I really love my job. I manage a social service agency that connects the developmentally disabled with families that help them achieve a better quality of life. In general social services is definitely a calling, as is working with the retarded. This position in particular is a bit less clinical and a bit more administrative than I originally intended for my career. However, I get to be on-call quite a bit, which gives me some clinical time. Once my son is a bit older, I may go back to doing Rape Crisis counseling volunteer/pro bono- the other area I am especially called to.
I don’t know if I would be ‘happier’ per say, but I could be equally as fullfilled being a photographer. I almost-majored in it during college (almost enough credits for a double major), but I couldn’t deal with the perspective of a truly unstable income, and possibly no income if my artistic abilities were only mediocre in the real world.
Were money truly no object, I would continue doing what I’m doing, part-time, or do rape counseling part-time, and spend the other half working on my book and taking my kid to the zoo.
Whatever you do, never take a mime class for college credit. It’s not the easy A you imagine.
I have what some people would consider a “dream job” – I design videogames. Sometimes it’s very, very cool indeed. Marathon brainstorming sessions. Really digging down deep into the play mechanics. Level design. That’s the fun stuff.
Downsides? Probably the biggest is the same thing anybody in any creative field experiences: You’re putting a piece of yourself on public display and hoping you don’t get laughed at. Sometimes I wish I had a job where I could just do A-B-C-D over and over again and call it a day. But I’m expected to be aggresssively creative, 24/7. It’s not easy to sustain. I’ve described it as being forcefed a food you love day after day.
I suppose I subconsciousy trained for this job my whole life. I’ve always loved board games and RPGs. I actually like analyzing their rule systems more than actually playing them. I’ve actually bought games just to read their rules. Before I did this professionally I designed games as a hobby. My wife laughs at me because right now I’m actually working on a little interactive fiction project on the side; I come home from a long day of designing games and unwind by DESIGNING MORE GAMES.
About the only other job I can imagine doing is writing full time. Mostly because I sometimes get sick of dealing with team politics. It’s fun to fantasize about a creative job where I wouldn’t have to collaborate with anyone.
Another librarian checking in. I work circulation and reference at a small academic library. I love it. When you’re a librarian, there’s no such thing as useless information. I find myself touching just about every subject area I’ve ever studied over the past twenty years or so. I love working with people, and our patrons are all pretty cool. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’ve never had the same day twice, but there’s certainly more variety than your average cubicle job.
I’m currently working on my second masters so that I can go on to bigger and brighter things within my library, but I have to say that this job is a great introduction. Even after I get the masters degree, I just might stick with my position get as much out of the position as I can.
I certainly don’t love doing my job (I dare you to find one tech support worker who loves it), but I love having it. I work nights on a rolling schedule where I work two nights in a row and then have four nights off. It gives me more money than I need and oodles of free time. What’s not to love?
I’m a teacher. Let’s put it this way…I love what my job is supposed to be. I love kids and I love helping people. I love learning, too. But I am burnt out. What used to be teaching is now test prep. I can’t put my own individual stamp on my lessons because…I am only allowed to do things that “the research” has said is effective. (Never mind that the research changes every six months or so.)
I have a boss who was decent to the teachers for three years. But now she’s heavily pushing her agenda. She’s turned the school I work at into a real high pressure situation. There’s no buy in and sadly, in my 20 + years that I’ve been teaching, I’ve never seen a staff so quietly angry and burnt out.
Ooops, I might be part of the reason for your burn out. I work for a standarized testing company. I can’t say that I love it, although it is far better than anything else I’ve had. It really depends on the time of year and what projects I’m working on. It is very much feast or famine. Some weeks are very busy, others I’m off from work.
How many of you think of your job as ‘just a job’ and how many of you see it as a calling? Was this a conscious choice? That is, did you want a job to love or was this not important to you at the time?
I’m somewhere in the middle. Love would be a strong word, but I do really, really like my job. I don’t see it as a calling, I see it more as just a fun job. I’ve learned more about wine and the winemaking process than I ever imagined I would. I occasionally get to drink wine at work! The pay, the benefits, and the perks (free/cheap wine!) are all pretty nice. At the end of the day though, it is still ‘just a job’, a way to pay the bills and afford this lifestyle.
In some ways it was a conscious choice to find a job I enjoyed, even though I didn’t know at the time what exactly that might have been. I’ve enjoyed jobs I’ve held in the past, but I’d say this is the most enjoyable so far.
*With the knowledge you have now, do you think you would have been happier with something else? If so, why? *
I’m sure there are things I would enjoy more, but at this time I’m very comfortable where I am.
Now, imagine this: you don’t have to work at all. What would you find yourself doing?*
I’d be on a sailboat somewhere in the Mediterranean.
I am an RN and I work in a stepdown unit. I used to work ICU, but adrenalin is an over-rated hormone.
I like helping people. I like working with physicians and contributing to a pt’s progress etc. I like having a body of expert knowledge–I am very good at what I do.
I am incredibly burnt out and need to move on, permanently. I left nursing once before and swore I would never go back. But we had a severe financial blow and I needed a job that week–so back into nursing went I. I have excellent benefits, I am somewhat underpaid, but I do only work PT–but every day is hell. I dread going in; I hate being there; I hate working short every damn day and when we protest are told to stop whining. It’s a horrible position to be in-trying to make a dollar out of $0.69 every day.
I am going to take the GRE in January, hopefully get into a Master’s program and become a librarian!
I am very excited–I have wanted to do this for a very long time.
maggots don’t faze me in the least.
Sorry, forgot to add: if I didn’t have to work, at first I would travel and see all the places that I want to see.
But I would eventually do some kind of work-either paid or volunteer. Maybe involving literacy and/or community outreach.
Not nursing–never again. I need to hang on for about 3 more years and then I am done. I hope I make it.
Welcome to the Dope, Valentine. Hope you sign up. And I’m amazed that no one thought to grap that username!
I’m one of the few remaining people who gets to do research in industry, but close to the real stuff, not in a research group. I get paid to organize and program chair conferences, to work on cool stuff I make up, and to get called in for real interesting problems. Yeah, I love it. I also love my company (which is not all that popular these days). I was a customer before I was an employee. I believe in it, which helps, and I love that our management does what they think is right, not what Wall Street wants. They refuse to be a me-too company, and that is really great. So I love my job and my company, and they’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers from my keyboard.
Man, it’s nice to see so many people who love their job.
Unfortunately, I’ve never had a job I hated more:
I’m in a new city and the people here are, well…different.
I have (seriously) the world’s worst boss, who sometimes says/does things that lead me to believe she’s mentally not right. She leads by condescension, she contradicts herself daily, she does not allow anyone to dispute her, she shifts blame, she’s a control freak: throws away things on peoples’ desks if she thinks they don’t need them anymore, changes computer settings on others’ computers when they’re out of the office. And on. And on. And on. I’m still here, partially because my therapist believes that she is my mother’s doppelganger and that I need to face up to her and not walk out like I have seriously planned to do at least 3 times in the last 9 months I’ve been here. And partially because I’m not convinced that every other job in this new city isn’t going to be staffed with people exactly like her.
(prepare yourself for world’s longest run-on sentence, which I’m not going to correct because it’s exactly how I feel) I have a college degree in what I do but at the end of the day, I don’t like what I do and wish I hadn’t had to make such a big decision as a teenager about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, because in the 15 years since I graduated, I’ve “grown up” in ways I would have never foreseen, and now I’m just…dissatisfied, with a feeling of impossibility about getting a degree for something completely different while needing to keep my 40 hour/week job so that I can pay off the college loan I still have and the credit card debt I racked up while trying to pay for the college loan as an underpaid 20-something.
I’d LOVE to have a job I love, and I’d love to get out of bed every day looking forward to going to work. But I don’t. I never have.
Well I’d better jump in and balance things out then.
I hate my job. I hate the field I am trained in. I should have gotten a degree in history instead of engineering. The money supports my mortgage and family, so here I stay. Wheee! I’m Homer Simpson!
I can’t say that I love my job by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I’m going to be liking it much better now that I’m working for a new (and much better, I hope) boss and for a program that consistantly as work to do. I work for a major aerospace contractor–one of those that is a conglomeration of aerospace and defense contractors that have been absorbed by a larger company–and while I have no small amount of cynicism about much of the work we do, I also get to see some pretty cool things, some of which work amazingly well, and go places I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to go.
Oh, and the paycheck ain’t bad, either. But on the whole, I wish I could find some good paying occupation where I can write (something besides IOCs and Test Reports), exploit and expand my knowledge of physics, mathematics, biology, history, philosophy, and literature. Oh, and if they’d pay me to learn the trombone and go sea kayaking, that would be cool, too. But I make do with what I have and entertain my coworkers with bizarre serial emails about how Dick Cheney looks like a panda (he does, he does) and attempting to explain the plot points in Donnie Darko. And occasionally we blow stuff up (albeit generally unintentionally) which is always kind of fun in a how-are-we-going-to-explain-this-to-the-customer sort of way.
It’s more fun than being a patent attorney, anyway, and it pays better than teaching 8th graders that they have to subtract the constant from both sides of the equation.
