February 1st, 2008
Meat Grinders
Some jobs just grind you up and squish you out. Which industries do you think are the roughest? Is your job a meat grinder?
Transcriptorial: She put them all to work; / some for their bodies / the rest to turn the cranks.
people think the music industry destroys people but it really doesn’t. if you’re happy making the music you want then it really is one of the best jobs you could wish for.
Are you in music? From an earlier comment, I take it you are in South Africa. Are you in South African music?
I am indeed. I am studying classical composition and theory at the University of Cape Town. I’m also in popular music, though… very into avant-garde rock.
I think the industries that make you mask your true self are the worst. And that can be anyone from a telemarketer to a politician. I can’t say which is worse.
There certainly are a lot of industries in which no one is allowed to act genuine.
I’m inclined to say telemarketer but that’s only cause I’ve done it. It wasn’t even my body or soul that felt like it had been ground up, it was my brain, every original thought or scrap of personality shoved through the pre-written speech into a uniform mush.
Work is just acting just like most of the rest of life. You rarely get to be yourself anywhere…
Or if you do, it has consequences…
Logger. You swagger into mini-marts and brag about killing trees. Or deer. Wearing a shirt that equates deer with women.
You may just have predicted the next big thing after wolf shirts.
My job is more of a soul grinder.
I supply technical services to a call centre. Although working conditions in my call centre are comparatively good, I have seen the job make old people out of young people in a few years. And they say call centres are the future of customer relations.
Almost everyone my age in the town where I grew up is in this line of work. What an age we live in.
Lawyer. Your job is to fight with people on behalf of other people and your hated by everyone for it. You don’t even get to pick your own fights and most of the job is boring grindwork, unlike the millions of programs that make it out to seem exciting. The pay is only great at a few places, and those places work you so hard you never get a chance to spend it.
I guess a dark sense of humor and a bar near the office can help.
My guess would be lawyer as well perhaps.
Or perhaps soldier.
Both are often taken up by their practitioners in an idealistic fashion and out of a desire to serve and do the right thing.
Both have different “practical applications” to what might have been hoped for or expected and serving people often gets a strange line blurred where one ends up taking orders and direction from senior staff who may also have had their dreams and ideals brutalised in the course of their service.
Both operate under specific instances of the “letter of the law” which is often not what the original spirit of the law might have been, and so one can find oneself acting out one’s part in a tragedy of epic proportions in which everything you do runs contrary to the ideals and original purpose of your taking up that profession…
And supposedly all “for the greater good”.
The insurance industry is definitely a rough one, especially customer service. Having to constantly tell people why they can’t have “their own money” just isn’t fun.
Do you think insurance companies intentionally pit their customer service staff against their customers? Set the expectations and the incentives up that way? Turn one set of working people against the other?
I don’t think they do… the thing is everything is all in the contract language. But people just don’t read it.
The comparison I usually try to make is, if you buy a new car, and you drive it around for a year but either decide you don’t like it, or you need the money back because of some kind of emergency, you’re not going to get your money back.
haha cool comics
but you must have some chingy ching ching to be advertising on facebook
Oh I wish. I get maybe a couple clicks a day from Facebook, definitely not enough chingy ching ching to make them worth however many billions they are worth these days.
I found your site through A Softer World, and I fell in love.
I work as a Pharmacy Technician. I deal with insurances, sick people, and old people all day. A mother, her two kids, and their grandmother walked up to buy the grandmother’s medication. The medication was pretty costly, and when the grandmother pulled the cash from her purse one of the little boys started screaming at me, “You made her spend all her money!” The mom tried to tell him it was the doctor that had prescribed it for his grandma, but the little boy didn’t understand. All he saw was me standing behind the register taking all of his grandmother’s money and giving her pills in return.
You are right at the intersection of very emotional topics for people; their health, their money, sometimes their family. It sounds like the child might have had a formative experience in favour of universal, socialized medicine.
A Softer World is a really cool site, by two really awesome people. I’m often curious to know how people found Secret Vespers. Thanks for your comment!
Pet Stores slowly suck out your soul…I’m a 5′2 120lb. 20 year old girl who hauls around 100 pounds of dog food at a time and cries when we sell good animals to bad people. My coworkers tell me that I will become hardened to these things over time…but do I want to?
Meatgrinder job? I work as a munitions technician. Long strange road to get here, but I spend most of my days doing heavy manual labor building explosive devices that are used to end things. The time not spent hammering my body to pulp is spent improving the devices. These devices are already so scarily good at what they do.
And the most crushing thing about the job is that the work will continue, no matter what I do, or don’t. And that is the thing that makes me cringe. I have an out. I can quit if I want. Many many many of my co-workers are people stuck for years, with contracts that make them no more than a number and a slave. No way out, and so they continue work. Day by day another inch of their souls is chewed up, and they cannot leave.
Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Happiness in Slavery’ music video comes to mind.