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  • Fast food. The job itself is easy, like the steps are the same and repeatable, but I've never worked so hard in my entire life. "It's just flipping burgers" yeah well it's a burger every few seconds. It's the pace at which you make the burgers, burning yourself with hot fries, making the stupid ice cream. All while poorly trained managers tell at you for putting 3 instead of 2 pickles on hamburger.

  • Being a mom. I'm not even one yet and simply help a certain family au pair style, and the childcare part is like a balancing act fueled by attentive dedication and no room to screw up badly. I actually help with teaching, and that's easier than getting out of that line of work to spend time with just two of the kids that show up.

  • Delivering the mail

    • Really? How come?

      • You have to wait until the truck with mail comes from the hub, so it doesn't matter how early you come into the post office. Sometimes the truck will arrive at 5:00 p.m., that means you have to sit there and spend an hour and a half to two hours case in your mail and parcels.

        Then you've got to pull all that mail that you cased, into trays stack it up and then you have to stalk your truck and then do the same with the packages.

        Then you leave to the route at about 6:30 to 7:00 and you've got about 3 hours left to deliver mail and packages. You've also got to deliver the mail under any weather condition.

        Lastly most carriers don't have their own route. They run the routes of the carriers who take a day off so you're constantly doing different routes every day and you don't know them so it takes you even longer to do your job because you have to learn the route.

        It's a stressful job.

        One lady told me, "You're not broken in yet until you cry"

  • There are different ways that a job can be difficult. Some are physically demanding. Some require a lot of skill (and/or luck). Others can be psychologically challenging. Some are a combination of those and more.

    I used to work in retail customer service. Honestly, I saw it suck the life and happiness out of some of my coworkers. People would have breakdowns or turn to drugs and alcohol. One of the reasons I was able to handle it is because I knew it wasn't life long career for me, it was just a job to support myself while I was in school but it left me with a lot of anxiety and maybe, to some degree, PTSD or something similar.

    There are a lot of responsibilities and expectations for that type of job. I had to manage the front-end staff. Make sure folks showed up for work, got out on time, got their breaks, performed their duties, make sure they were safe. That was a job in and of itself. I also had to count money, checks, run reports, and a bunch of general office / accounting duties. And then on top of all that, any time there was a problem, I was the first in line to have to deal with it. So, a large number of my customer interactions were with unhappy people. Way too many angry people who are rude, disrespectful, lack empathy, and are so demanding. Lots of ungrateful people and lots of scammers.

    The icing on the cake is that the schedule is highly irregular and the pay is crappy.

    Really, a customer service job like that is a lot of exposure to a lot of bad people and a lot of horrible behavior. It can be exhausting and mentally damaging. More than most people might realize.

22 comments