(no subject)

[nny]

Good lord bike seats are evil. I've even got one of those delightful gel ones, and still I feel like my bottom's worn away. Possibly freaked out the guy walking past Smaller and I who heard me pondering crotch calluses. :D It's a beautiful day today and I haven't yet decided how best to use it; I think I might end up just tidying my flat, try to start the new term with some small level of organisation, even though I haven't done nearly enough work towards said organisation. Ah well. I've applied for about seven more jobs and have about the same number again open in tabs, and if nothing comes of those I'll just start looking for a job in another line of work. I'm really not sure what I can imagine myself doing, though...

Positives: good with people, good phone manner, excellent at writing to spec, good teacher, patient, unruffleable, good listener

Negatives: disorganised, bad at changing the status quo, bad at self-motivation, bad at forward planning

Observations:

#1: I'm in the wrong line of work.
#2: what the heck else could I do?

ETA:

That's a good thought, actually. Have you got a second?

What is your job/what do you do every day? How did you get into it?

If you don't want to put it up in public an email'd be awesome - annysthetized(at)gmail.com

I have no idea if it'll be useful; mostly I'm just curious. :D

Comments

[polkadotskirt.livejournal.com]

I'm a nearly qualified paediatric nurse. I look after sick kids every day, taking observations and carrying out assessments, giving meds, doing dressings, arguing with doctors, talking and explaining and listening to parents and kids, finding activities that are right for the kid, regardless of illness, development etc. I do all that I can to make sure each child and family has the best day possible, and that plans are in place to continue their recovery. I got into it by doing a Bsc degree in nursing at King's College London, for which I needed 3 A levels. Half the course is practical, the rest is a full Bsc, meaning that I get something between 8-10 weeks off a year, unlike the usual 3 months for university students.

I have no idea if this sort of work would ever appeal to you, but if it would, HCA jobs with kids or carer roles are good, and graduates can do an 18 month course to become a qualified nurse.

[polkadotskirt.livejournal.com]

(just read it back: I don't do this every day, I do 13 shifts a month. The rest of the days are my own.)

[pennyplainknits.livejournal.com]

i emailed you :)

[weaverandom.livejournal.com]

I type court and police transcriptions. I got into it through having a degree in English (or, at the time, half of a degree in English) and applying at the right time through an online website. I've since arranged the same job for a friend - all you have to do is have great grammar.

I like it, but I don't do it every day any more - I'm back at uni studying to be a psychologist instead. So it may not be so helpful. <3

[mezzo-cammin.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm old, you know so...

I started out wanting to be a veterinarian, and was dissuaded by a high school (male) counselor, whom I don'tthink I will ever forgive. So, I went to school to become a vet tech, then went on to get a B.S. degree in...horticulture. When I graduated, I went to work for a veterinarian. I loved the work, loved the animals - realized it was sort of a dead end job, though. Went to work at my dad's print shop and learned the business from the ground up. Became a press operator and graphic artist. When my dad sold the business, I went to work as a graphic artist/designer at a corporation and stayed there for 15 years. Took an at-home study course and began doing medical transcription at night to make ends meet. Decided I could make a living doing that full-time, at home, and ditched the corporate world. And that's where I am now. I love it! I am seldome bored, and I learn something new every day. Plus. I work at home and am able to help raise my grandson here, and I can go outside and garden whenever I feel like it, or go the kitchen and whip something up instead of hitting the fast-food restaurants.

So, you just never know, is what I'm saying. Be open to new possibilities, and all that. :o)

[perardua.livejournal.com]

I'm a security control room operator at a big old national institution of a museum, which is a confusing mixture of monitoring CCTV and alarm systems, working the internal and external phone switchboards, working the transceiver radio system, assorted boring admin-y duties, and being expected to be the source of all knowledge for whatever member of staff has a question, whether it's related to our department or not.

I started out a couple of years ago as what was then called a museum assistant, now visitor services assistant, which itself is a mixture of security guard, theme park worker and information point for visitors. I'd been out of work for a long time after dropping out of uni due to depression and decided, based on a childhood fancy, that I really wanted to work in a museum while I waited for an RAF application to go through (a plan I have now abandoned until I'm actually fit enough to pass the tests!). I applied to every museum that was hiring warders, shop assistants, museum assistants and general dogsbodies, and, wonder of wonders, got accepted by my favourite museum.

After about a year of that, I was basically head-hunted into a part-time version of my current job, covering holidays and sick leave and still working as a museum assistant when not needed. I've no idea what they saw in me that made them so determined to get me into the control room and it's certainly not a job I would ever have thought of applying for without encouragement, but it turns out that it suits me rather well.

After another year, a permanent control room position came up, so I went for it and got it, and here I am. As I said before, it's not a job choice that would have entered my head if it hadn't been suggested to me and it's nowhere near what I thought I'd be doing with my life, but it's been a fairly nice surprise.

[cantabile.livejournal.com]

Like you a teacher, though primary, and have been out of the classroom for twelve years now. Currently subject manager for international exam board: recruit and train examiners, ensure assessment schemes are suitable and quality assured, ensure standards globally, keep up to date with 'trends' in subject, attend teacher training workshops (last one was in Dubai, one before The Hague, before that Birmingham, Los Angeles, Costa Rica), uphold protocols, procedures, etc. It's great and yet completely different from being in the classroom.

[batyatoon]

I work for The Claims Conference, in the Allocations department, as an administrative assistant. I got it through a placement agency, largely I think on account of having told them that I wanted to work for someplace that I thought was doing something worthwhile and important.

I didn't even know that I wanted that until I spent a six-month temporary stint working as a school secretary, after having spent the previous several years working for an investments firm where at the end of the day we bought and sold money.

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

I'm a licensed massage therapist. I got into it because I'd always wanted to do some sort of job in healthcare (I thought nurse at first but bedpans, ugh!). For a long time I got sidetracked away from it and worked in high tech, first doing documentation production, then as a quality assurance engineer, and finally moved to technical writer/editor. High tech was seductive and paid well and was completely unfulfilling. It wasn't the kind of writing I wanted to do and while I made a pretty good manager, I have a little personality quirk called "fuck authority, I want to do it my own way" which the people working for me loved but the higher-ups, not so much. I got tired of butting heads, quit my management job, went back to being an individual contributor (okay, I worked my way back down the corporate ladder), finally quit that and did freelance writing and editing. Somewhere in there we adopted our daughter and once she was in kindergarten, I decided it was finally time to go to massage school like I'd been contemplating for about seven years.

Voila. I like being my own boss and setting my own hours. It's work, but it's the kind of work I like to do.

[renshai.livejournal.com]

I'm a land surveyor. Well, technically, I'm an instrument-person, which pretty much means I'm the person on a survey crew who isn't the Crew Chief. Daily activities tend to vary depending on what stage of the survey we're on - see, Western Canada was divided up in the late 1800s into one-square-mile sections called townships, monumented at the corners, and all succeeding legal surveys have to be tied into this grid. So starting out a survey, all these corner monuments in the area need to be found - easier said than done, as some of these monuments haven't been rediscovered in any official capacity for longer than I've been alive; it's not unusual to go out, dig a hole two feet deep, and find nothing more than a rust spot. Or to discover that someone felt the monument was interfering with their chi, and thus removed it. Or hit it with their tractor. Or pounded a fence-post in on top of it. Once all the legal monumentation is recorded, we can continue with the survey - usually someone (occasionally us) has designed whatever we're laying out on the computer, and then hands us a list of coordinates that we need to put sticks in at.

The job involves a great deal of walking, carrying moderately heavy things, and being outside in all weather (although heavy rain or heavy wind will keep us inside - the equipment is usually not waterproofed, and getting any kind of accuracy in high winds is an exercise in frustration). It also involves dealing with an occasionally hostile public (legal pins are frequently found in people's lawns), a great deal of travel, and long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of frenzied activity. You need to be decent at basic math (algebra and geometry, for the level I'm working in), have good spacial relations, a decent sense of direction, and a high tolerance for mud.

I sort of fell into the field - I failed out of engineering after a bout of depression and a head injury, and discovered that no university would take me back, leaving me with tech school as my only option. I'd expressed to my dad that one of the main problems I'd been having with engineering as a career choice was that I didn't want a desk-job, and he suggested I should give surveying a try, so I did. I loved it. I actually still love it - but it's really a male-dominated field (I've only ever met two other female surveyors, and one of them I lured into the program myself), and while it's a good choice for me now....well, I don't think it's what I want to do with my life. Thankfully, surveying skills get used in a variety of other careers, including archaeology and environmental studies, which is why I'm trying to go back to university. I guess we'll see where I eventually end up.

If I stayed in surveying, I'd be Crew Chief within a year or two, and gain my Technologist title. I could go back to school for another two years to upgrade my diploma to a B.Sc., and take my exams to become a Western Canada Lands Surveyor, giving me the power to sign legal plans surveyed within Dominion Lands (mostly Native Reservations and National Parks). Then I could take my provincial lands surveyor exams, which will give me the power to sign off on legal plans in whichever province I took the exams in. This is a much higher-paid position - there're only 50~ Saskatchewan Lands Surveyors, and they're in high demand. But it's also largely an office job, with a suit and a tie and everything. Blarrrrgh.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Since I'm going through more or less the same thought process at the moment...

I'm a qualified librarian, which means that I spent 2 years (part time) doing an MA, during which time pretty much everyone asked "but what's the point of it". My answer was mostly "you can't get a job without one" which was true if unsatisfactory. I'm now having the same wrestling match with Chartership.

My actual job is rather different to what most people think of as librarianing, since I work in technical services rather than reference. I do some reference work, but mostly, I spend my time processing books. That can be ordering them on a website or by email, adding a record to our online catalogue but is mostly adding information so that our financial system knows what's going on. I also type up grids for accounts so they know what money to allocate for each invoice, and I trouble-shoot when there are problems with orders.

Yes, this is as dull as it sounds. I wanted to be a librarian, not an accountant. Which isn't to say my job isn't important - without me, we'd have no books from outside the UK, and we wouldn't have a clue how much money we'd spent - but on a day to day basis, I feel like an over-qualified data-entry clerk. It'd be a perfect job *for* an accountant, or for someone who's good at admin. Neither of these are me.

I became a librarian because I got a better degree than I thought I was going to, so I didn't feel that all I was good for was catering. TRUE STORY. Convinced I'd more or less flunked everything, I pursued catering pretty hard. Then I got a decent result, discovered that while I liked cooking, I didn't like catering, and flapped around for something else. Librarian Traineeships came up on the Oxford University website, and I grabbed it with both hands. I'm now thinking that, when I had the choice, I should have gone after Reference positions rather than technical ones, and I'm working on getting out of it, as soon as we know what my other half is doing.

I'm not sure if that's interesting/helpful, but I think what I learned was, when I had the choice, I should have chosen what I liked rather than what was available at the time. It's harder trying to rectify that 5 years down the line.

[cow.livejournal.com]

I currently manage an IT department for a small interweb company, and I also am in charge of making their 350+ servers around the world go. Basically, I get the junior staff to answer client support requests, and I help do things like set up big projects for clients and what not.

I got into it by accident--was working in the campus computer labs during undergrad, got a job doing a very low level version of this, then got offered a full-time job at some point.

I wouldn't say I love what I do, but I'm good at it, and I'm not sure what else I could be doing.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

This post is really great. I may bookmark it.

I'm a graduate student in English. I sit around and write things about medieval saints while drinking coffee and eating pastries in cafes. It's the best job in the world, except that I earn bare living expenses and I don't know whether I'll get a job that does make money when this is over.

[puchuupoet.livejournal.com]

I've worked at an ocean-side amusement park for the past five years (first in the stores, now in money processing). I had needed a second job, and once summer hits the park is constantly hiring. In the past I've worked at pet stores, a vet's office and a bookstore (which I loved, until corporate stepped in and made it really difficult to actually help the customers).

I have a General Ed. A.A., a desire to work with animals (more of an interest in the husbandry rather than the biology of them), and an "Ooh, shiny"-type attention span, so it's hard for me to settle down and pick a focus for my education. I'm moving in a short bit, so I'm hoping job hunting will help expose me to more options out there. I do, however, generally look for jobs rather than careers, something that will support the bills and my hobbies, and if I enjoy it? Then that's a bonus.

I'm tempted to stay in the amusement park/hotel/vacationing field, since I really do love my job. I get to help happy people; if they're annoyed I do what I can, and am able to leave it at work when I leave (unlike the pet stores). The only part that's worrisome is how the economy will affect the industry in the next several years.

(I hope that's what you're looking for, I sort of rambled there :) )

[cadencecascade.livejournal.com]

I am a Health Unit Clerk(HUC)/Telemetry Monitor at a small hospital. I process Doctors orders for 2 units, a Medical/Surgical unit and an ICU unit, which is where my desk is. I also initiate and maintain charts, coordinate with our offsite pharmacy, facilitate admissions and transfers, answer phones, am the 2nd floor receptionist, and somehow have become the resident go-to girl for technological problems, even for systems that technically I don't have access to.

For the Telemetry Monitor part of my job I monitor cardiac patients' heartbeats and do the initial determination of whether or not their abnormal rhythms need to be brought to immediate MD/RN attention. I have 3 computers that sit at my desk. I look very official. I'm the only non-RN person on my floor during my shift (I work the 2300-0700 shift).

As to how I got into this, I was working at this hospital as a CNA (Certified Nurses Assistant) part-time, and I really liked working there. I had friends amongst the staff and liked the nurse manager, so when this job came open I applied, and then took it upon myself to take the EKG class that I would have to take for the job, even before they offered it to me.

They did't offer it to me. The person they did offer it to was a friend of my family's, who had two job offers and was trying to decide which one she wanted. She chose the other one and since I was the second choice in their job line up, the hospital offered the position to me.

I've been there for over a year now. It's not my life calling or anything (I'm more of a computer person than a people person), and I'm still in school (2 more semesters, YAAY), but I like it. It's not hard, I can study and do homework, I've friends there, and I still get along with my manager and supervisors. That's worth a lot.

[klatubarada.livejournal.com]

I started out wanting to work in a creative field but was told by my school jobcounseller -at the all girls school i went to 20 yrs ago-that 'there were no jobs in Art and I should learn typing as the world always needs secretarys'....!

I ignored the guy but ended up in a 'cleaning offices and toilets' job followed by becoming a dental nurse -my mum got me it .It was better than the cleaning job i was doing but oh, how i hated it with a fiery passion!.I floated along for 6 years before i realised how truly miserable i truly was.
Had an epiphany looking out of the window one day and seeing a school friend with 7(count 'em) kids.Gave myself a kick in the pants and at 25 I moved away from everyone i knew and went to University to re discover my love of making 'stuff' in 3d/textiles/wood to find something i could love doing as a job.

I did a Modelmaking/Propmaking course at University ,for four yrs and -eventually- fought my way to became a freelance prop maker for televison and the movies.(Still cant believe i did it).I mostly sanded fibreglass and swept up a lot but i was beyond lucky and have amazing memories of working in the studios,getting my name in lights :D and working on five films.
Although i loved it it was pure and utter social hell as i would be up at 5am and home at 10pm sometimes 6 days a week.
Work conditons and health n safety were awful and i did it for four years until the film industry nosedived,my right hand gave me problems and other health issues forced me to look elsewhere.

Got on a graduate scheme to become a land surveyor but the hand problems meant i sucked at it plus i am so bad with numbers!

Going home one evening i saw an advert in a london paper asking if people were able to go to switzerland to train to become Watchmakers,I thought i may as well try it.In the interview I told the head of the watch company he HAD to employ more women as he was really missing how awesome we truly are and i personally would brighten the place up!

I got the job over the 47 men that applied and trained for four months in beautiful,wonderful switzerland.The training was frustratingly hard work ,pushed me to my limits physically and emotionally as i suffered daily verbal abuse by the sexist male teacher.He just made me more determined with every remark he was stupid enough to make.

So that was 2 and a half yrs ago.
I spend my days working through boxes of very posh watches that need re assembling,repairing,careful handling and cleaning.I work at my own pace ,take my breaks when i want -within reason-and the job is fab!.I dont have very high production figures but i do my job very well and carefully.Im one of three women in the workshop of 50 men and the 8 to 4.30pm days feel like half days compared to what i did on the back lots of the studios.
I was told two weeks ago Im 'not good enough' to progress and be a 'real'watchmaker mainly due to the tendon problem thats re-surfaced but I have never taken anyones ideas of what they think i can and cant do so i wont be starting now! :D

I still remember cleaning toilets and see how far i have come and it really just takes a few steps to open the world up.Take one small step and the rest will follow ,i promise.
x