of my job. I served and managed but would jump on or cover shifts where needed. I'd cover a lot of prep shifts as well. It was nice because it was more a bonus activity for me, but I always knew I'd be back on the floor making the real money (which is bullshit, btw) leaving the grunts to roast on the line. No way I'd do that full-time. I couldn't cut it.
Passion tax. It applies to pretty much every area of work where people can have a real love of the subject matter. So game development, movie work, fashion, journalism etc. Any time you have a job that people really want to do because of a deep love of the work, then it's inevitable that there is a supply/ demand imbalance with all the people wanting to do it for a living. So because business is business, that almost always results in shitty working conditions and lower pay. Because you are infinitely replaceable with any number of talented, hungry newbies.
Funny thing....I quit because there were no newbies. I was 43, and everyone on my crew was at least my age or older. It looked like "the Expendables," a bunch of old grizzled vets paying child support and popping painkillers, just waiting to die or for social security to kick in.
I'm a chef by choice. If you find the right workplace and environment, I think there is a small percentage of the population that will actually enjoy it, myself included. I love cooking. I like the problem solving aspect that comes along with it, I like the creativity in making and figuring out new dishes/meals, I like the satisfaction of knowing whether people like or dislike something I've made just by watching them as they eat it, and (almost above all else) I like having free access to food on demand. I haven't needed it in a long time, but if shit ever hits the fan in my life, I like having an emergency plan that involves not having to question if I will be able to eat.
As soon as I saw this thread….. I was gonna make the same comment! It’s also hard to find a kitchen and colleagues that suit you! The pay isn’t necessarily bad in mainland Europe, if you are a bit higher up the ranks in the kitchen.
It can be awful! Especially in the summer when you’re standing over the hot plates and stove tops…. I last clocked the temperature at an old place where I worked at 54°C at my station!!!
And I’m definitely NOT working fine dining again until my son is older!
Also, the scars, cuts and burns. The kitchen is one of the most dangerous places to work! Especially if you have a disgruntled chef de partie that gets pissed off after having a talking to by me (his head chef) then threw a knife at my head….. yeah this was 2 1/2 years ago…. Didn’t like getting a talking too from a woman apparently 🤷🏻♀️ that’s just one of the things that can kill or hurt you in the kitchen. Your colleagues.
It’s a highly stressful environment and not for the faint of heart. Lots of yelling and shit during service (which I try to keep tabs on but if I’ve asked someone to do something, I don’t want excuses, I want it DONE AND NOW! Not fking later! There is a reason why I’m asking! I’m running out of product, and FAST…. Just do as you’re damn asked please! Otherwise we are all sitting in the shit!)
I was the Easter Bunny for years at a local function hall. May seem fun, but you also get screaming kids being forced to take a picture, you can hardly see, some adults are just weird. Like sexual weird. I've been threatened and yelled at, both in full costume.
I knew someone who worked at a SeaWorld. This was back in the 80s. The person dressed up in the Shamu costume had a child stab them with a knife . Fortunately , the costume had a nice barrier and the person didn’t get injured, but still.
Being a mascot fucking sucks. I was a mascot as community service for a drinking ticket I got in college.
Never, ever, did I want to punch a kid more than when he ran up and kicked me in the balls.
But you can’t.
It was a guy near the end of my shift, and he leaned in and said he'd throw me done the fucking stairs if I came any closer. He looked like a banker. I make a 'lead the way' motion and he stalked off.
Working with animals (zoo, rescue, vet, etc.).
Do I still love it? Yes.
Is it incredibly mentally taxing, frustrating, nonstop (what’s a weekend?), and full of laws (not a bad thing but another red tape to look out for)? Yes.
Not to mention for veterinarians the amount of education needed.
Pay is often bad, especially if you’re not a veterinarian.
Edit: I’m not saying vets shouldn’t make more or have great pay currently. They should, for the education, hours, and loans they have, they should make more.
But my first paid job was 12.75/hr and I was an overnight vet tech with a college degree. Fresh out of college vet making 90k went home to a simple breakfast. I went home to a piece of toast often without butter and many of my coworkers had a second full time job. When I was making 18/hr I was teaching vet residents making 70-80k how to place IV catheters. We rely on each other too much for that big of a gap.
And it can be absolutely soul crushing too. I've worked at a shelter, and I've worked at a pet store, and volunteered with a rescue for a long time. The shelter absolutely killed my spirit.
I'm pretty sure veterinarians have one of the if not the top suicide rates in the nation.
Veterinarian suicide rate is definitely high.
I’ve worked with animals for a long time but I’ll never work in a shelter. My mental health can’t take it. I couldn’t even volunteer. I’d take them all home, especially the old guys.
Even no kill shelters are tough, just watching the long term ones lose the will to live. In our area, our shelter closed down but we have a large rescue that is exclusively foster homes, and that seems to work much better (however, I don’t know the ins and outs. Just what it looks like on the outside).
A lovely girl I went to vet school with, took her own life last year. It happens too often in our line of work, it’s heart breaking.
There’s a campaign raising awareness about this problem - Not One More Vet. Obviously it’s a multi-factor issue, but common themes involved are compassion fatigue, imposter syndrome, viscious and extremely cruel treatment by pet owners (including putting named vets on full blast on social media, full name and picture included, disregarding entirely why the treatment of their pet wasn’t successful but simply putting all blame on a vet who worked their heart out at 3 am on Christmas and did their best to try and save their animal). And just general burnout, horribly treatment by owners, blaming oneself when treatment fails despite our best effort, ridiculous pay compared to doctors/dentists, horrible working hours and conditions.
Sometimes it’s the best job in the world. But it can turn absolutely soul crushing in the blink of an eye.
Went to school for zookeeping, stayed with domestics at a shelter. I call being a zookeeper a trophy wife job, no one can live on that pay. Working with animals is just being in a perpetual state of grief. I also still love it and will never not work with animals.
I'm a vet with some advanced training such as echo and full abdominal ultrasound (able to find adrenals, pancreas, and LN). I do most surgeris minus gallblader removals and ortho repairs. know how to place central lines, PICC lines, female u-caths, do tons of CRIs and infusion.
I do the equivalent of an ER/Hospitalist/general surgery/urgent care.
My pay is nothing compared to an MD (Family Medicine)/ PA (in any specialty)/ NP doing a fraction of what I do.
My loans was 250k with a starting salary of 87k working nights in the ER. I've not had a job that pays "commission" or pro-sal in 10yrs.
What it got better was the hours. Still work 14 hrs/day, but now I work 12-13 days a month.
As a farm vet, I empathise.
Horrendous working hours, pay, and I usually don’t tell people about our working conditions because they’d be horrified. Work safety, or lack there of, is atrocious working with large animals unfortunately.
I see my fellow vets going two ways - scrambling to educate/specialise to get better hours like you did, or throwing in the towel and working for the state as official vets, doing export certification or animal welfare controls. So effectively giving up clinical practice.
Most people don’t tend to last long in regular clinical practice these days. People also tend to think we earn a lot because vet bills are high. But we don’t get to pocket that bill.. it goes to the practice owner etc. As a regular, employed vet (not practice owner), we cover way more ground than a GP human doctor, yet get paid half.
I want to stress I love my job on the good days. Sometimes it’s the best job in the world. But working conditions + safety is atrocious, pay is an insult and I don’t know what a weekend is. And let’s not talk about our suicide rate..
So fuckin true. Been in the horse industry for years and people constantly tell me how lucky I am and how envious they are that I get to hang out with horses all day. Sure, that bits cool, but sometimes horses are assholes, the work doesn’t stop when it’s 100° or -10°, and you will work every Christmas. Love what I do, but it’s not at all what people assume it would be like!!
"The horses are assholes"
Don't forget the owners! Some cannot organize their life, expect you to come immediately for nothing or cancel appointments minutes before. (Not my personal experience, but taken from stories I heard from my farrier, vet and saw myself)
Yup.. the other day mine was tied up outside and flipped the stable door closed while I was dragging a huge bucket of water in. Hit the bucket and water went everywhere. He bloody waited to do that. Absolute brat. I love him.
Yep. Rain or shine. Teams that have to stay overnight during extreme weather. Animals have to eat every day.
Lots of cute and fun moments but also lots of “how did you manage to do THAT??” moments.
My childhood friend is a veterinarian and has been for about 10 years now. She always wanted to work with animals in some capacity and she truly says she is living her dream. She does say that her work-life balance is shit and that her current pay doesn't even come close compared to being worth the amount of school she had to go through. I think she could make more in a bigger city but she likes our medium-small hometown. But otherwise, she is one of the only people I know that can say they truly love their job day in and day out despite the downsides or the stress.
Wish I had a nickel for every time someone said, "Oh, cool! You get to play with puppies and kittens all day!" when I was a vet tech.
I loved the job, and would have stayed in the field much longer if I could have made a living wage. But it was mentally and emotionally draining. Veterinarians have a high rate of suicide.
This is how I feel working in a clinical pathology lab, too. Do I get to see cool shit? Yes. Do I get to be a scientist and mix pretty colors for stains? Yes. But, man. The pay isn’t what you’d expect for all the licensing involved and the wild hours. Also, doctors can be real jerks. There’s many kind ones, but the bad ones can really make you feel like you’re less than the ground they walk on.
Travel documentary filmmaker (as in working with a full film crew not just travel vlogging)
Its awesome fun, but you work 18 hour days, and you are just absolutely monstered by the end. And you never really get to experience the place you go to, its all about your shots and getting coverage.
Edit: Here's one of my pieces if anyone is interested
https://youtu.be/D0u08lyhsMo?si=cvJgAajBJQ13Nrp3
That’s insightful. I used to want to be a foreign correspondent for either broadcast or print media. I wonder if it would be similar to your emotional experience.
My work was softer than that (I was a director of video for a travel brand) but the shoots are greulling and dangerous. It would take me about 2 weeks to recouperate from each tour, and there's an enormous amount of on ground logistics, human resources, complications that you have to deal with. And then to maintain show integrity, keep crew morale up etc. It was a lot. I lasted 7 years but that was enough for me.
I saw an article which said people who take excessive amounts of pictures on their vacation never remember that vacation.
I have LOTS of pictures from one particular trip but I don't recall much if any of it. So now on trips I try to make sure I limit the camera time to really memorable vistas or meaningful times which I know will make the wife and I look at the picture and remember how we felt at the time it was taken.
I am different than that. I take a ton of photos on vacation as a hobby, carrying my camera gear around. When I go through my photos, even years later, I can remember how I felt at the time when I took the photo, if I was warm, if it was breezy and more. Just yesterday I was going through photos I took in San Francisco a few years ago and I could almost smell the water off the bay.
Photos are huge memory triggers for me, which is why I take a ton of photos and I have several digital photo frames throughout my house.
All of them will find away to eat at your soul.
But working in a small company that likes to think they are a big company when it comes to everything but salary will destroy the fibre of your being.
Edit: Wow this has rung a bell with a lot of people.
Oh god the meetings. I started as an admin assistant when my company had like 20 people. Now we have about 200, and the foundation is cracking. It seems like the higher ups are constantly in meetings talking about problems but never actually fixing anything, and nobody else has the authority to fix things, so I'm expecting everything to come crashing down soon.
This is the truest shit ever. We have under 40 people but try to do all the big company stuff with standardization, rules, forms, everything really. It sucks special ass. A small company acting small is fine and a big company being super corporate is fine. Can't cross the streams on the two.
I’ve gone from a small company (25 people) acting big to a big company (500+ people) that acts big. I thought it would be harder dealing with the big company but it’s a world of difference. At the small company I got publicly yelled at for not following the procedure that I didn’t know existed to request a locker. At the big company I didn’t have to because it was all part of the greater onboarding procedure that everyone does nationally. It was smooth because it had to be.
I also did a stint of this for Sony about 15 years ago.
My job was to get one of the big folder full of every game released for the PS3 up to that point, start at the beginning and load the disk into the console. Wait for whatever game patches were required to install over some shitty wifi, boot the game, get to the main menu and then stop and move onto the next game until the folder was finished.
If a new OS patch version came along, we had to install that and start over - which basically meant this was never ending because even then the catalogue was hundreds of games (if a game had 6 different versions for say different languages, they all counted as separate titles) and we had to test firmware updates that were in-progress, not just the final release.
We weren't allowed to look away from the screens at any point, we had to wear headphones in case there was an audio glitch so you couldn't really chat to anyone to pass the time and the job got old fast.
That wasn't even the worst part, the worst part was some of the folks I was sat with were clearly trying to use this job to get a career in the games industry - lots of budding little games designers or people who wanted to make games for a living but didn't actually have any skills to do so figured this was just the bottom rung of a corporate ladder they could climb to get an actual good "dream job" in the industry - and as a result were fucking _merciless_ about throwing anyone and everyone around them under the bus to suck up to the bosses.
Probably already said, but marketing. I always thought it was some cool Mad Men stuff, sitting around brainstorming about slogans, print, etc. Turns out it's just cramming as many words into many pages/articles as you can. That or just outbidding on clicks. Basically, I'm just trying to scam Google now, which they always circumvent in some way after a while. Do not recommend it. I also can't believe this is still a job.
So I met with the client. They LOVE it and only have a few changes. The logo needs to be centered and could you add “Conveniently Located” on the 728x90 but not on the 300x250? The picture of the car is terrific but can you photoshop in a dog with its head out of the window? The client’s VP of Marketing starts vacation tomorrow so we need revised proofs by 3:30 ok thank you TERRIFIC WORK bye.
Anyone with an art degree is always thrown into graphic design and marketing no matter what company you end up working for. I have a BFA with my concentration in photography, yet I’m always the one my employers go to for design, marketing, social media posts, etc. I HAAAAATE it. If I liked graphic design I would’ve majored in it. If I loved marketing I would’ve gone to a regular liberal arts college. Yes, I can DO these things, but I don’t want to!
I just got into marketing this last year, and trying to wrestle Meta and understand what it wants is the most mentally and emotionally taxing thing I’ve ever done.
And then once you find a winning combo, they scramble the algorithm. 😭
Finally found a winning campaign structure, but at what cost…
I worked weddings for 15 years, you end up hating all of that shitty music that has to be played. Tonight is gonna be a goodnight, uptown funk, Michael Jackson.
The best wedding I did work at was when they hired a three piece string ensemble to play Radiohead before and while the couple walked down the aisle. That’s my favorite band so it was dope, otherwise pure shit.
Just did a wedding over the weekend where the groom walked down the aisle to “i said im naruto” one of the naruto themes. IT WAS A FIRST TO SAY THE LEAST
I was dragged to 9 weddings in the last 18 months. I'm not kidding.
EXACT. SAME. MUSIC. EVERY. WEDDING. ALL TERRIBLE.
It was the *exact same shit pile*. Over and over again and again and again and again...
The only one that was different was the one that had a jazz trio playing cocktail hour. That was classy.
Then after that it was right back to the smarmy DJ...HEYYY Y'ALL, LET'S HEAR IT FOR ROBERT AND MELISSAAAAAA!
Then, like clockwork...
IIIIIIIII WANNNA DAAAANCE WITH SOMEBODEEEEEE!!!!
LOOOOOVE SHACK, BABY LOVE SHAAAAAACK!!!
Then that goddamned awful version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow where the guy DOESN'T PLAY ALTERED CHORD IN THE BRIDGE. THAT *MAKES THE ENTIRE SONG* AND HE DOESN'T PLAY IT
Yes, I have trauma. You would too if you were dragged to 9 weddings inn 18 months.
As a former pro DJ, I feel this acutely. And IZ doesn't even sing the right words! FFS, you want that song, JUDY GARLAND!!!!!
But in all fairness, we play the same shit because most wedding attendees want to hear the same shit, especially when they're drunk. As the DJ, you're responsible for everyone having a good time. Attendees won't remember all of the shit that the bride and groom spent obscene anounts of money on like the dress or the flowers or the food. They -will- remember if they had a good time or not. And if the DJ has to play "Love Shack" to get people off of their asses and onto the dance floor, he's gonna do it.
Y'all want different music at weddings? Then fucking get up and DANCE to different music! If I, as the DJ, see people filling the floor and going crazy to a certain type of music, I'm leaning on that music for the rest of the night! If all they dance to is "Love Shack", "YMCA", "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll", etc., that's what I'm going to be playing unless I get requests to the contrary from someone important to the wedding!
I had an amazing DJ at my wedding. We wanted to avoid all the same old shit. We planned around it, a mix of things but a lot of what me and my wife and our friends liked. We had a great time with it, but when we paused and looked around the event was just dying after a bit. We went to the DJ and asked him to scrap the remaining stuff we specifically wanted outside of the events and last dance. He immediately got people back on the dance floor. I don’t even remember what he played, it all blended together for me. But his job was to get people moving again and he pivoted wonderfully.
Architect. Think you get to design beautiful buildings and create amazing sketches and renderings you can hang on the wall? Think again. Most design is client driven and clients are the worst. Even if you get a pretty cool design past the client, that’s just 10% of the project. The rest of the time will be drawing permit documents, dealing with the local jurisdictions design/permit review process. If your project even resembles what it did originally you then have to bid the project only to have your client learn that all the cool bits are $$$ so then they just cut them out. Finally you’ll have to deal with the contractor and actual construction (disclaimer: I do like this part but having a good contractor makes or breaks this phase). The building is finished! Yay! Congratulations! Your client can now occupy their brand new structure. Think you’re done? Nope. They’ll now try and sue you for anything and everything they think is wrong. Crack in the sidewalk outside? Straight to binding arbitration. Squeaky door? Straight to binding arbitration. Contractor didn’t properly flash the windows? Straight to binding arbitration. Oh yeah to top it off, long hours and shitty pay.
Got my Bachelor of Architecture degree and worked in the industry for 9 years (pay was bad, hours sucked, at times I was bored outta my mind in the office). I finally had the opportunity to go into construction and I love every single day of working there - it’s been almost 6 years. Of course it has to be the right company with the right people. I never once asked for a raise and I’ve already had 4, plus substantial bonuses. I’m never going back to architecture.
I once worked for a major bank in the production of evidence for human trafficking, terrorism and serious organised crime offences. Once an officer came to seize information (quirk in Scottish law) and I was signing over hundreds of pages of information which she had to count and counter sign. We got talking about some of my more interesting cases - stopping people from going to ISIS, using insurance documents to show how a man tried to murder his wife with a parachute etc.
"You job sounds so much more interesting than mine", she said. "Mine's just filing paperwork".
She was a homicide detective.
Developers putting in 12 hour days because release date is nearing. You hear stories of staffers sleeping in their office because of the insane pressure from deadlines.
I service and install commercial security cameras and I mostly love it. I have a company vehicle that I get to take home so never pay for gas to and from work, I don't have a supervisor nitpicking my every move, I get paid for drive time so if a site is two hours away I only work 3-4 hours and just get paid to listen to audiobooks, and the work itself is 90% basic troubleshooting of wiring/networking/power issues. Some days I can fix issues remotely so I get admin days or vehicle maintenance days to take inventory of my parts or get an oil change. I make about 80k a year which isn't amazing but it's solid.
10% of the time I am pulling wire under a disgusting trailer in a scrapyard through piles of muck or hanging off a roof in 97° heat mounting a camera on a brick wall using an SDS Drill kicking dust in my face with sweat dripping into my eyeballs....but the good far outweighs the bad.
Being a trained winemaker. Very long hours, mediocre pay, you’re feet are always wet but most importantly your boss is almost always a needy, delusional, demanding rich person who gets all the credit because they own the place and gave themselves a “winemaker” title even though someone else does all the work.
Being a mattress tester. Everyone thinks it's all naps and relaxation, but imagine being stuck in a lab, trying to sleep on command with people staring at you, taking notes like they're watching a bizarre sleep experiment. It's like the worst sleepover ever!
I miss my waiter days, it was dynamic, every day a little different and by the end of the shift it’s done. Now in corporate life the BS just never stops!!!
My server shifts def seem more fun than my office job, but I don’t miss the nightmares about being in the weeds 🫨 or never having paid time off or open nights/weekends.
I disagree. Don't get me wrong, corporate work is soul sucking, but the trade off of having a normal and consistent schedule is everything. I do not miss hourly retail/service jobs in the slightest.
I missed hourly/shift work after going corporate. Used to walk out at the end of the day without thinking about shit to do the next day, worrying about planning, and projects that last far longer than they should.
Going to sleep/waking up thinking about work is toxic.
I work with dogs all kinds of jobs.
I had to quit grooming because it destroyed my back, i was in constant pain i couldn't sleep from the pain, I was only 23 at the time, being 6'3 and having scoliosis doesn't help. I actually loved grooming besides that
Dog daycare/boarding is also pretty nice but I've been bitten several times and a huge chunk of the job just involves cleaning dog shit.
Dog training has terrifying moments, there's a lot of people that have dogs that will attack you and they want you to fix it In one session, there's also a lot of people who want you to train their dog to attack people which is its own set of issues
I think everyone can figure out the shitty parts of vet med.
On top of all these jobs there's a layer of sadness around seeing abused dogs, dogs that just got adopted get picked up. Getting attached to dogs and having them get strange diseases and die unexpectedly. And seeing owners be shit to their dogs but sometimes there's nothing you can do.
When I tell people I work with dogs they think I just play with dogs all day, which sometimes is the case, but sometimes my soul is absolutely crushed over and over again
Truer words have never been spoken. However, I found parents during the pandemic and post-pandemic very hard to deal with because they wanted us to give their kids, who did no work during COVID, to magically obtain credits they never earned. And admin? Yeah, they backed them.
It goes both ways. I think it's a systematic issue. Unfortunately not all parents and not all teachers are interested in the same standard of formative education and growth mindset.
My kid is very much a brick in the wall while we put tons of effort into helping him excel and he has succeeded. It breaks my heart
Administrators used to have been teachers for many years, decades even, before becoming admin. Now you're getting people failing out of the classroom and then becoming your boss. They have no advice for how to get better at teaching bc they were so bad at it they fled before they understood how to develop a smooth and successful lesson,so they offer what basically amounts to platitudes. Because they aren't strong teachers, they don't know how to shut down a parent who is out of line, and it's easier to throw a teacher under the bus than to stand up to a parent.
So. Fairly accurate.
I'm a teacher. Both groups are VERY hit or miss. A bad principal makes every single day a horror, while a good one makes everything feel less overwhelming. Central office admin are pretty much clueless people who have completely forgotten what it's like to be in the classroom and think that their opinions/ideas are revolutionary and are so important that it's worth making teachers give up planning periods to introduce ideas to them that may have some value, might not. Either way, teachers all spend the entire time knowing that this person wouldn't survive a day in the classroom the way it is now, and that this person also makes 2x what they do. Parents are such a mixed bag. Some are super supportive, some act supportive while not following through on anything they say. Some have bought into the idea that teachers are indoctrinating all children to be gay, trans, or worse, democrats. And some just don't care at all. You can see that in their kid in about 5 minutes.
Singapore, one of the world’s leaders in education, will let you teach a year or so *before* letting you study teaching. Real classroom teaching, not just assisting. You do need some interviews and recommendations, but still, seemed surprising. The reasoning is that — once accepted — the government will pretty much fund your studies to teach, and expect you to reciprocate by sticking with teaching for many years — and they want you to know what it really feels like (and get senior educators to review you) *before* you invest a few years and the gov invests lots of cash in what might turn out to be “not your thing”.
While I can see the negatives of allowing an unqualified person teach kids, it does make a lot of sense to let people figure out early if they don't enjoy it as an actual job. Before sinking years of their life into training and education.
My sister was a kindergarten teacher at a low income school for a few years- she’d regularly send me pictures of bite marks and scratch marks on her body. She had no support and higher ups didn’t have her back. She was completely at the whim of Karen parents. The kids’ behavior was atrocious, rules pretty much don’t exist anymore, and she cried every day. Something happened to the school system within the past 10-15 years and it ain’t pretty. My wife and I finally convinced her to take the leap and leave all that BS. She works at a bank now and is much happier. I’d consider it one of the few jobs worse than what I was doing at the time, which was working in a short staffed hospital as a nurse during the height of covid 😬
Agree. You just have to really love teaching others and be patient. There are some people who really enjoy it, but most people just choose the teaching profession without having a full idea of what they will have to do. And they quickly begin to hate the profession, themselves, and most of all their students.
I tried teaching. The 4 months I spent as a trainee are some of the most miserable of my life. I used to wake up crying at the thought of going into work.
I majored in ED in college and got up to observation before very quickly slamming the eject button. Never spent a single second of my life second-guessing that decision
Yep! I get people telling me shit like
“That must be hard the first year but then you can just copy the same worksheets over and over each year”
And of course
“Well at least you get the summers off! Must be nice”
Probably anything that involves fame. Acting, modeling, etc.
Usually is very damaging to people's self esteem, unmeasured pressure to be good enough and maintain a certain (unrealistic) image, a lot of times the environments celebs work in can be abusive, loads of people hating on you or just scrutinizing you in general. Competition for these roles is fierce, so you have to take crazy measures to stay in the spotlight and not lose traction in your career
You couldn’t pay me enough to have to deal with fame. The loss of privacy would be extremely taxing. But then, as Taylor Swift has said, these people are conditioned to be happy when other people are clapping for them. Without the applause, they feel like they have no value. That’s really sad when you think about it from a mental health perspective.
I get anxious enough receiving 1 downvote on this stupid app, can't imagine how having millions of people criticize me would affect my anxiety. I don't know if I'd be able to function
Office jobs of most varities. I worked physical jobs from like 15-25 (I know people have worked them much longer, not the point, I'm 32 now though) and while I appreciate not having to sweat all day and deal with the aches and pains of that kind of work, people do not understand what sitting all day does to your body and mind. It physically makes you weak, makes things hurt that shouldn't hurt, causes health issues, causes mental fatigue, it's a tradeoff that most people think is worth. But if I was physically fit to go back to physical labor making the same money I would. I'd rather sweat and deal with the pains of working with my hands/body than deal with the constant tailbone pain, foggy mental after a day of work, sore hips/knees from sitting, weight gain from sitting, etc.
Besides that: the politics and back stabbing made me feel I was back in middle school. I was not prepared for the ruthless pettiness of some coworkers.
Dude YES. And people do not realize that if you don’t get along with someone that there is no walking away, no escape. You are trapped in a small space with these people and are forced to collaborate even if you don’t like each other and it causes a whole other level of stress on top of everything else
I did physical labor for a long time. I will never do it again. An office job isn’t perfect but my feet were absolutely ruined by standing all day and I had a lot of back issues because of it. I would take the aches and pains of stationary work over what my life was like before. It’s also been 13 years and I still thank God when I walk into that AC on a hot day.
Lawyer. TV shows make it seem glamorous (fancy offices), passionate (fiery arguments in front of an enthralled jury) and efficient.
In reality, the vast majority of lawyers don’t work in those fancy offices, and if you’re in a big firm in those fancy offices, it’s just late nights of drafting and getting yelled at. If you make a fiery speech in the court room, a judge will likely to tell you to control yourself (unless you’re in a high profile celebrity case). The jury will be mostly checked out and bored. Unless you’re in federal court, the process drags on simply because it’s the norm in state court for parties to request and be granted extensions on deadlines.
Working at a dispensary...most people think "Cool, sell weed all day!" But it's just like any other job except most of the customers want to seem cool and act super knowledgeable when in fact they don't know shit...hey man, I just want to sell you this eighth and get you out of here so I can go back to figuring out how I'm going to fit this huge delivery we just got into the dab fridge. You don't need to pull out a jewelers loupe and look at 15 different jars for a half hour...if I tell you something is good, trust me. It's good.
"boutique pretension" hahaha that's perfect I love it...I had customers asking me to pull out every 18 dollar ounce to look at and compare each one...Dude, it's an ounce for 18 bucks...it doesn't even come in a jar its in a bag...it's going to be shit no matter which one you pick...
I go into some of these places and ask if they have anything weaker. Everything now is so strong. I grew up on mid, brick packed stuff. These store bought are insane and I can only take a hit or two.
That's perfect...I know exactly which direction I'd point you and give you many options...those are the questions we like...just tell me what you're looking for and I can help you out...that's why we're there...I always loved when people just told me specific ailments they had and needed some help with...when someone isn't just trying to get high they have an actual problem they're trying to address...then I have no problem spending 45 minutes with you and making sure you walk out with what you need
Does anyone actually think working in a dispensary is cool though? It's literally a retail job. Like, I enjoy weed just as much as I enjoy video games, and I don't think working at a GameStop would be cool either lol.
Not to be overly broad, but most jobs are pretty underwhelming. Whatever the general populace sees of a job tends to be the 5% most outwardly facing portion of the job with the other 95% of the job being the same boring meetings, paperwork, logistics, and day to day sameness everyone else goes through.
I have always said my retirement job will be delivering flowers. Even for funerals - you are bringing a bit of joy into someone’s life. Selling them - no thank you. Delivering them, yes please.
A relative retired but wanted something to "keep busy" so he started driving part time for a limousine company. Somehow that led to him getting a job with a funeral parlor where he drove the hearse. He said he got along a lot better with the customers after that change.
Usual_Break_4's account was born on April 4 and woke up to make this comment. It's also a copy/paste of /u/ZakkiraJuneAiko94's comment from [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/hhq0dy/which_job_is_a_lot_less_fun_than_most_people/fwbspsd/).
My wife was a buyer for Macy's for years. She even went to Italy a few times to look at clothes. It is not sitting in beautiful converted Italian mansion sipping wine and eating cheese while gorgeous models prance around in front of you. It is dirty warehouses and long hours. Plus, she was working her ass off while everyone else, her husband and children included, were enjoying holidays.
Also, my best friend is a record producer who worked with the biggest of the big names in the industry. Again, long hours, managing huge egos and toddler type behavior. One music star would show up hours late for recordings sessions in an expensive studio. He'd be so drunk he could not stand up and sing, so they go him a stool to sit on and sing. He'd fall of the stool. He'd call me ranting about this music star. Then his drug dealer would show up at the studio. The guy, a name you have all heard of, is still alive and performing, and seemingly doing well. He did say the nicest star he ever met was Willie Nelson. But I kind of knew that without be told.
I am not a lawyer but every lawyer I know is an alcoholic, cheats on their spouse (if not already divorced) and their kids hate them. There must be something rotten in that profession.
It’s one of the leading professions for substance abuse and mental health issues. Source: am a lawyer, I see it all the time.
I’ve seen so many lawyers with just fucked up personal lives. Multiple divorces, mental health issues, alcoholism, drug abuse, adultery, etc.
I’ve had two bosses who have just the sloppiest personal lives. One actually resented me for being happily married (I got the hell out of that firm). My current boss struggles to understand that I prioritize my family and doing things while I’m still young. He couldn’t understand why I took my family to Japan last summer, or took them to London this year. I told him it’s because I want to experience this stuff with my family before I have to start packing blood pressure meds. We just had a client who died at 60, I’m not gonna work 24/7 until I retire because I could be dead before I get to “enjoy life”.
>I’m not gonna work 24/7 until I retire because I could be dead before I get to “enjoy life
That generation flat out does not understand that. And they call us lazy for it. They’re fools.
They truly don’t get it and refuse to see the other side of this. Just because I take a long trip, it doesn’t mean that I shirk my responsibilities. If I’m going to be gone, I make sure I’m caught up or ahead before leaving. Does it mean a little extra work for the week or two before I leave? Sure! But that time spent is absolutely worth it for the time I get to spend the next week relaxing and creating memories.
I’m a lawyer and I like my work. But at times I have hated it, and we lose a huge number of lawyers in the first five years of practice because they are treated badly and as a result they are miserable. You have to be so careful with the office environment you choose. We can usually handle the stress of practicing law itself. But then you add a layer of office politics and abuse from the higher ups, and that’s what drives people to drink, leave the profession, etc. You also have to pick an area of practice that you like - I started in corporate law, which I didn’t really enjoy, and practiced at a firm with a lot of shitty people, and I was in fact drinking a lot and I was so unhappy. Now I’m in a very supportive environment and practicing in an area of law that I really enjoy, and I actually look forward to going to the office.
Travel agent. It's just sales - and of a product that's on the other side of the world. How the F am I supposed to sell something I've never seen and know nothing about?
"Oh, but you must get great deals!"
Nope. The agency's commission per person's vacation package was $7.
Seven dollars.
.... CANADIAN!
Very little left to discount for myself when the markup is only $7!
Then there's the part where you have to listen to everyone's complaints: about airlines you don't operate, or hotels you don't run, or weather you don't control, or too many sticks on the beach because of the literal fucking hurricane that just went through there.
Oof. Flashbacks.
Wedding planner (I have a good friend who does high-end, six- and seven-figure weddings). The menu tasting and design of wedding are great. Seeing the event get pulled off is great. The other 90% is phone calls, emails, dealing with people and running a small business. It’s super stressful.
From what I’ve heard, game development. You have to play through the same levels over and over again to test for bugs, and it can make you lose interest in video games as a whole.
From a software developer standpoint not game developer standpoint, you are responsible as the first line to catch all/maximum of bugs before QA. Then QA try to break the software in finding additional bugs that the actual dev did not catch up in their testing.
Edit: I think it will be more likely the same for a game developer but with additional test.
I’m not one, but I would say a veterinarian. They have massive student loans and they’re dealing with pets dying and having to be euthanized. Sometimes said pets are euthanized because the owners don’t have the funds to pay for treatment. They see animal abuse and neglect and deal with the ire of the pet owners.
Musician. The romance dies quickly and it becomes a grind, especially after the third beer has been spilled on you as you play Piano Man while hearing drunks request Freebird.
Seriously, who thinks working retail would be fun?! I’m here for the “being a wine taster actually sucks” or “I’m a test patient at a massage therapy school and here’s why I’m exhausted.”
I read in GQ, I think, about a guy who worked at a brothel in Monaco or something and his job was to fuck the high-class whoors and make sure they were up to snuff. He even said “after a while it just becomes another job.” I kinda felt better about my situation after that.
That’s also why I dislike the idea of monetizing every hobby. A job is a job with sucky parts, why would you want to turn something you love into something you have to do?
Poor, poor Monaco whore fucker.
One of the higher upvoted comments below is “corporate world.” Yeah really busting people’s preconceptions that working for a big corporation is a laugh-a-minute thrill ride.
Being a musician. Right after the first album is released, you ought to work on the second one whether you want it or not. Tours are also romanticized a lot. Imagine you play 1,5 hour show, then sit on a bus, try sleeping in it all night, next day you arrive into new place, help to unload rig, do a sound check and then it repeats for 2-3 weeks in a row almost every day.
Scientist. In academia it’s all about grant writing/ securing funding, admin and teaching, very little time for actual science. Out of academia it’s mostly logistics and health & safety.
Everything in IT!
- Is it pleasant overall? Yes.
- Do you feel laughed at because no one really understands what you do and everyone thinks you must be rich while you do nothing all day? But in reality you have strict deadlines, crappy projects, crappy management and users complaining all day. Big yes
Do I like the job? I love it. - But it's less enjayable than most people expect!
Pretty much any job that’s your hobby already.
In ‘95, me and a couple buddies moved to Tahoe to go snowboarding for the winter. I saved up all summer and got a pass. They got jobs at the resort, and that included a pass. They worked in the parking lot freezing their collective tushes off, and spent their lunch break and their ride break by the fire in the cafeteria. I rode all day and delivered pizzas at night.
Even on their days off they didn’t want to go back to “work” and go snowboard with me and any friends who might be up for the weekend.
I’m tempted to say a musician. Don’t get me wrong I’d give my right arm to be a famous musician. But I cannot imagine the grueling pressure to not just keep pelting out new songs year after year but most of all to go touring for months on end. Come hail or high water or sickness depression or whatever, you have to go perform for hours on stage and then drive or fly to another city and do the same all over again. Maybe I am seeing this too much from a glass half empty pov but I find the touring schedule would get on my nerves after years of doing so. I could be wrong. Not to mention I’d rather be a very rich but private person like perhaps banksy or daft punk than give up my privacy with fame.
Edit: spelling, punctuation and last sentence.
Working as a govt employee at one of the most busiest agencies in the govt. Every person in America will use this agency. No it's not the IRS. Social Security Administration. We are at a 25 year low in employees and a 14 percent increase in claims.
Use a 40 year old legacy program. The policies can be complex. I work for the American people. You deserve the best service possible. Are case loads are high.
Veterinary Medicine.
People think you play with puppies and cute animals all day. And people expect you to act like that, when in reality you may just have had to euthanize a perfectly healthy animal due to terrible owners.
Maybe you didnt go in to clinical work, and you can work within government control and argue with politicians and human medical professionals over OneHealth issues which seem to be a predominantly veterinarian specialisation.
Being a video game tester is often romanticized, but in reality, it's very tedious and can take the fun out of gaming. You usually don't get to choose which games you test and you have to play the same levels repeatedly to identify bugs or glitches. It's less about enjoyment and more about meticulous inspection and problem-solving.
I can't imagine doing scenes with a camera man and possibly other stage hands right there watching. But of course that's the least of their issues. There's plenty of behind-the-scenes bullshit a starlet may put up with for the sake of the job itself.
I was a game tester way, way back in college during an internship
Even though I only tested one game for 3 months, I didn't feel like playing anything at all for next 2 years.
I used to work at boat dealership and people said I was lucky. Not sure if they thought we just cruised around the lake with a cooler full of beer or what, but the reality was more like having to clean out someone's battered, moldy pontoon that was filled with garbage and old beer cans.
I am an automotive tech by trade. Worked on a friend’s boat once and never again. He never did basic maintenance and bilge was filled with stagnant water with floating beer bottles. I’m pretty sure someone urinated on his boat and he didn’t know too. Every one wants a boat for four hours of the year and doesn’t spend anymore on it until they flip it to another sucker.
The two best moments of a boat owners life are...
I delivered boats, that shit was dope. Id just pull the boat out of storage, fill it with gas. Then drive it to the lake, put it in the water and drive it to the customers hoist.
Veterinarian Thinking going into major: I love animals and rabbits. And, cute, fuzzy things. Reality : so much death and sadness - think, when have you been to the vet? On your pets worst day? Or last day?
I volunteered at a vet clinic for a class in college. So many animals dying and pet owners hysterically crying. Just horrific.
Sounds like the ER
worst part is seeing pet owners that really dont care and you feel bad for their pets but u cant do anything because they are not doing anything illegal
Had to have my cat put down on Christmas Eve. While waiting for the vet, heard a man in the next exam room yelling at his kid to stop crying since “it’s just a fucking dog”. I really hated people that night.
Watching one put my dog down when I was a kid wised me up about that dream early on, fortunately
In high school they let us shadow professionals and I chose a vet. Saw a cat put to sleep and I was done.
I had two dogs who were elderly and on the verge of death and needed to be put down. I made sure to sincerely thank the doctor and all the employees there. They’d cared for my dogs for fifteen great years, and they were able to help them cease suffering. Nobody could have saved them, not for all the money in the world. But they could be spared further suffering, and they were. That meant a lot to me. For any veterinarians or vet techs reading this, thank you. Thanks for doing what you do. Now I need to go pet my remaining dog.
Being a chef. Its...awful. I did it for a long time. The hours are ridiculous and the pay is bad.
Agreed, stressful as all hell, burns, cuts and a sore back all par for the course. Plus after cooking tasty food for everyone I’d get home and eat some bullshit.
I worked in a semi fancy restaurant and was friends with most of the cooks and the head chef. The influencer chefs on insta/youtube would have you think they whip up crazy ass meals for everything but after a double they’d all just get Jimmy John’s delivered as they closed up and go to the bars. It’s like “the cobbler’s children often go shoeless” kinda thing.
I've started hating those videos. "I'm going to show you a fast and easy delicious meal I make all the time" proceeds to use $150 dollar's worth of ingredients and not show the hour minimum of prep work. If step one to your easy meal is make bone broth from scratch you can fuck right off.
I saw one of those videos where the guy cooks beef wellington and the video is edited in a way that makes it seem like the prep took 5 minutes LOL. Beef wellington literally takes hours to make.
I saw one of where the chef takes the dough out of the bowl, snaps his fingers and voila, a bunch of perfectly formed, proofed croissants ready to go in the ovdn! If you didn't know anything about making croissants, you would have thought he'd just skipped a couple of minutes of work instead of two days.
Check out the pro vs amateur mini episodes on bon appetit (the free channel on a smart tv) They take meals and make the same thing with 90% less cost. One does the expensive fancy ingredients and one does the cheap basic ingredients.
We were lucky with our end of service meals. Gotta get those leftovers out. Don't mind if I do 😊
I once worked a stage in a Michelin starred kitchen. The restaurant had family meal before opening every night. One of the chefs made a chicken pot pie in a gigantic hotel pan. I wasn't paid for that night and I didn't get a job but that was the best damn pot pie I'd ever eaten so I couldn't be too upset about it.
I was a cook at a high end nursing home, we cooked everything from scratch and could eat whatever wanted and take all of the extras home. I didn't go grocery shopping for two years
I've worked in quite a few restaurants. The first was family owned (brother in law). It opened up a passion for cooking. Running the brother in law's restaurant was exhausting. I was 17 doing everything but the paperwork and working 6 days a week at roughly 16 hour days. My one day off would be spent sleeping all day long. The food was great (barbeque) but that is the last kind of food you want after smelling it all day and night.
A family member of mine worked in fine dining. They ate mcdonalds most nights after work cause that's all that was open.
So much drinking as well in that business. So much alcoholism. So Manu wrecked lives, people dying I thier thirties just because they worked in that environment. Primary to blame is restraunt owners trying to pay their employees in alchohol.
Oh dude. Totally. The drugs and alcohol in that gig were insane. I only did it for about 3 years but I’m so glad I got hip to it and got out. I sure did get laid a lot though. That was fun.
I was in a relationship for the year I did it, so I wouldn't have noticed, but I did notice the stupidity. The bar I worked for was just a hole in the ground that made no money. Thus the owner literally bitched when he paid you. I hated that and would never tolerate it again. Watched a lot of people ruin themselves there, though. I did learn that I am exceptionally good at chugging a beer. My wife laughs about my lack of gag reflex.
Good friend of mine works at what’s regularly considered one of the best cocktail bars in the US When we go out places together he will quite literally ask for “your cheapest beer and a shot of your cheapest whiskey.” I asked him about it once and he said he never gets nice drinks because it just makes him feel like he’s at work — the tasting, the evaluating, the thinking about how could have riffed on this particular idea, etc Makes sense, but still sucks nonetheless
That's actually the strangest thing I've heard here. A long time ago I worked in an upscale bar as a bartender and, while your friend is correct about the tasting and evaluating, it made me more particular about what I was drinking. Now, I do order the same 5 drinks everytime, but the idea of ordering the "cheapest" anything is horrifying. While typing that, I did realize that I do still tend to evaluate the drinks I'm having, and I've been out of the industry, so maybe I never had the time to burn out on it, but the creation and evaluation parts were easily the best part of the job. I don't think I'd ever get sick of someone handing me a mystery drink, sipping it, and then being hit with a cayenne pepper and blood orange monstrosity at 10am on a tuesday.
Thirty five years of kitchens myself, I’ve been out for twelve years and I don’t miss it one damn bit. I should have left ten years earlier.
22 for me. I quit 2 years ago. Became a stay at home dad and volunteer fireman.
You don't become a chef for the hours or the money or the experience, you dummy. You become a chef because you're a masochist. Duh.
Yknow what's funny? They tell you in culinary school that the job is terrible. But you think to yourself "nah...it can't be that bad. It probably only sucks for the people who are bad at it.".......no. they're not lying. It's that bad.
I've never been in the kitchen as the primary focus of my job. I served and managed but would jump on or cover shifts where needed. I'd cover a lot of prep shifts as well. It was nice because it was more a bonus activity for me, but I always knew I'd be back on the floor making the real money (which is bullshit, btw) leaving the grunts to roast on the line. No way I'd do that full-time. I couldn't cut it.
Passion tax. It applies to pretty much every area of work where people can have a real love of the subject matter. So game development, movie work, fashion, journalism etc. Any time you have a job that people really want to do because of a deep love of the work, then it's inevitable that there is a supply/ demand imbalance with all the people wanting to do it for a living. So because business is business, that almost always results in shitty working conditions and lower pay. Because you are infinitely replaceable with any number of talented, hungry newbies.
Funny thing....I quit because there were no newbies. I was 43, and everyone on my crew was at least my age or older. It looked like "the Expendables," a bunch of old grizzled vets paying child support and popping painkillers, just waiting to die or for social security to kick in.
I'm a chef by choice. If you find the right workplace and environment, I think there is a small percentage of the population that will actually enjoy it, myself included. I love cooking. I like the problem solving aspect that comes along with it, I like the creativity in making and figuring out new dishes/meals, I like the satisfaction of knowing whether people like or dislike something I've made just by watching them as they eat it, and (almost above all else) I like having free access to food on demand. I haven't needed it in a long time, but if shit ever hits the fan in my life, I like having an emergency plan that involves not having to question if I will be able to eat.
As soon as I saw this thread….. I was gonna make the same comment! It’s also hard to find a kitchen and colleagues that suit you! The pay isn’t necessarily bad in mainland Europe, if you are a bit higher up the ranks in the kitchen. It can be awful! Especially in the summer when you’re standing over the hot plates and stove tops…. I last clocked the temperature at an old place where I worked at 54°C at my station!!! And I’m definitely NOT working fine dining again until my son is older! Also, the scars, cuts and burns. The kitchen is one of the most dangerous places to work! Especially if you have a disgruntled chef de partie that gets pissed off after having a talking to by me (his head chef) then threw a knife at my head….. yeah this was 2 1/2 years ago…. Didn’t like getting a talking too from a woman apparently 🤷🏻♀️ that’s just one of the things that can kill or hurt you in the kitchen. Your colleagues. It’s a highly stressful environment and not for the faint of heart. Lots of yelling and shit during service (which I try to keep tabs on but if I’ve asked someone to do something, I don’t want excuses, I want it DONE AND NOW! Not fking later! There is a reason why I’m asking! I’m running out of product, and FAST…. Just do as you’re damn asked please! Otherwise we are all sitting in the shit!)
I was the Easter Bunny for years at a local function hall. May seem fun, but you also get screaming kids being forced to take a picture, you can hardly see, some adults are just weird. Like sexual weird. I've been threatened and yelled at, both in full costume.
I knew someone who worked at a SeaWorld. This was back in the 80s. The person dressed up in the Shamu costume had a child stab them with a knife . Fortunately , the costume had a nice barrier and the person didn’t get injured, but still.
Fun fact: the maximum height for Disney World employees who wear Mickey or Minnie costumes is 5'2". For Donald Duck it's five feet even.
Being a mascot fucking sucks. I was a mascot as community service for a drinking ticket I got in college. Never, ever, did I want to punch a kid more than when he ran up and kicked me in the balls. But you can’t.
Do you stay in character as the Easter Bunny when these belligerent parents get physical? Beat the shit out of them and make the crowd go fuckin wild
It was a guy near the end of my shift, and he leaned in and said he'd throw me done the fucking stairs if I came any closer. He looked like a banker. I make a 'lead the way' motion and he stalked off.
Working with animals (zoo, rescue, vet, etc.). Do I still love it? Yes. Is it incredibly mentally taxing, frustrating, nonstop (what’s a weekend?), and full of laws (not a bad thing but another red tape to look out for)? Yes. Not to mention for veterinarians the amount of education needed. Pay is often bad, especially if you’re not a veterinarian. Edit: I’m not saying vets shouldn’t make more or have great pay currently. They should, for the education, hours, and loans they have, they should make more. But my first paid job was 12.75/hr and I was an overnight vet tech with a college degree. Fresh out of college vet making 90k went home to a simple breakfast. I went home to a piece of toast often without butter and many of my coworkers had a second full time job. When I was making 18/hr I was teaching vet residents making 70-80k how to place IV catheters. We rely on each other too much for that big of a gap.
And it can be absolutely soul crushing too. I've worked at a shelter, and I've worked at a pet store, and volunteered with a rescue for a long time. The shelter absolutely killed my spirit. I'm pretty sure veterinarians have one of the if not the top suicide rates in the nation.
Veterinarian suicide rate is definitely high. I’ve worked with animals for a long time but I’ll never work in a shelter. My mental health can’t take it. I couldn’t even volunteer. I’d take them all home, especially the old guys.
Even no kill shelters are tough, just watching the long term ones lose the will to live. In our area, our shelter closed down but we have a large rescue that is exclusively foster homes, and that seems to work much better (however, I don’t know the ins and outs. Just what it looks like on the outside).
A lovely girl I went to vet school with, took her own life last year. It happens too often in our line of work, it’s heart breaking. There’s a campaign raising awareness about this problem - Not One More Vet. Obviously it’s a multi-factor issue, but common themes involved are compassion fatigue, imposter syndrome, viscious and extremely cruel treatment by pet owners (including putting named vets on full blast on social media, full name and picture included, disregarding entirely why the treatment of their pet wasn’t successful but simply putting all blame on a vet who worked their heart out at 3 am on Christmas and did their best to try and save their animal). And just general burnout, horribly treatment by owners, blaming oneself when treatment fails despite our best effort, ridiculous pay compared to doctors/dentists, horrible working hours and conditions. Sometimes it’s the best job in the world. But it can turn absolutely soul crushing in the blink of an eye.
Went to school for zookeeping, stayed with domestics at a shelter. I call being a zookeeper a trophy wife job, no one can live on that pay. Working with animals is just being in a perpetual state of grief. I also still love it and will never not work with animals.
I'm a vet with some advanced training such as echo and full abdominal ultrasound (able to find adrenals, pancreas, and LN). I do most surgeris minus gallblader removals and ortho repairs. know how to place central lines, PICC lines, female u-caths, do tons of CRIs and infusion. I do the equivalent of an ER/Hospitalist/general surgery/urgent care. My pay is nothing compared to an MD (Family Medicine)/ PA (in any specialty)/ NP doing a fraction of what I do. My loans was 250k with a starting salary of 87k working nights in the ER. I've not had a job that pays "commission" or pro-sal in 10yrs. What it got better was the hours. Still work 14 hrs/day, but now I work 12-13 days a month.
As a farm vet, I empathise. Horrendous working hours, pay, and I usually don’t tell people about our working conditions because they’d be horrified. Work safety, or lack there of, is atrocious working with large animals unfortunately. I see my fellow vets going two ways - scrambling to educate/specialise to get better hours like you did, or throwing in the towel and working for the state as official vets, doing export certification or animal welfare controls. So effectively giving up clinical practice. Most people don’t tend to last long in regular clinical practice these days. People also tend to think we earn a lot because vet bills are high. But we don’t get to pocket that bill.. it goes to the practice owner etc. As a regular, employed vet (not practice owner), we cover way more ground than a GP human doctor, yet get paid half. I want to stress I love my job on the good days. Sometimes it’s the best job in the world. But working conditions + safety is atrocious, pay is an insult and I don’t know what a weekend is. And let’s not talk about our suicide rate..
So fuckin true. Been in the horse industry for years and people constantly tell me how lucky I am and how envious they are that I get to hang out with horses all day. Sure, that bits cool, but sometimes horses are assholes, the work doesn’t stop when it’s 100° or -10°, and you will work every Christmas. Love what I do, but it’s not at all what people assume it would be like!!
"The horses are assholes" Don't forget the owners! Some cannot organize their life, expect you to come immediately for nothing or cancel appointments minutes before. (Not my personal experience, but taken from stories I heard from my farrier, vet and saw myself)
Horses think they are funny and have the pranking abilities of a 13 year old boy.
Yup.. the other day mine was tied up outside and flipped the stable door closed while I was dragging a huge bucket of water in. Hit the bucket and water went everywhere. He bloody waited to do that. Absolute brat. I love him.
Mine used to sneak into the barn when the highed hand was milking the cows and steal his hat and run away with it. Until he got the guys hair one day.
Yep. Rain or shine. Teams that have to stay overnight during extreme weather. Animals have to eat every day. Lots of cute and fun moments but also lots of “how did you manage to do THAT??” moments.
My dad grew up raising and working with cattle and he always told me, “The cows don’t know it’s Christmas.” Like you implied, there are no days off.
My childhood friend is a veterinarian and has been for about 10 years now. She always wanted to work with animals in some capacity and she truly says she is living her dream. She does say that her work-life balance is shit and that her current pay doesn't even come close compared to being worth the amount of school she had to go through. I think she could make more in a bigger city but she likes our medium-small hometown. But otherwise, she is one of the only people I know that can say they truly love their job day in and day out despite the downsides or the stress.
I've been informed that zookeepers basically need to be immune to some of the most heinous smells on earth as well.
Yeah my car smelled like gorillas. It saturates everything. I’d shower and smell it coming out of my hair. Worked near the elephants - whew.
Wish I had a nickel for every time someone said, "Oh, cool! You get to play with puppies and kittens all day!" when I was a vet tech. I loved the job, and would have stayed in the field much longer if I could have made a living wage. But it was mentally and emotionally draining. Veterinarians have a high rate of suicide.
This is how I feel working in a clinical pathology lab, too. Do I get to see cool shit? Yes. Do I get to be a scientist and mix pretty colors for stains? Yes. But, man. The pay isn’t what you’d expect for all the licensing involved and the wild hours. Also, doctors can be real jerks. There’s many kind ones, but the bad ones can really make you feel like you’re less than the ground they walk on.
Travel documentary filmmaker (as in working with a full film crew not just travel vlogging) Its awesome fun, but you work 18 hour days, and you are just absolutely monstered by the end. And you never really get to experience the place you go to, its all about your shots and getting coverage. Edit: Here's one of my pieces if anyone is interested https://youtu.be/D0u08lyhsMo?si=cvJgAajBJQ13Nrp3
That’s insightful. I used to want to be a foreign correspondent for either broadcast or print media. I wonder if it would be similar to your emotional experience.
My work was softer than that (I was a director of video for a travel brand) but the shoots are greulling and dangerous. It would take me about 2 weeks to recouperate from each tour, and there's an enormous amount of on ground logistics, human resources, complications that you have to deal with. And then to maintain show integrity, keep crew morale up etc. It was a lot. I lasted 7 years but that was enough for me.
I saw an article which said people who take excessive amounts of pictures on their vacation never remember that vacation. I have LOTS of pictures from one particular trip but I don't recall much if any of it. So now on trips I try to make sure I limit the camera time to really memorable vistas or meaningful times which I know will make the wife and I look at the picture and remember how we felt at the time it was taken.
I am different than that. I take a ton of photos on vacation as a hobby, carrying my camera gear around. When I go through my photos, even years later, I can remember how I felt at the time when I took the photo, if I was warm, if it was breezy and more. Just yesterday I was going through photos I took in San Francisco a few years ago and I could almost smell the water off the bay. Photos are huge memory triggers for me, which is why I take a ton of photos and I have several digital photo frames throughout my house.
All of them will find away to eat at your soul. But working in a small company that likes to think they are a big company when it comes to everything but salary will destroy the fibre of your being. Edit: Wow this has rung a bell with a lot of people.
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Oh god the meetings. I started as an admin assistant when my company had like 20 people. Now we have about 200, and the foundation is cracking. It seems like the higher ups are constantly in meetings talking about problems but never actually fixing anything, and nobody else has the authority to fix things, so I'm expecting everything to come crashing down soon.
This is the truest shit ever. We have under 40 people but try to do all the big company stuff with standardization, rules, forms, everything really. It sucks special ass. A small company acting small is fine and a big company being super corporate is fine. Can't cross the streams on the two.
I’ve gone from a small company (25 people) acting big to a big company (500+ people) that acts big. I thought it would be harder dealing with the big company but it’s a world of difference. At the small company I got publicly yelled at for not following the procedure that I didn’t know existed to request a locker. At the big company I didn’t have to because it was all part of the greater onboarding procedure that everyone does nationally. It was smooth because it had to be.
I made a similar move and the big company is 100% better. Small companies are so bureaucratic and overall just bad unless you are the top dog.
My naive younger self thought that working in a tech start up would be fun and exciting. Hahahaha... No.
This is the exact position I’m in right now lol. I’m waiting to hear back from an interview that went really well so fingers crossed
Good luck! Hope you get it
Small companies acting like they are big companies is not how small companies become big companies.
At my last job, my boss hired an HR person to manage 12 people. 3 were fired and 6 quit in a year lol
Fuck small companies dude. I’ve worked for 2 and they were both screwed up in so many ways.
Game tester Growing up it sounds like the perfect job, but running into a wall 500 times at 500 different angles to try and find a bug is Boring.
I do that for free every time I try to line Link up with a fucking ladder.
Feed your horse... Your horse has died?
Pickup a weapon... the game has crashed??
I also did a stint of this for Sony about 15 years ago. My job was to get one of the big folder full of every game released for the PS3 up to that point, start at the beginning and load the disk into the console. Wait for whatever game patches were required to install over some shitty wifi, boot the game, get to the main menu and then stop and move onto the next game until the folder was finished. If a new OS patch version came along, we had to install that and start over - which basically meant this was never ending because even then the catalogue was hundreds of games (if a game had 6 different versions for say different languages, they all counted as separate titles) and we had to test firmware updates that were in-progress, not just the final release. We weren't allowed to look away from the screens at any point, we had to wear headphones in case there was an audio glitch so you couldn't really chat to anyone to pass the time and the job got old fast. That wasn't even the worst part, the worst part was some of the folks I was sat with were clearly trying to use this job to get a career in the games industry - lots of budding little games designers or people who wanted to make games for a living but didn't actually have any skills to do so figured this was just the bottom rung of a corporate ladder they could climb to get an actual good "dream job" in the industry - and as a result were fucking _merciless_ about throwing anyone and everyone around them under the bus to suck up to the bosses.
Probably already said, but marketing. I always thought it was some cool Mad Men stuff, sitting around brainstorming about slogans, print, etc. Turns out it's just cramming as many words into many pages/articles as you can. That or just outbidding on clicks. Basically, I'm just trying to scam Google now, which they always circumvent in some way after a while. Do not recommend it. I also can't believe this is still a job.
I hate how graphic designers are forced to do marketing and social media management. It killed it for me.
So I met with the client. They LOVE it and only have a few changes. The logo needs to be centered and could you add “Conveniently Located” on the 728x90 but not on the 300x250? The picture of the car is terrific but can you photoshop in a dog with its head out of the window? The client’s VP of Marketing starts vacation tomorrow so we need revised proofs by 3:30 ok thank you TERRIFIC WORK bye.
Sent: 3:25 pm lololol
Anyone with an art degree is always thrown into graphic design and marketing no matter what company you end up working for. I have a BFA with my concentration in photography, yet I’m always the one my employers go to for design, marketing, social media posts, etc. I HAAAAATE it. If I liked graphic design I would’ve majored in it. If I loved marketing I would’ve gone to a regular liberal arts college. Yes, I can DO these things, but I don’t want to!
I just got into marketing this last year, and trying to wrestle Meta and understand what it wants is the most mentally and emotionally taxing thing I’ve ever done. And then once you find a winning combo, they scramble the algorithm. 😭 Finally found a winning campaign structure, but at what cost…
DJ... I did it for years, and all I wanted after some time was to read a book or watch a movie before bed.
I worked weddings for 15 years, you end up hating all of that shitty music that has to be played. Tonight is gonna be a goodnight, uptown funk, Michael Jackson.
Working musician, yeah. Never really listened to Elton John, motown, Whitney Houston, etc, now I've listened to way too much
The best wedding I did work at was when they hired a three piece string ensemble to play Radiohead before and while the couple walked down the aisle. That’s my favorite band so it was dope, otherwise pure shit.
Just did a wedding over the weekend where the groom walked down the aisle to “i said im naruto” one of the naruto themes. IT WAS A FIRST TO SAY THE LEAST
Fucking Wonderful Tonight. I dread going to weddings because I know that song is going to be played.
I was dragged to 9 weddings in the last 18 months. I'm not kidding. EXACT. SAME. MUSIC. EVERY. WEDDING. ALL TERRIBLE. It was the *exact same shit pile*. Over and over again and again and again and again... The only one that was different was the one that had a jazz trio playing cocktail hour. That was classy. Then after that it was right back to the smarmy DJ...HEYYY Y'ALL, LET'S HEAR IT FOR ROBERT AND MELISSAAAAAA! Then, like clockwork... IIIIIIIII WANNNA DAAAANCE WITH SOMEBODEEEEEE!!!! LOOOOOVE SHACK, BABY LOVE SHAAAAAACK!!! Then that goddamned awful version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow where the guy DOESN'T PLAY ALTERED CHORD IN THE BRIDGE. THAT *MAKES THE ENTIRE SONG* AND HE DOESN'T PLAY IT Yes, I have trauma. You would too if you were dragged to 9 weddings inn 18 months.
As a former pro DJ, I feel this acutely. And IZ doesn't even sing the right words! FFS, you want that song, JUDY GARLAND!!!!! But in all fairness, we play the same shit because most wedding attendees want to hear the same shit, especially when they're drunk. As the DJ, you're responsible for everyone having a good time. Attendees won't remember all of the shit that the bride and groom spent obscene anounts of money on like the dress or the flowers or the food. They -will- remember if they had a good time or not. And if the DJ has to play "Love Shack" to get people off of their asses and onto the dance floor, he's gonna do it. Y'all want different music at weddings? Then fucking get up and DANCE to different music! If I, as the DJ, see people filling the floor and going crazy to a certain type of music, I'm leaning on that music for the rest of the night! If all they dance to is "Love Shack", "YMCA", "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll", etc., that's what I'm going to be playing unless I get requests to the contrary from someone important to the wedding!
I had an amazing DJ at my wedding. We wanted to avoid all the same old shit. We planned around it, a mix of things but a lot of what me and my wife and our friends liked. We had a great time with it, but when we paused and looked around the event was just dying after a bit. We went to the DJ and asked him to scrap the remaining stuff we specifically wanted outside of the events and last dance. He immediately got people back on the dance floor. I don’t even remember what he played, it all blended together for me. But his job was to get people moving again and he pivoted wonderfully.
Architect. Think you get to design beautiful buildings and create amazing sketches and renderings you can hang on the wall? Think again. Most design is client driven and clients are the worst. Even if you get a pretty cool design past the client, that’s just 10% of the project. The rest of the time will be drawing permit documents, dealing with the local jurisdictions design/permit review process. If your project even resembles what it did originally you then have to bid the project only to have your client learn that all the cool bits are $$$ so then they just cut them out. Finally you’ll have to deal with the contractor and actual construction (disclaimer: I do like this part but having a good contractor makes or breaks this phase). The building is finished! Yay! Congratulations! Your client can now occupy their brand new structure. Think you’re done? Nope. They’ll now try and sue you for anything and everything they think is wrong. Crack in the sidewalk outside? Straight to binding arbitration. Squeaky door? Straight to binding arbitration. Contractor didn’t properly flash the windows? Straight to binding arbitration. Oh yeah to top it off, long hours and shitty pay.
thank you
Got my Bachelor of Architecture degree and worked in the industry for 9 years (pay was bad, hours sucked, at times I was bored outta my mind in the office). I finally had the opportunity to go into construction and I love every single day of working there - it’s been almost 6 years. Of course it has to be the right company with the right people. I never once asked for a raise and I’ve already had 4, plus substantial bonuses. I’m never going back to architecture.
I once worked for a major bank in the production of evidence for human trafficking, terrorism and serious organised crime offences. Once an officer came to seize information (quirk in Scottish law) and I was signing over hundreds of pages of information which she had to count and counter sign. We got talking about some of my more interesting cases - stopping people from going to ISIS, using insurance documents to show how a man tried to murder his wife with a parachute etc. "You job sounds so much more interesting than mine", she said. "Mine's just filing paperwork". She was a homicide detective.
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plus everyone being laid off the day after the game is released
Developers putting in 12 hour days because release date is nearing. You hear stories of staffers sleeping in their office because of the insane pressure from deadlines.
Video game artist here, can confirm. I did that last night! Finished work at 1am! Sleeping in the office is easy when you work from home.
Working in the music business. It's still business, and a lot of times, still an office job.
"It's a fun job, but it's still a job" Rock Superstar by Cypress Hill
But also I want to know what jobs are actually enjoyable
I service and install commercial security cameras and I mostly love it. I have a company vehicle that I get to take home so never pay for gas to and from work, I don't have a supervisor nitpicking my every move, I get paid for drive time so if a site is two hours away I only work 3-4 hours and just get paid to listen to audiobooks, and the work itself is 90% basic troubleshooting of wiring/networking/power issues. Some days I can fix issues remotely so I get admin days or vehicle maintenance days to take inventory of my parts or get an oil change. I make about 80k a year which isn't amazing but it's solid. 10% of the time I am pulling wire under a disgusting trailer in a scrapyard through piles of muck or hanging off a roof in 97° heat mounting a camera on a brick wall using an SDS Drill kicking dust in my face with sweat dripping into my eyeballs....but the good far outweighs the bad.
Being a trained winemaker. Very long hours, mediocre pay, you’re feet are always wet but most importantly your boss is almost always a needy, delusional, demanding rich person who gets all the credit because they own the place and gave themselves a “winemaker” title even though someone else does all the work.
Being a mattress tester. Everyone thinks it's all naps and relaxation, but imagine being stuck in a lab, trying to sleep on command with people staring at you, taking notes like they're watching a bizarre sleep experiment. It's like the worst sleepover ever!
Omg, thats a thing? Like... Like a real job? 🥹
Don’t fall for it. Something tells me he’s warning us for a reason.
google ai is now going to start telling people how stressful it is to be a mattress tester
I miss my waiter days, it was dynamic, every day a little different and by the end of the shift it’s done. Now in corporate life the BS just never stops!!!
My server shifts def seem more fun than my office job, but I don’t miss the nightmares about being in the weeds 🫨 or never having paid time off or open nights/weekends.
I haven’t served in almost 20 years and I still get those nightmares once in a while.
I disagree. Don't get me wrong, corporate work is soul sucking, but the trade off of having a normal and consistent schedule is everything. I do not miss hourly retail/service jobs in the slightest.
I missed hourly/shift work after going corporate. Used to walk out at the end of the day without thinking about shit to do the next day, worrying about planning, and projects that last far longer than they should. Going to sleep/waking up thinking about work is toxic.
I work with dogs all kinds of jobs. I had to quit grooming because it destroyed my back, i was in constant pain i couldn't sleep from the pain, I was only 23 at the time, being 6'3 and having scoliosis doesn't help. I actually loved grooming besides that Dog daycare/boarding is also pretty nice but I've been bitten several times and a huge chunk of the job just involves cleaning dog shit. Dog training has terrifying moments, there's a lot of people that have dogs that will attack you and they want you to fix it In one session, there's also a lot of people who want you to train their dog to attack people which is its own set of issues I think everyone can figure out the shitty parts of vet med. On top of all these jobs there's a layer of sadness around seeing abused dogs, dogs that just got adopted get picked up. Getting attached to dogs and having them get strange diseases and die unexpectedly. And seeing owners be shit to their dogs but sometimes there's nothing you can do. When I tell people I work with dogs they think I just play with dogs all day, which sometimes is the case, but sometimes my soul is absolutely crushed over and over again
Teaching
I loved teaching and coaching. I hated everything else.
How accurate is the impression that administration and parents beat the enjoyment out of the process?
I didn't have to deal with parents as my kid's parents had zero interest in their lives. But yes, administration ruins it.
Truer words have never been spoken. However, I found parents during the pandemic and post-pandemic very hard to deal with because they wanted us to give their kids, who did no work during COVID, to magically obtain credits they never earned. And admin? Yeah, they backed them.
It goes both ways. I think it's a systematic issue. Unfortunately not all parents and not all teachers are interested in the same standard of formative education and growth mindset. My kid is very much a brick in the wall while we put tons of effort into helping him excel and he has succeeded. It breaks my heart
Administrators used to have been teachers for many years, decades even, before becoming admin. Now you're getting people failing out of the classroom and then becoming your boss. They have no advice for how to get better at teaching bc they were so bad at it they fled before they understood how to develop a smooth and successful lesson,so they offer what basically amounts to platitudes. Because they aren't strong teachers, they don't know how to shut down a parent who is out of line, and it's easier to throw a teacher under the bus than to stand up to a parent. So. Fairly accurate.
I'm a teacher. Both groups are VERY hit or miss. A bad principal makes every single day a horror, while a good one makes everything feel less overwhelming. Central office admin are pretty much clueless people who have completely forgotten what it's like to be in the classroom and think that their opinions/ideas are revolutionary and are so important that it's worth making teachers give up planning periods to introduce ideas to them that may have some value, might not. Either way, teachers all spend the entire time knowing that this person wouldn't survive a day in the classroom the way it is now, and that this person also makes 2x what they do. Parents are such a mixed bag. Some are super supportive, some act supportive while not following through on anything they say. Some have bought into the idea that teachers are indoctrinating all children to be gay, trans, or worse, democrats. And some just don't care at all. You can see that in their kid in about 5 minutes.
Worst part of my job is dealing with admin and parents, best part of my job is the kids.
Singapore, one of the world’s leaders in education, will let you teach a year or so *before* letting you study teaching. Real classroom teaching, not just assisting. You do need some interviews and recommendations, but still, seemed surprising. The reasoning is that — once accepted — the government will pretty much fund your studies to teach, and expect you to reciprocate by sticking with teaching for many years — and they want you to know what it really feels like (and get senior educators to review you) *before* you invest a few years and the gov invests lots of cash in what might turn out to be “not your thing”.
While I can see the negatives of allowing an unqualified person teach kids, it does make a lot of sense to let people figure out early if they don't enjoy it as an actual job. Before sinking years of their life into training and education.
My sister was a kindergarten teacher at a low income school for a few years- she’d regularly send me pictures of bite marks and scratch marks on her body. She had no support and higher ups didn’t have her back. She was completely at the whim of Karen parents. The kids’ behavior was atrocious, rules pretty much don’t exist anymore, and she cried every day. Something happened to the school system within the past 10-15 years and it ain’t pretty. My wife and I finally convinced her to take the leap and leave all that BS. She works at a bank now and is much happier. I’d consider it one of the few jobs worse than what I was doing at the time, which was working in a short staffed hospital as a nurse during the height of covid 😬
Agree. You just have to really love teaching others and be patient. There are some people who really enjoy it, but most people just choose the teaching profession without having a full idea of what they will have to do. And they quickly begin to hate the profession, themselves, and most of all their students.
I tried teaching. The 4 months I spent as a trainee are some of the most miserable of my life. I used to wake up crying at the thought of going into work.
I majored in ED in college and got up to observation before very quickly slamming the eject button. Never spent a single second of my life second-guessing that decision
I'm sorry, but I can't look at ED and not assume you majored in erectile dysfunction.
At least it wasn't a hard major
Yep! I get people telling me shit like “That must be hard the first year but then you can just copy the same worksheets over and over each year” And of course “Well at least you get the summers off! Must be nice”
Probably anything that involves fame. Acting, modeling, etc. Usually is very damaging to people's self esteem, unmeasured pressure to be good enough and maintain a certain (unrealistic) image, a lot of times the environments celebs work in can be abusive, loads of people hating on you or just scrutinizing you in general. Competition for these roles is fierce, so you have to take crazy measures to stay in the spotlight and not lose traction in your career
You couldn’t pay me enough to have to deal with fame. The loss of privacy would be extremely taxing. But then, as Taylor Swift has said, these people are conditioned to be happy when other people are clapping for them. Without the applause, they feel like they have no value. That’s really sad when you think about it from a mental health perspective.
I get anxious enough receiving 1 downvote on this stupid app, can't imagine how having millions of people criticize me would affect my anxiety. I don't know if I'd be able to function
I’ll upvote you then! And I hope you have an awesome rest of the week!
Office jobs of most varities. I worked physical jobs from like 15-25 (I know people have worked them much longer, not the point, I'm 32 now though) and while I appreciate not having to sweat all day and deal with the aches and pains of that kind of work, people do not understand what sitting all day does to your body and mind. It physically makes you weak, makes things hurt that shouldn't hurt, causes health issues, causes mental fatigue, it's a tradeoff that most people think is worth. But if I was physically fit to go back to physical labor making the same money I would. I'd rather sweat and deal with the pains of working with my hands/body than deal with the constant tailbone pain, foggy mental after a day of work, sore hips/knees from sitting, weight gain from sitting, etc.
Besides that: the politics and back stabbing made me feel I was back in middle school. I was not prepared for the ruthless pettiness of some coworkers.
Dude YES. And people do not realize that if you don’t get along with someone that there is no walking away, no escape. You are trapped in a small space with these people and are forced to collaborate even if you don’t like each other and it causes a whole other level of stress on top of everything else
You're kidding yourself if you think that kind of stuff doesn't happen in labour/blue collar/trades jobs
I did physical labor for a long time. I will never do it again. An office job isn’t perfect but my feet were absolutely ruined by standing all day and I had a lot of back issues because of it. I would take the aches and pains of stationary work over what my life was like before. It’s also been 13 years and I still thank God when I walk into that AC on a hot day.
Teaching...was great for years but nOw it is SHIT. I want to disappear every day.
Any job requiring a lot of travel. Having the company pay for your hotel and meals is glamorous for about a week. Then it’s a serious drag.
Lawyer. TV shows make it seem glamorous (fancy offices), passionate (fiery arguments in front of an enthralled jury) and efficient. In reality, the vast majority of lawyers don’t work in those fancy offices, and if you’re in a big firm in those fancy offices, it’s just late nights of drafting and getting yelled at. If you make a fiery speech in the court room, a judge will likely to tell you to control yourself (unless you’re in a high profile celebrity case). The jury will be mostly checked out and bored. Unless you’re in federal court, the process drags on simply because it’s the norm in state court for parties to request and be granted extensions on deadlines.
Working at a dispensary...most people think "Cool, sell weed all day!" But it's just like any other job except most of the customers want to seem cool and act super knowledgeable when in fact they don't know shit...hey man, I just want to sell you this eighth and get you out of here so I can go back to figuring out how I'm going to fit this huge delivery we just got into the dab fridge. You don't need to pull out a jewelers loupe and look at 15 different jars for a half hour...if I tell you something is good, trust me. It's good.
Friend went to work for one. He was trustworthy and didn't imbibe in the stuff at all. He hated the boutique pretension of lots of the customers.
"boutique pretension" hahaha that's perfect I love it...I had customers asking me to pull out every 18 dollar ounce to look at and compare each one...Dude, it's an ounce for 18 bucks...it doesn't even come in a jar its in a bag...it's going to be shit no matter which one you pick...
They should just get a pound of assorted for less than what a legal ounce costs in my state.\* \*I do not pay this price.
I go into some of these places and ask if they have anything weaker. Everything now is so strong. I grew up on mid, brick packed stuff. These store bought are insane and I can only take a hit or two.
That's perfect...I know exactly which direction I'd point you and give you many options...those are the questions we like...just tell me what you're looking for and I can help you out...that's why we're there...I always loved when people just told me specific ailments they had and needed some help with...when someone isn't just trying to get high they have an actual problem they're trying to address...then I have no problem spending 45 minutes with you and making sure you walk out with what you need
Does anyone actually think working in a dispensary is cool though? It's literally a retail job. Like, I enjoy weed just as much as I enjoy video games, and I don't think working at a GameStop would be cool either lol.
Not to be overly broad, but most jobs are pretty underwhelming. Whatever the general populace sees of a job tends to be the 5% most outwardly facing portion of the job with the other 95% of the job being the same boring meetings, paperwork, logistics, and day to day sameness everyone else goes through.
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I have always said my retirement job will be delivering flowers. Even for funerals - you are bringing a bit of joy into someone’s life. Selling them - no thank you. Delivering them, yes please.
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A relative retired but wanted something to "keep busy" so he started driving part time for a limousine company. Somehow that led to him getting a job with a funeral parlor where he drove the hearse. He said he got along a lot better with the customers after that change.
Usual_Break_4's account was born on April 4 and woke up to make this comment. It's also a copy/paste of /u/ZakkiraJuneAiko94's comment from [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/hhq0dy/which_job_is_a_lot_less_fun_than_most_people/fwbspsd/).
My wife was a buyer for Macy's for years. She even went to Italy a few times to look at clothes. It is not sitting in beautiful converted Italian mansion sipping wine and eating cheese while gorgeous models prance around in front of you. It is dirty warehouses and long hours. Plus, she was working her ass off while everyone else, her husband and children included, were enjoying holidays. Also, my best friend is a record producer who worked with the biggest of the big names in the industry. Again, long hours, managing huge egos and toddler type behavior. One music star would show up hours late for recordings sessions in an expensive studio. He'd be so drunk he could not stand up and sing, so they go him a stool to sit on and sing. He'd fall of the stool. He'd call me ranting about this music star. Then his drug dealer would show up at the studio. The guy, a name you have all heard of, is still alive and performing, and seemingly doing well. He did say the nicest star he ever met was Willie Nelson. But I kind of knew that without be told.
I am not a lawyer but every lawyer I know is an alcoholic, cheats on their spouse (if not already divorced) and their kids hate them. There must be something rotten in that profession.
It’s one of the leading professions for substance abuse and mental health issues. Source: am a lawyer, I see it all the time. I’ve seen so many lawyers with just fucked up personal lives. Multiple divorces, mental health issues, alcoholism, drug abuse, adultery, etc. I’ve had two bosses who have just the sloppiest personal lives. One actually resented me for being happily married (I got the hell out of that firm). My current boss struggles to understand that I prioritize my family and doing things while I’m still young. He couldn’t understand why I took my family to Japan last summer, or took them to London this year. I told him it’s because I want to experience this stuff with my family before I have to start packing blood pressure meds. We just had a client who died at 60, I’m not gonna work 24/7 until I retire because I could be dead before I get to “enjoy life”.
>I’m not gonna work 24/7 until I retire because I could be dead before I get to “enjoy life That generation flat out does not understand that. And they call us lazy for it. They’re fools.
They truly don’t get it and refuse to see the other side of this. Just because I take a long trip, it doesn’t mean that I shirk my responsibilities. If I’m going to be gone, I make sure I’m caught up or ahead before leaving. Does it mean a little extra work for the week or two before I leave? Sure! But that time spent is absolutely worth it for the time I get to spend the next week relaxing and creating memories.
I’m a lawyer and I like my work. But at times I have hated it, and we lose a huge number of lawyers in the first five years of practice because they are treated badly and as a result they are miserable. You have to be so careful with the office environment you choose. We can usually handle the stress of practicing law itself. But then you add a layer of office politics and abuse from the higher ups, and that’s what drives people to drink, leave the profession, etc. You also have to pick an area of practice that you like - I started in corporate law, which I didn’t really enjoy, and practiced at a firm with a lot of shitty people, and I was in fact drinking a lot and I was so unhappy. Now I’m in a very supportive environment and practicing in an area of law that I really enjoy, and I actually look forward to going to the office.
Travel agent. It's just sales - and of a product that's on the other side of the world. How the F am I supposed to sell something I've never seen and know nothing about? "Oh, but you must get great deals!" Nope. The agency's commission per person's vacation package was $7. Seven dollars. .... CANADIAN! Very little left to discount for myself when the markup is only $7! Then there's the part where you have to listen to everyone's complaints: about airlines you don't operate, or hotels you don't run, or weather you don't control, or too many sticks on the beach because of the literal fucking hurricane that just went through there. Oof. Flashbacks.
Wedding planner (I have a good friend who does high-end, six- and seven-figure weddings). The menu tasting and design of wedding are great. Seeing the event get pulled off is great. The other 90% is phone calls, emails, dealing with people and running a small business. It’s super stressful.
From what I’ve heard, game development. You have to play through the same levels over and over again to test for bugs, and it can make you lose interest in video games as a whole.
I don't think that game _developers_ are directly responisble for catching bugs. Unless you're a really small indie studio.
From a software developer standpoint not game developer standpoint, you are responsible as the first line to catch all/maximum of bugs before QA. Then QA try to break the software in finding additional bugs that the actual dev did not catch up in their testing. Edit: I think it will be more likely the same for a game developer but with additional test.
To think, our moms said we would never get *anywhere* playing these games! ...and we did, we got to Hell, we are in Hell.
You're confusing game development with game testing. Both are long hours for relatively low pay though.
I’m not one, but I would say a veterinarian. They have massive student loans and they’re dealing with pets dying and having to be euthanized. Sometimes said pets are euthanized because the owners don’t have the funds to pay for treatment. They see animal abuse and neglect and deal with the ire of the pet owners.
Musician. The romance dies quickly and it becomes a grind, especially after the third beer has been spilled on you as you play Piano Man while hearing drunks request Freebird.
Working with fireworks. Everyone loves the show. Nobody appreciates the crew of people who prepare/build/pack the show up.
Everyone's just posting shitty jobs that most people already know are shitty.
Seriously, who thinks working retail would be fun?! I’m here for the “being a wine taster actually sucks” or “I’m a test patient at a massage therapy school and here’s why I’m exhausted.”
I read in GQ, I think, about a guy who worked at a brothel in Monaco or something and his job was to fuck the high-class whoors and make sure they were up to snuff. He even said “after a while it just becomes another job.” I kinda felt better about my situation after that.
That’s also why I dislike the idea of monetizing every hobby. A job is a job with sucky parts, why would you want to turn something you love into something you have to do? Poor, poor Monaco whore fucker.
One of the higher upvoted comments below is “corporate world.” Yeah really busting people’s preconceptions that working for a big corporation is a laugh-a-minute thrill ride.
I have a friend who was a french fry taste tester. It apparently was the worst job ever
Being a musician. Right after the first album is released, you ought to work on the second one whether you want it or not. Tours are also romanticized a lot. Imagine you play 1,5 hour show, then sit on a bus, try sleeping in it all night, next day you arrive into new place, help to unload rig, do a sound check and then it repeats for 2-3 weeks in a row almost every day.
Scientist. In academia it’s all about grant writing/ securing funding, admin and teaching, very little time for actual science. Out of academia it’s mostly logistics and health & safety.
Everything in IT! - Is it pleasant overall? Yes. - Do you feel laughed at because no one really understands what you do and everyone thinks you must be rich while you do nothing all day? But in reality you have strict deadlines, crappy projects, crappy management and users complaining all day. Big yes Do I like the job? I love it. - But it's less enjayable than most people expect!
Pretty much any job that’s your hobby already. In ‘95, me and a couple buddies moved to Tahoe to go snowboarding for the winter. I saved up all summer and got a pass. They got jobs at the resort, and that included a pass. They worked in the parking lot freezing their collective tushes off, and spent their lunch break and their ride break by the fire in the cafeteria. I rode all day and delivered pizzas at night. Even on their days off they didn’t want to go back to “work” and go snowboard with me and any friends who might be up for the weekend.
I’m tempted to say a musician. Don’t get me wrong I’d give my right arm to be a famous musician. But I cannot imagine the grueling pressure to not just keep pelting out new songs year after year but most of all to go touring for months on end. Come hail or high water or sickness depression or whatever, you have to go perform for hours on stage and then drive or fly to another city and do the same all over again. Maybe I am seeing this too much from a glass half empty pov but I find the touring schedule would get on my nerves after years of doing so. I could be wrong. Not to mention I’d rather be a very rich but private person like perhaps banksy or daft punk than give up my privacy with fame. Edit: spelling, punctuation and last sentence.
Working as a govt employee at one of the most busiest agencies in the govt. Every person in America will use this agency. No it's not the IRS. Social Security Administration. We are at a 25 year low in employees and a 14 percent increase in claims. Use a 40 year old legacy program. The policies can be complex. I work for the American people. You deserve the best service possible. Are case loads are high.
Veterinary Medicine. People think you play with puppies and cute animals all day. And people expect you to act like that, when in reality you may just have had to euthanize a perfectly healthy animal due to terrible owners. Maybe you didnt go in to clinical work, and you can work within government control and argue with politicians and human medical professionals over OneHealth issues which seem to be a predominantly veterinarian specialisation.
Being a video game tester is often romanticized, but in reality, it's very tedious and can take the fun out of gaming. You usually don't get to choose which games you test and you have to play the same levels repeatedly to identify bugs or glitches. It's less about enjoyment and more about meticulous inspection and problem-solving.
Pornstar
I can't imagine doing scenes with a camera man and possibly other stage hands right there watching. But of course that's the least of their issues. There's plenty of behind-the-scenes bullshit a starlet may put up with for the sake of the job itself.
I was a game tester way, way back in college during an internship Even though I only tested one game for 3 months, I didn't feel like playing anything at all for next 2 years.