The Approach to Careers

I’ve worked mostly in Food Service all my life. I’ve made pizzas, sold cutlery, worked fast food, catering and food service administration. I know food. People know that I know food and they respect the amount of knowledge I have in that area.

But this doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t really make me anything except relentless. I have stamina.

Like so many others I know, the battle waged every day is making those eight hours tolerable. Like I’ve said before I’m no different than most people. I’m not any more remarkable than anyone else. My workplace is filled with people who mean well. People who have good hearts. People who let work affect them in an entirely negative way but who are otherwise great people. The little snags and barbs of the job’s actual processes are typically not the worst part of your day are they? It’s usually the people you blame for making work so terrible isn’t it? Go on, say it. It’s just the two of us.

We have to realize that we are different people in different situations. For instance, when I’m with a group of people (friends or otherwise) I get super confident and enjoy being the center of attention. I’m a showman at heart. I like all eyes on me. But when i have no one to entertain, when it’s just me all by myself, I become much more reserved.

Work is a place where we sometimes transform into different people and not always do we undergo the same transformation. For me, i’m usually the one who’s grounded. I see how serious a situation is (or usually isn’t in most cases) and treat it accordingly and typically with humor. This calms some and infuriates others. But that’s who I am at work. Usually. Every once and a while I take it overly serious and become super chill evil office guy. Not proud of it but it happens. All of that vanishes when I leave the building though.

The trick to surviving work is to know that the person who is aggravating you now is not always the true face of that person. Once you look around and see your workplace for what it is, just a bunch of regular folks surviving each day as best as possible, then you can go forward and start making work tolerable for yourself. You might even be able to see where your co-workers are coming from.

Beneath all the stresses and dynamics of work we’re all pretty much the same. We just have a different approach.