The Career Masochist
Getting paid to be punished
Five a.m. is a stupid time. I wish I could phrase that sentiment in a more literarily creative way, but I’ve been up since 5 a.m. and I just don’t have the brain capacity. The only good time to see 5 a.m. is when you’re young, full of mind-altering substances, have zero responsibilities the next day and are winding down to sleep until sometime that afternoon. To start your day at 5 a.m. is just miserable.
I feel so strongly about this subject because I recently have taken to grumpily rolling out of the comfort of my bed five days a week well before the sun has bothered to rise above the horizon. Every morning is horrible, but these early mornings are just a part of my new job, another career path that seems to underscore I must want to punish myself.
I’m assuming when most people are searching for a job, their desire list looks like the following:
A good salary for the effort
A strong work/life balance
An agreeable schedule
A good share of responsibility without a sense of overwhelming pressure
Plenty of opportunities for advancement
Working with people you like to be around
However, based on my career choices, my apparent ideal list is:
Good pay, provided you don’t need many luxuries like food and shelter
A completely unpredictable schedule guaranteed to keep you working while everyone you know and love is relaxing and/or sleeping
Constant, testicles-in-a-vice-grip levels of pressure to perform quickly and perfectly
Opportunities for advancement only if the boss wants to sleep with you (they never do, in my case)
Working with humans you’d rather not live in the same hemisphere
I may not be a masochist in the bedroom, but I clearly desire proverbial pain in my work.
Aside from my first job at 15 years old, bagging groceries at a supermarket and stealing the occasional beer from the cooler, all my jobs seem to have these negative characteristics.
For about eight years I worked as a professional cook in restaurants. If you’ve never toiled away in a professional kitchen, let me explain the work in simplistic terms. It’s incredibly hot and noisy. You will spend almost all working hours prepping, cooking and cleaning at a breakneck pace. Your hands will be covered in burns and blisters. Your back will ache from constantly bending over a stovetop or cutting board. Many of your joints, particularly your knees, will turn to gelatin from bending, pivoting, reaching, squatting, etc. And your customers will demand perfection. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
For this grind you are rewarded with poverty level wages. There’s no need to keep up with health insurance benefits because you don’t have any. Typically, you work under a head chef that runs his brigade with an iron fist. You do learn new hobbies, however, like doing hard drugs. If you’ve ever wondered why so many restaurant workers seem to have drug and alcohol addictions, it’s because they wouldn’t work in a restaurant unless they were rarely sober.
Despite this, for eight of my nine years working in restaurants, I loved it. I was on mind-altering substances through much of this time, mind you, but I really did enjoy being a cook.
But it was time to put that journalism degree, which had taken me about seven years to earn due in part to those substances, to good use. But my prediction that the journalism industry would be a greener pasture wasn’t true. Instead it’s a field, at least in terms of positive career characteristics, made entirely of cow patties.
Being a journalist entails working wildly unpredictable working hours. You are effectively always on call should news break, even if you absolutely should not be working at that time. For instance, in March 2020 I wrote a breaking news story about a local politician contracting COVID-19. The initial report was released sometime around 10 p.m. There was little information available, and I only needed to make a call or two to put the story together, so it was straightforward enough. Trouble was, I was many, many beers into a night of drinking. Because the internet is forever, you can still read this article I wrote, covering a harrowing subject in a tumultuous time, while plastered.
Additionally, readers and the subjects of articles demand absolute perfection. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Even if you’re drunk while writing the piece. And in the age of content, content, content, you are required to bang out a simply staggering number of articles each day while constantly getting complaints from your editor and readers: “You need to cover this story.”
There’s also the constant interaction with the public. This includes sifting through the mounds of bullshit politicians tell you and dealing with the general public, usually when they are extremely upset about something, which is why they need you, the journalist, to compile the story.
Journalists also must utter some of the most depressing career-related phrases that exist.
“I’d really love to go to that party considering I could desperately need a night off and time with friends I never get to see, but I must be up early tomorrow to cover a ‘Prayer Breakfast.’”
Even if you’re a great journalist or editor, there is the persistent and overbearing knowledge the field, as you know it, is dying.
But at least as a journalist everyone hates you and the pay is terrible.
Meanwhile, the threat of layoffs and news organizations shutting down is unrelenting. You’re thankful each day you’re still able to have this terrible job. Recently, I even lost that. After being laid off for the third time in 14 months, I decided to pursue another career. But in the meantime, I’m now a school bus driver. That’s why I’ve been waking up at the God-awful hour of 5 a.m.
Despite the early wakeups, I do feel downright comfortable in this new career path. It’s extremely stressful, has terrible working hours, immense pressure to always perform perfectly and terrible pay.
It seems only right I would choose this career in which I am in charge of up to 50 elementary-aged kids. Their favorite hobbies include screaming, hitting, biting, and running amok on a vehicle moving at highway speeds. As I tell these kids to sit down, quiet down, and stop trying to light one another on fire, I am in control of a 13-plus-ton bus that is about as agile around city streets as a person featured on “My 600-lb Life.” And each weekday this torment starts before the sun has decided to make an appearance.
I can’t even turn to drugs or alcohol for relief, like I would do in my cooking days. That’s a shame, because nothing makes me want to get high or drunk quite like an afternoon spent corralling, disciplining and transporting dozens of kids who, given their general insanity, could very well be high on methamphetamines. Of course I would never drive a bus, or any other vehicle, while intoxicated, but the fact that school bus drivers can’t unwind with a joint on a Friday night after dealing with these screaming banshees all week is callous.
I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be a school bus driver. Or more accurately, how long I’ll be able to last. Maybe it’s time to find another path. I hear working on an offshore oil rig might be right up my alley.