Things No One Tells You About So-called Dream Jobs - AskReddit

Karen wants to pay for another shoot but only if you agree to do her friends daughter's destination wedding for free which job is a lot less fun than most people expect zookeeper don't get me wrong it's awesome to be around so many amazing animals and care for them but the smells are ridiculously insanely foul I have a really strong stomach and it's still tough for me we've had some interns quit over it I was warned about the smells when getting into the field but thought oh I volunteered at animal shelters I know what animals stink smells like nope not even close otters they are related to ferrets so they have super strong Musk way stronger than ferrets and smear it everywhere they also eat nothing but fish and you really can smell it in their oily gooey poop big cats out in the open it's not so bad but I've thrown up in the night house before huge six pound piles of cat poop all over the floor with no litter to mask the smell unneutered male lions will spray do like a cat one lion makes enough spray to make the whole place smell like a cat hoarders house being a writer I always thought it was my absolute dream job but the only job I could get after college was working in a Content mill as a blog writer I used to work 70 hour weeks staring at the computer in a basement of an old bank writing BS articles about the dangers of my old fence cleaning and why you need a commercial awning in the dream turned into a nightmare while I still write occasionally I am now working as a communications person so it is a bit less heavy similarly fiction writer isn't as amazing as movies and TV shows what have you believe most of the work is spent out in yourself feeling like your book isn't going anywhere and that you'll never be able to finish it and even when you do that nobody is going to like it and if they do that you'll never live up to the expectations with the next one oh and line editing is one of the most boring mind-numbing things I've done in my entire life especially when it comes to cleaning up repetitions it literally never ends you basically just have to let go of it when you hit your deadline and hope you did good enough that readers won't ask themselves how such a terrible writer can be published don't think I'd want to do anything else for the rest of my life though Demolition everyone wants to break stuff with a sledgehammer everyone is tired of lifting that sledgehammer by 5 swings nobody wants to load the broken stuff into bags or a wheelbarrow and take it to the dumpster pays also lower unreliable you get given a week to bust up and remove the tile from some strip mall store front and then the terms change after they see that that's not all that they wanted I did a two-week demo job years ago where I had to jackhammer 75 pounds at least a concrete slab and grind rebar into pieces I'm in good shape and the job messed me up professional photographer not like hobbyist but business owning photographer sucks the love right out of your work because you started the business to take pictures then Karen doesn't like the way she looks in one of them so she wants the whole set for free plus a reshoot for free plus those images for free then the two high school kids getting into a very ill-advised marriage at exactly 18 years old wants to book you for their wedding but their budget is only 50 dollars then Karen calls back because she loves your work and wants to pay for another shoot but only if you agree to do her friends daughter's destination wedding for free then you get a call from your last bride it's been two weeks since their wedding where the hell are her pictures then you get no leads from a bridal expo then a client finds out you don't support their candidate and tries to take you to court to get her money back then summons to thought who thinks she's influencing people offers a collab where you take pro photos of her and she adds patents to filters to it and claims her friend took them and she's not gonna pay and then you get some entitled mom who wants you to photograph every day of her newborns first year of life for $100 I went back to being a hobbyist archaeologist did it during my 20s and that was more than enough long hot days living out of cheap motels on bad pay and you typically find nothing more than some pieces of glass and broken pottery every once in a blue moon you find something cool but those items generally end up getting stored away in a box full of other artifacts never to be seen again most people have no idea that professional archaeology is usually tedious physically difficult and uncomfortable work and you get paid bad and share cheap hotel rooms with co-workers that like you are also functional alcoholics and have probably slept with other co-workers too oh and that's actually a pretty good scenario after spending anywhere between three and ten years getting a master's degree or doctorate did it for years gave it up for an office job when my kids were born one of the best decisions I ever made graphic design it is soul-crushing everyone and their mom thinks it sounds cool so the job market is flooded with untalented naive people the universities hand two-degree out to anyone who does the assignments regardless if they're any good so hard to hire a good designer and thus the industry has a lot of trash sweatshops for cheap illustrators try and become graphic designers then get disappointed when it involves little to no illustration people underestimate how unfun it is to do art for other people and for boring subjects the subjectivity means everyone always has an opinion no matter how unqualified they are and when something is a bad idea you get blamed rather than the concept it's so hard to take clients down the same journey you just took so they think you're just an idiot you can't do things in the style you like because it's all about what sells you're constantly pressured to produce something amazing on stupidly tight deadlines everyone thinks whatever stock image they want magically exists and they steal off the internet like kleptos you're expected to learn how to do tons of things like video photo social and web programming just to pull your weight you have to keep up with styles or trends or become irrelevant fast a big part of the job is being good with messaging voice flow hierarchy and all these artsy kids are so bad at it the grammar mistakes I see made by 30 year olds who graduated college are alarming you have to be strategic this isn't pretty pretty art time we're trying to perfect communication trying to convince people of something you have to pack a stupid amount of info into a small graphic and somehow make it work you have to deal with bad feedback like pop and Wow and absolutely no one respects your time and labor managing graphic designers is even worse they all think their poop doesn't stink in the worst ones are the cockiest it's so hard to tell people they simply just suck in their art is bad hiking and backpacking guide worrying for others the whole time takes the fun away I went on a glacier hike when I was in Iceland and the guide seemed genuinely shocked and thrilled that my girlfriend and I were the only two people on his tour that had actually spent more than five minutes outdoors and that we were appropriately dressed he said usually he had fairly large groups of tourists who typically had practically no outdoor experience and even less experience with cold weather he said people often showed up in flip-flops even though the instructions clearly said to wear sturdy hiking shoes he also said the group's typically move extremely slowly and he never gets to take people up on to the part with the best views and cleanest looking ice he actually seemed really relieved we wanted to go further up and we're making great time like it was a treat for him he was very knowledgeable and seemed so excited to talk about the stuff he knew and I got the impression he usually spent more time babysitting than actually sharing that knowledge lawyer know it isn't like they show on TV Hey finally cases before the judge ditch the other party didn't show up next date that judge has given his three months away and that's just litigation as Tom Hanks once said it's like doing homework for a living it was an interview many years ago and he was asked what career he would hate to have if wasn't an actor it stuck with me because it ranked through working in an animal shelter for sure it's probably less intense than zoo keeping but the amount of people who apply or volunteer expecting to come in and play with cute puppies all day is absurd we're basically animal maids you deal with animals of all sorts of behavioral and developmental stages pooping and pissing everywhere and then you look over in this dog named Chumbawamba swimming in his water bowl so you've got to fill that up six times and dry his cattle out and then you go and mop up the cat room around ten kittens who want to eat your mop and also for children who are all yelling that there's puke in the floor and I must clean it now not to mention all the extra behind-the-scenes work that the public never sees how in the summer during kitten and puppy season the shelter built to house five hundred max has 750 and I didn't take a lunch or sit at all for any of my shifts for the past six days how the courts force us to put down animal that we know can be rehabilitated but we don't get enough funding to fight it how animal control just showed up with the fourth pregnant stray of the week but intake is full and even double-stacked in some cases so your coworker Foster's the cats on her own not even to mention the people who do dumb stuff and end up getting bit or scratched and the animal is the one who bears those consequences I am the proudest shelter worker in the world I adore my job even at its hardest I didn't sit for nine and a half hours today and I found a cat turd in the cuff of my jeans but it doesn't matter because a bonded pair of adult cats got adopted today I took six applications this morning in the cat and bank four with the gup-e I is already looking better and we sent a mama out to foster the hard work is always worth it for these babies lifeguarding everyone expects baywatch saving life's all the time but it's usually just sitting there blowing your whistle telling little poops to stop messing around it is so mind-numbingly boring yet if you're distracted for 30 seconds someone can die that's the best-case scenario then there's dealing with morons who don't know how to watch their children worst case scenario is that someone dies while you're on duty working in a music instrument store your days are spent listening to 50 different people play 50 different riffs poorly simultaneously as if they're all putting on their own concert person who thinks playing well and playing loud are the same thing person who wants to make sure you know they are very smart and you are very lucky to be in their presence person who goes to absurd lengths to test out drumsticks to make sure their pitch matched without knowing how to execute any of those techniques extra points if they're just going to shred them to splinters in a week anyway people who act like you're in their way because you're trying to do your job people who assume you couldn't possibly know anything about the instruments you play and sell all day along side note I mostly loved my time working in a music store and I enjoy helping people but the people who come in with aggressive egos and nasty attitudes are insufferable gamemaster in an escape room it's the same repetitive script resetting the same stuff giving clues and hints about the same things the patrons are often competitive families who argue obnoxious impatient 13 year college students who have been drinking idiots who break stuff and touch stuff that I specifically told them not to they never remember your initial instructions if something gets broken during one group you have to hurry and fix it before the next group being a character performer at Disney don't get me wrong there are some amazing perks and truly magical moments I know I'm super lucky and tons of people would love to be in my shoes but the day-to-day work is exhausting in ways I never thought possible guests are ridiculously abusive I've had things said and done to me I never would have imagined the company isn't always great it highly depends on your leadership and there's so much focus on your body and face good and bad that it can be incredibly depressing and difficult emotionally plus you have to accept that there's very little upward mobility most people grow out of it and it's rough to know that one day you'll get too old or too fat and you will have to start all over in a new career field so you constantly are thinking either one what you're going to do when you leave two how you're going to keep yourself there paleontologist you don't get to work with full dinosaur skeletons and do all kinds of Awesome expeditions you're mostly sitting at a desk looking at some pictures and logging stuff on your computer maybe examining a fossil occasionally if you're lucky you can go on a real dig and oh my god spend hours in the hot Sun dusting off rocks Google Streetview driver you're all alone for eight plus hours a day can almost never take a break need to constantly be on and focused lest you crash the $25,000 Subaru with $60,000 worth of camera equipment on it you end up becoming an amateur meteorologist to keep track of weather patterns and cloud cover and in my experience there are a lot of people who just get insanely upset at you at Google and the job in general for a wide variety of reasons I enjoyed myself when I did it but it was nowhere near as glamorous or fun as I or my friends and family assumed dog groomer it's like working with children but with the added danger of one of them ripping your face off if you're not careful very stressful honestly any job working with animals it is always seen as such a great job but it usually involves a need for a good amount of physical strength and strong stomach when cleaning up bodily fluids and a hell of a lot of patients can't get spooked or scared of them video game tester you aren't spending your time playing completed fully realized games you are playing the same level of a game over and over seeing if there are bugs there are a bunch of testing methodologies such as load and soap testing white room testing version testing to name a few but the most common one is functionality testing functionality testing is so if I walk into that corner with the shotgun in my inventory I can clip through the wall but if I have my m16 in my inventory I don't clip through video game testing is like prostitution it's doing something you love in the least fun way possible sure some days it can be great and just like the real thing but most days it's a huge pain in the butt video game developer non indie they're notoriously overworked especially during crunch time the field is highly competitive too so I imagine if you have the slightest issue with work being your entire life it wouldn't be hard to replace you video game developers are notorious for not getting paid what they deserve especially relative to other peers in the CS world voice acting is also pretty brutal voice actors generally don't get paid very well in their straining their throats or whatever flight attendant one you are on-call forever have a terrible schedule have no life and make no money for five to ten years to while you work for peanuts you can't afford to use your flight benefits in any substantial way three then when you finally get a chance to use your benefits for a trip you have to fly standby which means you aren't guaranteed to get on the flight you want four then if you do make it out of town you better have like a week off so you can make damn sure you're back in your base city in time for your next work shift five did I mention there is an active US legislation that allows airlines to exploit so you don't get paid for certain work hours that you actually need to be working for example flight attendants don't get paid for boarding or any time the plane is at the gate worst job ever I honestly think being a streamer and a youtuber is a lot less fun than it seems to be but a lot of people know that by now what I imagine is the worst is if you have to play a game you hate just because everyone wants to stream that game like a contractor you have to go where the money is everyone where I work asks me if I stream cause they all know I love playing games but nah man never tried it and never will playing games is my stress relief nowadays being a chef all the flair and awesomeness they show on bison Netflix is far from what actually happens in the industry it's not all fancy plates and tattooed slash cool haired guys doing their thing it's a drug-infested law-breaking work environment that only benefits the owners of a restaurant I inherited a full service breakfast lunch and dinner restaurant that had been in my family for 16 year at the ripe age of 23 85 percent of my 20 plus staff members had some form of substance dependency I tried my best to be fair and pay people well but after a year so I lost almost all faith and humanity or the service industry at the very least it's not some fun ride where I get to call the shots and everything works out everyone thinks that I'm just raking in the cash but the reality is I haven't broken even in months even before the pandemic and them in a constant state of fear that I will have destroyed the restaurant and myself in the process that being said I'm sure there are some owners who have it all figured out and abuse their staff in the system to profit but a majority of us are just trying our best and hanging on for dear life acting all the ones we see on TV and movies are the 0.0001% of incredibly lucky and talented people who managed to thrive in a hostile and overcrowded industry and even when you are working the actual job itself is 99% sitting on Apple crate and hot make up waiting for some grips to move a lighting fixture then you say three lines over and over again for an hour and then you wrap plus it's literally all about luck these days there's a lot of absolutely may actors just with shoulders to rub or got discovered through some stupid abstract means like getting drunk at a party like Norman Reedus it's a joke and it's all typecasting almost exclusively anyway just write bad generic recycled screenplays and sell them to Netflix they keep buying them all anyone is doing anymore is trying to capture someone's attention enough to remain background static while someone scrolls through their social media endlessly on their phone good shows and movies is what - 30 percent at best of all the stuff made most is seriously derivative ripoff lazy garbage fronted by some affluent butthole trying to make 10 percent gross profit off it or some studio doing the same Suicide Squad is a prime example there working in entertainment in general you really need to love what you're doing to succeed in it it's long hours no social life and you need to be 100% on the ball or else someone else will take your gig not only that but you need to be at least tolerable to work with people think everyone in entertainment is a self-centered a-hole but that's not really true they definitely exist even the highest positions but it's still rare overall and unless they're talented enough for everyone to put up with they tend to be snuffed out pretty quick you work 12 to 14 hour days on a good day in a team environment no one wants to spend that much time with a butthole modeling I produced fashion shoots for the past seven years we should swim in January and tell the girls to relax and not look so cold here hold this hot D to warm you up until we rip it away from you for the photo drop your shoulders unclench your fists try to rub out your goosebumps and we shoot winter in July oh and tell the girls to stop sweating sometimes they have to change 100 plus times a day and get a front side back in detail shot for each one of those outfits and they need to look good seem relaxed and confident when really they are exhausted and uncomfortable I always had cold brew coffee and peanut butter cups ready to help them get through it brutal job a pediatric nurse being a nurse for children and adolescents everyone in nursing school talks about how much they want to work with kids the reality is that a pediatric nurse sees more cases of abuse and neglect than any other specialty doesn't matter where you are in a pediatric hospital it's the thing you see most I've seen so many Department of Child Services caseworkers that I've gotten to know some of them and became acquaintances with them sure are working with children and adolescence is great but people don't think about the most essential piece of that puzzle which is their families it doesn't matter how good of care you give to those kids if you don't loop the parents into that care you may as well just not be doing anything for them farming at least in my experience it's a rough and thankless way to make a living with no days often no management to cry to when there's a problem you my dad is in the hospital and isn't doing well can I take a couple days off the plants no also everyone thinks you have the cushiest job ever everything is automated now isn't it you get tons of bailouts and subsidies and whatnot right you get three months in winter off right maybe out west where they're growing a billion acres of corn in one field so the robot tractors can really get confused in such a machine would actually pay for itself only if you're in Iowa growing ethanol corn it's three months of building and equipment maintenance with no pay it's the exact opposite of a paid vacation but it goes for months no we don't go to Hawaii social media manager isn't fun sure you sometimes get paid to post memes and fun jokes but your jobs is also to read the comments section basically I've seen horribly racist stuff dead bodies and dick pics in the mentions and DMS of the brand's I've run people scream at you online like you can fix anything also people think anyone can do social media so they don't take your job as seriously my fiance's friend works for tumblr overseeing a lot of the censoring and moderating and the stuff he's seen you've got to be a strong person to work on any social media platform like that personal trainer just lazy unmotivated people who get mad they are and losing weight then they leave the gym and treat themselves with a 400 calorie dessert and a shag and know you I'm not talking to you about steroids you literally just started going to the gym weird hours it's basically customer service a lot of people are misinformed about fitness to be trainer at schools you need an actual degree the certification is kinda a joke in my opinion the people who really need you are the ones most likely to quit since they usually have other underlying issues being an extra in a movie now it can be super fun I especially love historical and post-apocalyptic stuff but a typical day on set wasn't what I thought it would be when I started doing it often we have to get up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning to get to holding and if you're a minute late to check-in sometimes they'll kick you out then we sit around and holding with sometimes hundreds of other extras and we're usually sitting there for a good three or four hours before they start telling us to get ready to film during this time we go through long wardrobe hair and makeup lines where they reuse clothes unless you bring them yourself brushes and makeup without washing them when we finally get to film it's often the same mundane motions over and over exceptions of course and those are always fun then we either get shuffled around or go back to holding several more hours pass we go film again hungry you get lunch six hours after your call time and a usually a meager supply of snacks in between takes it's more standing around often in heat or rain or we all get shuffled into cramped spaces to wait days on set are often more than twelve hours and I know someone who had to be on set for 26 hours straight they can legally hold you there until they declared filming is done so don't make plans for the next day not to mention that you rarely see yourself in the final cut I'm not trying to bash other background actors or the film industry because I've met lots of awesome people and gotten to do some pretty cool things for example interacting with main actors and scenes running around in the woods with fake guns or being a zombie but when I did my first job as a team I definitely thought it would be a lot different working in a craft beer bar no I do not want to hear about every craft beer that you've ever had are the best craft beer in your town no I am NOT going to tell my boss that this spar would be so much better effects and yes you are vastly more knowledgeable about the craft of beer than I am maybe a lot of times not because while I like people and talking to people I really do not care about the brewing process but I love to learn and love listening to what you have to say if you are saying it out of a true love of the craft and not because you are trying to prove to me that you know more than I do about beer and no I am not working here to hear misogynistic comments like if you were a lower cut shirt you'll get more tips or much worse that I've usually heard before thanks for listening to radio TTS hit the subscribe button and activate the notification bell for more advice that ruins your day click the right box for the radio TTS career advice playlist let us know in the comments what you think about these professions you

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Keywords: reddit, reddit stories, best of reddit, askreddit, reddit story, ask reddit, askreddit funny, reddit funny, r/askreddit, top posts, reddit best, r/, reddit top posts, askreddit top posts, reddit top post, radio tts dream job, dream job reddit, nightmare job reddit, reddit jobs, reddit job stories, reddit job secrets, reddit hate job, dream job, askreddit career paths, r/askreddit career, askreddit careers, dream job turned nightmare, dream job became a nightmare

Id: RA1SPHUC-LQ

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020