Our weekend "store manager" at our little baby retail store has finished her law degree and has headed off to do whatever it is young lawyers do these days, and until we find a replacement, that means the duty falls to moi.
Being there has given me an opportunity to contemplate the meaning of "boring job". You see dear reader, this store, quite deliberately, isn't in a high traffic location and there's a limit to the amount of shelf cleaning and stock filling we can do before it's all done. After that? Well let's just say the internet connection at the sales desk gets a bit of a work-out.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying retail is boring. I used to do Thursday nights and Saturdays at our local department store when I was in high school, and it seemed like an ok life, even if it wasn't going to be my career. I just started wondering, though, about "boring" and "interesting" jobs.
If I'd asked you to describe life with the US Military fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, you probably wouldn't use the word "boring". There are lots of words you might use and your choice will probably be influenced by your political perception, but I'm reasonably certain that without first hand knowledge, "boring" isn't on your list. However, before you decide, read this blog from a soldier on the front line. (It will open in a new window or tab.)
Ok. Maybe fighting the Taliban is an extreme example. It's not so much a career choice as a policy position for whatever politician sent you there, so what about a career behind the camera in TV or the movies?
Our office is right next door to Fox Studios in Sydney, which means we often see film crews out and about doing whatever it is they do. From the outside, this looks like not much at all. There's a lot of people standing around and by the look of them, each has about 5 minutes of very specialised work to do at some point during the day-long shoot. The rest of the time.... hmmmm... apparently you can't even whip out a book because you're supposed to look interested and be alert in case your five minutes comes up in the next five minutes.
A friend of mine used to be what's loosely described as a "top fashion model", except that she had (has) a brain, which, if you're a model, isn't a great asset. Her common description of her modelling career is "tediously boring", which she acknowleges is a tautology, but which she uses anyway to somehow add additional emphasis.
And can someone tell me what an Astronaut does? I mean, career "astronauts" get to fly into space maybe two or three times in their lives, IF they're lucky. That's maybe twenty or thirty days tops. The rest of the time is spent on terra firma with the rest of us, training, and going to parties where you get to tell people you're an astronaut.
These are supposed to be the cool jobs people... glam, exiting, dream jobs that always get a "wow" from whoever asks the "what do you do?" question. Bah!
Ok... so let's look at the slightly more mundane... at what my parents would have called "a real job", like being a 747 pilot flying between Sydney and LA? Sounds great, yeah? I'm sure it gets the right reaction at those same parties but let's see... you arrive at work, spend forever going through a tedious but very necessary pre-flight check list, and then you drive the bus out to the end of the runway, push the throttle forward and whoosh... off you and your flight computer go. The next 30 minutes climbing to cruising altitude would go by rather quickly and...
... for the next 13 hours, there's really not much for you to do. You can't even sit back and watch a movie or play chess with the co-pilot. And post 9/11, you can't even talk about gladiator movies with young cockpit guests. At the end of the flight, you have 30 minutes of being told "descend", "turn left", "turn some more", "climb", "hold", "change radio channels", "turn right", and then you land. Doing rolls or loop-the-loops isn't allowed under any circumstances. The job generally only gets "not-so-boring" if you're not doing it properly, or if some idiot in maintenance didn't do his properly, but on balance, this doesn't happen nearly often enough to keep things interesting. Of course, you get paid quite well, which is the only reason another friend of mine keeps doing it.
An ex girlfriend is a "plant pathologist". When she first told me, I had this image flash into my straw brain of a tree walking into her office to get a sap test. She used to get really excited about plant pathology. For me... well let's just say I have difficulty deciding if the plant in my office is real or plastic. She spends her day staring down a microscope in some CSI style government agriculture lab trying to decide if the Wheat Blight came from the field to the north or the east. Exciting huh?
Our recently departed law grad isn't going into law. To quote her... "are you serious? Can you actually see me processing damned property contracts for the rest of my life? I think not." She hasn't decided what she wants to do... she just knows it won't be either law or retail. I think she wants to try a modelling career.
A guy I went to school with is a procedures analyst for a major supermarket chain. His job is to look at the day-to-day procedures of running a store and make recommendations that are supposed to make the stores run better.
Seriously. This is what he does... He observes how a store runs and writes up store manuals that stay stuff like "Twenty Dollar Notes shall be removed from the register and folded so that the picture of Hargraves faces out. This will allow for easier counting when the cash reaches the store's counting room." Clearly, he hasn't spent any time standing at the checkout that's emptying its register because otherwise he'd know just how pissed off those of us standing there get while the check out chick takes the time to properly turn and fold the cash. Actually, he's now the Procedures Analysis Manager, which means he trains and runs a team of people formulating these policies. Inevitably, of course, local store staff just think it's all a joke, which means he suffers terribly from depression and feelings of insignificance.
I was at the local Police Station the other day (perhaps a story for another time) and the officer was complaining about the amount of admin she has to do each day. I asked her how much of her time is actually devoted to catching bad guys or running crowd control duty at some local event. "Oh, about 5%". The rest, she said, is just boring paperwork. "But at least I'm not the security guard standing outside the local bank", she added, as though the tedium of others somehow made it all ok.
The most boring job on the planet was, in my estimation, that of a toll collector on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At least that's what I thought until just after 9/11 when some great mind in the Government decided that we'd better put a security guard on the pedestrian walkway to guard against a terrorist attack.
This, of course, is an utterly failed strategy because if a terrorist was going to hit our most famous icon, they'd probably just drive onto the bridge in a truck filled with something that goes boom, about which there's little a lone guard could do because a)trucks can't get onto the walkway and b)he's not going to last long wandering across the lanes of 70kph traffic checking trucks for people who may or may not be terrorists. He's therefore left to spend his day wandering aimlessly backwards and forwards among the walk-to-workers, joggers and tourists.
At least, sitting behind this sales desk, I can ramble on in a blog to kill a few minutes.
4 comments:
LOL. I so relate CTB. When I was working I used to have interesting jobs for the most part - I mean, I'd say they were 80% interesting - and if a boring job came across my desk, I could usually flick it off to someone further down the ladder to do. To them, it was interesting.
You're so right - boredom is relative.
I had a boring job once but I loved because it meant I could read all day. So long as I kept the book below the counter (on my lap)nobody minded at all. This was in the olden days, before interweb access was standard - in fact it was so long ago I don't think I even knew it existed!
dancingmorganmouse is right. A boring job can be good as long as you are given the freedom to do something other than work. Like writting a blog.
Boredom absolutley is relative. Even at various times during the same job. I'm bored stupid right now but only because what I'm doing now is nowhere near as exciting as chasing down insurgents and having random gun fights. But it doesn't matter anyway, we all play our part regardless of how exciting it is.
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