I remember my first real job. I was a bag boy – as we were called, someone who bagged groceries at a grocery store. The ‘Work’ concept was a mystery to me even though I started working for money when I was nine years old, and I had recently quit a job that paid twice as much because I disliked what I was doing.
It was so formal. I had trouble with the clocking in and clocking out. We had to clock in and out within two minutes of our appointed time. If we missed we were docked some amount of time from our pay. I did not know it then, but the system was set up, so someone always had their time card docked. No matter how people tried, not everyone could clock in within the allotted minutes.
Breaks were another matter completely. The time I was allowed to go to break was always random. Some days break was after the first hour of work, other days it was four hours after starting. This to was a hard system to adjust to. If you went to work hungry, you might be starving by the time your break rolled around. If you ate before going to work, you may not be hungry until a few hours after your break was a dim memory. That too was a planned system to frustrate employee’s.
There are various roadblocks associated in many of the jobs each of us do every day. Some frustrations are intentional. Management makes life difficult so no one becomes too settled in their job. Management in some jobs prefers a high employee turnover, for varied reasons. In other situations, like when I worked an assembly line, or in my case a dis-assembly line, lunch was dictated by the work flow. The line stopped, the line started.
At lower pay levels, many jobs are worse than they have to be. The company may give time based raises or other enticing benefits to long term employees. Then they set up the way work is done to ensure most people are frustrated and have left before they can become a long term employee. This way a business can claim to be friendly to the employee. When in truth, they operate using barrier tactics that other less polished companies do not use. These types of businesses polish up the exterior a little more to make working their look worthwhile.
There is also the problem of too many people available to do the job. If an employer knows they can lose and retrain half their workforce every few months, some companies choose to do just that. Working conditions are barely tolerable, and become worse as time goes on. The law of supply and demand. There is too much supply (workers) and too little demand (jobs).
By the time I was twenty-five, I had worked at over twenty ‘real’ jobs trying to find a place where I fit in, and could be happy. Work to me was a revolving door. Quit one job in the morning, and start at a different job in the afternoon. Most of those jobs were the jobs described above. Poor pay, hard work, and little real prospects of any long term goals with one particular company.
There is a golden lining in working conditions like this. If you pay attention, you learn how to manage people in a manner they appreciate. You learn many different skill sets, of which most carry over from one job to the next. You see many different ways of doing the same thing, and with enough job hopping, you eventually start to look pretty sharp because you can and do suggest better ways of doing the same old thing.
Work if you are like me, contains a basic flaw. No matter what form the work takes, there is a drum beat in the background setting the rhythm of a work and life. The biggest secret to enjoying your work is to find creative ways to manage the drum beat.
