What's Your Job Like?

Just sitting here thinking about jobs and how everyone always looks at other jobs and thinks they look better than their own. I would like to hear what people do and what they like and dislike about it…The reason I am thinking this is that I have done three different jobs in the last year all with different Pro’s and Con’s. I would really lke to think I will try some other jobs in my life and I would like to hear about other peoples jobs.

Here are mine:

Bar Manager

Pros:
-Does not require a lot of thought and the work environment is fun
-Lots of freebies (concerts/sporting events/etc.)
-Job autonomy/freedom to decide on promotions and events
-Flexible work hours
-Fun Staff/built in social life
-Free food and beverage

Cons:
-Not a tenured position
-wage/job performance tied to sales
-Unhealthy work environment
-Free food and beverage!!!
-When the &*&% hits the fan (fights, etc.) it can get ugly
-long/late hours
-Your phone will NEVER stop ringing with staff issues, maintenance issues, promotions, every call you can imagine…

Strength and conditioning trainer for athletes

Pros:
-excellent to train and work with motivated athletes
-gratifying to see your athletes improve
-healthy work environment
-work and train outside in the sun
-Pay can be really good
-You are your own boss

Cons:
-At the mercy of your clients schedule
-working with lazy athletes who you need to remove from your program or take the blame for their lack of perormance
-takes a while before you start making good money or recoup initial investment in setting up a facility

Teacher

Pros:
-Monday to Friday 8-4
-Summer and holidays off
-When you see that you have made a difference or have a student come back and tell you that you were a positive role model for them
-Autonomy to run your classroom how you see fit (within reason)
-Tenured position
-Good benefits and steady pay

Cons:
-Your not gonna get rich!!!
-Working with kids all day is physically and mentally exhausting
-A lot of Bureaucracy, meetings, legal issues, handbooks, policies (I think you get the picture)
-Surprisingly lonely because all you see is kids all day…

How about everyone else…

Jackson

I would like to augment your teacher pro and cons. Sure, some teachers do have summer and holidays off. Most I know work until they go to bed and work on the weekends as well. Then, if they support a club, etc. they will work over holidays and in the summer. Since the pay is not good, they work (teaching or other) during the summer.

It is like they say being a college professor is a great job. The saying in my department is “it is great because you can choose the 80 to 90 hours a week you work.” If you have tenure, of course. More hours and less choice, if not. Summer, in this case, is for research (and hopefully you have outside funding.)

I have had jobs you could leave at the office when the day was through. Teaching, at any level, is not one of those.

Sorry, rant.

I’ve been the head of IT in a large hospice for the last 6 months.

Pro’s.

Good money
I like IT and mucking about with computers
Friendly professional people
Get to interact a lot with the patients
Great environment

Con’s
Not so long ago I was saying goodnight to one of our patients who I’d been helping out with her laptop. I sat next to her in her bed and I could see something was wrong. She reached out for my hand and coughed - blood. Started coming from her nose, eyes, ears, mouth. I hit aid call and sat with her waiting for her to die.

In all honesty, this is a pro too. I’d known her for just a few weeks and believe me the look on her face of friendship in her last moments was incredible.

I may retrain as a social worker. Not as much money but I don’t need much money.

i work weekends at Petsmart in Everett, MA on weekends (in case yall want to see me) when i first started it sucked and i hated it. although now its pretty laid back. i usually have a gallon of milk with me to drink on the floor and i fuck around with the other employees, shoot the shit, and mess around on the intercom. a couple managers are cool shit and dont mind us fucking around cause most the people who work there are like 17-20 and the managers are usually like 25 but one is a fuckin douchebag that everyone wants to get fired.

last time i worked it was one of the cool managers last day so we T.P.'d the breakroom and some girls decorated it with miscellaneous things from the store and got her a cake and shit, it was pretty cool. those are the times im talking about when shit is all good and everyone is having fun but there are some really fucking shitty days too.

8am to 3pm - Molding Plant Manager

PROS:
-I work for my dad in the family business.
-I’m my own boss 90% of the time.
-I get to work with my hands.
-I get to solve problems.
-I get to tell people what to do.

CONS:
-I work for my dad.
-Injection molding is not the most profitable business anymore.
-Because it’s my family and my business, I can’t leave work at work. I worry about meeting deadlines, material shortages, price increases, etc constantly.
-I’m responsible if the shit hits the fan.

I a manager at an OTB. OTB stands for Off Track Betting. People come here to bet on Horse Races, which we show live via satellite. There isn’t much gambling in this state, other than the lottery, and we have no competition in the horse racing business so we are basically a monopoly.

Pros:
-Interesting environment, filled with a very odd and unique collection of misfits, losers and degenerates. I have always liked to people watch, and these are some interesting “people”. I use quotation marks because some of them don’t even qualify as human.

Of course they can be obnoxious. Take your worst customer service experience, add alcohol and gambling. But I was not good at confrontation before I came here, I’d either be too nice, or fucking explode, so learning to deal with these assholes has been good for me. I’ve also made friends with a few degenerates, and a few cops as well.

-I like the People I work with. There are a couple of attractive women here, and that makes it easier to come to work.

-Plenty of time to dick around on the internet, like right now.

-It’s easy. I’ve dealt with just about any contngency you can think of, theft, fire, plumbing disasters. There aren’t any surprises left.

Cons:
-It’s easy. No challenge.

-No chance for advancement, and no desire.

-No job security. I’ve been here for 5 years, and the whole time I have expected to get fired any day for going ballistic on some whiney, belligerent sack of shit who gets in my face at the wrong time.

I want to be a fire-fighter, and have been putting in my applications and taking tests for a while now. I hope something comes through by this summer. I’ll be 30 and would like to be started on a real career by then. In the mean time, I don’t mind staying here.

I’m a trainer. I love it.

Cons would be that since I own the business, there’s a risk that everything could go down. That won’t happen, but the risk is there.

Dealing with difficult people can be annoying. But in a way this is a plus because I’m forced out of my comfort zone and have to rely on diplomacy.

I do hate the 5am starts. And my biggest problem is telling all my early morning guys that I won’t do them anymore. They get really upset when you take away their early morning sessions for some reason!

I work for a very high end Drapery, Carpet, Upholstery cleaning company. I like my job but I’m getting a little old for it and I don’t do good on the management side of things. Still planning a chance to personal trainer in a year or two.

Pro’s
Work by myself
Meet some really cool people
Instant results
Benefits, dental & medical
Each job averages 2 hrs (eat lots)
Work is physically demanding (moving furniture)
Have a really clean house
Company vehicle
Commission based (can make good money)

Con’s
I have a boss
Meet some really disgusting slobs
Work some very long days
I have a boss
Have to clean van daily (or live with the stink)
Sweat like hell in the summer
I have a boss
Have slow and busy seasons
Friends always want freebies
Did I mention I have a boss
People continue to buy white cotton furniture (very bad idea)

Well, I worked at Garden Center for ten years.

Pros-

  • good tan in the summer

Cons-
-Everything else.

Right now I’m a machinist.

Pros-

  • You feel manly working with metal all day

Cons-

  • Everything else.

By next week I may be either an editorial assistant, an office worker in health insurance, or a barback at a big bar in Jersey.

I’ll let you know how any (or none) of them go.

Sr. Systems Administrator (a.k.a. computer geek)
I did this thing for a number of years and I think I explored most of the branches of this “tree”. Now I’m actually doing quite a bit of non-sysadmin stuff, such as programming, databases, etc. I also have a lot of networking and network security stuff on my resume.

Pros:

  • good salary and benefits
  • clean and quiet environment
  • live in the Silicon Valley (wait, isn’t that on the Cons list?)
  • flexible schedule
  • can probably relocate pretty easily
  • lots of fun if you like computers
  • interact with some real smart people every day

Cons:

  • spending a bazillion hours per year with your eyes glued to the screen will make you a total nerd if you aren’t already one
  • paradoxically, less freedom than in a purely physical job (this kind of job uses your mind, so you’re not free to think of anything you want while you work)
  • can be pretty stressful, apparently for no reason. But it’s true. This job has a high percentage of burn-outs.
  • interact with total geekazoids every day
  • when something doesn’t work, it’s assumed it’s your fault. When everything works fine, nobody notices. You morons, you aren’t supposed to notice a reliable network!

This job is really fun only at the senior levels. As a junior sysadmin you’ll be doing a pretty menial and robotic job.

I’m an illustrator. I make a nice income drawing pictures on my Mac for a living. My studio is in my home, so I never have to drive to work. One of my regular gigs is illustrating 21 spot illustrations for MuscleMag’s “Muscle Bites” column every month.

I’m a graphic designer and also work at home.
Pros:
I set my own schedule
I train when I want to
I sleep in
Cons:
Chasing down the money
Keeping track of the books
Now that my daughter is old enough to be home alone after school for a few hours, I’m starting part time as a merchandising coordinator at a major fashion label. I still will have to do layouts, but here is some variety in the new job that will be fun. And it will be nice to get out of the house after 7 years of working at home. They have a nice gym on site too.
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Software Performance Tester.

When I’m not at a client actually doing what it is that I do, I sit in the office and kill time on T-Nation.

Otherwise I rock up at a client, learn what it is their software should do, come up with a plan to hopefully find the performance related bugs, write some scripts to simulate many human users and test test the system with these scripts, point developers at bugs, write a report on what I did.

Its a consultant role - I get go to different work places and learn new things often. I get to create scripts (baby version of what a real programmer does). It pays well.

Much better than what I did before which was desktop support - (every question is answered: “Shut the fuck up and reboot your fucking PC, you complete fucking retard.”).

I’m currently studying for a law degree and what to take this ‘consultant’ thing a step further and become a barrister or such and advise on legal matters concerning information technology.

To better explain I make florin’s life hell and someone like me would be helping T-Nation fix the problems with their server’s having issues lately…

I walked away from a job in law that would have set me up for life in 5-10 years because:

Pros - money
Cons - everything else, especially never seeing my family and working for fat, greedy rats

Now I work as a private tutor (satisfaction of helping students reach their potential without the bureaucratic mess that is 90% of teaching in school) and am pursuing a career with the police (great money, outdoor job, physical, good hours).

[quote]Tex Ag wrote:
I would like to augment your teacher pro and cons. Sure, some teachers do have summer and holidays off. Most I know work until they go to bed and work on the weekends as well. Then, if they support a club, etc. they will work over holidays and in the summer. Since the pay is not good, they work (teaching or other) during the summer.

It is like they say being a college professor is a great job. The saying in my department is “it is great because you can choose the 80 to 90 hours a week you work.” If you have tenure, of course. More hours and less choice, if not. Summer, in this case, is for research (and hopefully you have outside funding.)

I have had jobs you could leave at the office when the day was through. Teaching, at any level, is not one of those.

Sorry, rant.[/quote]

x2

And don’t apologize. My job at my school is, let me catch my breath, Network Administrator Webmaster Teacher Business Department Chair. It’s a private school so I get paid much much less than anyone doing a similar job. Staff are fantastic people to work with. I am ‘king’ of technology there, so I do no wrong and am the SME in everything. This is my fifth year.

I’m a project Engineer for a bay area construction firm.

Pros:

-Excellent base salary
-Excellent bonuses, not commission based
-EXCELLENT retirement plan
-It’s what I went to school for
-Projects last about a year, then you move on to the next project in a new location
-It’s challenging as hell to manage 30+ subcontractors at the same time
-I work on site every day with “blue collar” guys, not office yuppies who brown nose all day
-I work with guys twice my age who have been in the company for 25+ years who encourage me to learn and ask questions as much as I want
-I live in the central valley where housing is cheap, but I earn bay area wages which are high. Not many people in California can afford to buy a home only two months after graduating college, but I managed to do it.

Cons:

-Long commute, but as stated in my final point above, it’s worth it because I can afford a home of my OWN. Small piece of shit homes in the bay area can go for 600k+
-Really can’t think of any more cons