For example, if you are a top chef and open a restaurant, the thing most visible to the outside world are your world-class recipes.
However, you must contend with issues like a waiter not showing up at the last minute, with a broken air conditioner, suddenly one of the stoves stops working, etc
At the end of the day, the more mundane stuff takes up as much if not more of your time and effort as the more profound stuff you would like to be doing.
In general, the pattern goes something like
What people want to do
What people end up doing
e.g.
What people want to do:
Design novel high-tech gadgets that people will love
What people end up doing:
Spending endless hours figuring out why the latest firmware doesn’t work,
Wasting days or weeks to find a workaround to a hardware bug,
…
or
What people want to do:
Run for office to help people and/or seek personal glory
What people end up doing:
Wasting a lot of time and energy trying to raise money
…
Anyway, I’m curious about the mundane side in various types of jobs.
What did you ‘sign up for’, and what have you ended up doing day-to-day?
What I signed up for:
Helping book air travel for credit card holders wanting to redeem points
What I often end up doing:
Dealing with people who argue with me about their program guidelines and want to know why they’re not getting what they thought their programs offer.
I too signed up for connecting people to information!
What I do: give homeless guys the paper. Direct people to the bathrooms. Fix the copier. Fix the microfilm machines. Every Wednesday, when the newspaper assistant is out, I get the newspapers (hundreds of them), throw out the ads, put them in order, staple them, label them as ours, record them, and put them out in the racks. This is dirty, boring, and a really hateful job.
What I Signed Up For:
Designing and implementing fantastic Web sites and Web software
What I End Up Doing:
Explaining to people how Web sites work and how Web sites are not free, and listening to people complain about things they don’t understand.
What I signed up for:
Studying heart transplant rejection in a mouse model.
What I End Up Doing:
Remind (read: nag) my boss and co-workers to keep their radiation/hazardous materials/blood borne pathogens training current. File paperwork and lab reports. Try to explain to vendors that our delivery address is really, really long but they need it or their package won’t reach us.
What I signed up for:
Newsroom clerk at the local newspaper. Writing obituaries, archiving, etc.
What I end up doing:
Arguing with the relatives of the deceased over what can and cannot go into free news obits. This takes a lot more time than I would like it to and I go home every night near tears because I hate having to do that.
What I Signed Up For: Building the best airplanes in the world.
**What I end up doing:**Telling engineers how to design systems then forcing them to make the appropriate changes to the paperwork. Fixing the errors of those that work up line, I’m the last in line before the airplane rolls out the door. And finally, groaning at light bulb jokes. My job is testing the interior and flight deck lighting and I change a lot of light bulbs, everything from tiny little LED’s to 6 foot long flourescent tubes.