How does your job change you ?

[warpus]

I work at a University where people are often hired and promoted based on seniority instead of experience and knowhow. People are often assigned to tasks here they have no business of getting their fingers into.

Having worked here for 7+ years, I am now far more cynical than ever.

 

[Pegasus_77]

I work at a University where people are often hired and promoted based on seniority instead of experience and knowhow.
.

I also hate those dumbasses who have little academic contributions but brag like they know many things.

Sent from my iPhone 6 using Tapatalk

 

[Pegasus_77]

Being a teacher makes my friend more patient.

 

[Arwon]

I'm a lot more statistics and data minded than I was 5 years ago.

 

[Antilogic]

My best friend changed the most by his job, I'd say. He used to be kiddy, innocent, and relatively honest.

After working from a teller to a sales manager over the course of 5-6 years, he's sinister, calculating, and honey-tongued. I can still tell what he's thinking based on the subtle shifts in his body language, but he's no longer the same person I grew up with over 20 years of my life.

As for me, I learned to be much more careful in dealing with people. About a year ago, I almost let a conflict escalate to the manager level and now I just keep a policy of being fake-nice to even people I don't like and that worked out well.

I have noticed my relatives and friends, once going into the workforce, have become more "professional" for the lack of a better word in all of the worst ways. Their conversation style has become more curt and robotic, and overall less genuine-feeling. I don't know if it's just a different type of stress or what, but I'm hoping I don't come off that way as well.

I work at a University where people are often hired and promoted based on seniority instead of experience and knowhow. People are often assigned to tasks here they have no business of getting their fingers into.

Having worked here for 7+ years, I am now far more cynical than ever.

I'm only laughing because it's true. Some of the most clueless post-docs I know are the ones getting jobs as professors because they are best at selling themselves. The smarter guys seem to have no interest in going into academia.

 

[Commodore]

Does it change the way you perceive the world?
Do you get rid of bad habits because of it ?
Or anything else.
Feel free to post the impacts of your job on your life.

My time in the Army gave me a better idea of what true poverty really is when I deployed to Iraq. It kind of makes the complaints of people in the Western World ring hollow. Every time I hear someone here in the US hollering about how poor they are when they have a car, a place to live that isn't a shanty, and nearly unlimited internet access I can't help by think to myself "shut up it could be worse, a lot worse".

 

[Pegasus_77]

My time in the Army gave me a better idea of what true poverty really is when I deployed to Iraq. It kind of makes the complaints of people in the Western World ring hollow. Every time I hear someone here in the US hollering about how poor they are when they have a car, a place to live that isn't a shanty, and nearly unlimited internet access I can't help by think to myself "shut up it could be worse, a lot worse".

No offense but have you killed someone?
I recently watched Homeland and get so impressed by Sergeant Brody. The war is not a good thing.

 

[Borachio]

My job as a truck driver turned me stupid with fatigue.

My job as a docker brutalized me beyond being shocked about anything.

My experience being unemployed has made me realize how much I value my own time, and how so many things I'm willing to forego for the privilege of not working for some nutcase employer.

 

[Commodore]

No offense but have you killed someone?
I recently watched Homeland and get so impressed by Sergeant Brody. The war is not a good thing.

Like up close and personal to where I could definitely say it was me that killed the person? No. But I have fired at the enemy from a distance along side my squad, so I can't say if it was my bullet that killed the guy. I have also tossed grenades into windows of buildings we were clearing and called in artillery and air/drone strikes on buildings that would have been too tough to clear with infantry.

So I guess the proper answer to your question would be that I have not directly killed anyone, but I have committed actions that resulted in the deaths of others.

 

[Pegasus_77]

Like up close and personal to where I could definitely say it was me that killed the person? No. But I have fired at the enemy from a distance along side my squad, so I can't say if it was my bullet that killed the guy. I have also tossed grenades into windows of buildings we were clearing and called in artillery and air/drone strikes on buildings that would have been too tough to clear with infantry.

So I guess the proper answer to your question would be that I have not directly killed anyone, but I have committed actions that resulted in the deaths of others.

when you saw the dead bodies, did you feel bad?what did the army do to comfort the soldiers who felt bad?

 

[Flying Pig]

Commodore is being extremely diplomatic but 'have you killed anybody?' is an incredibly bad question to ask a combat veteran for a whole multitude of reasons. In the first place, fighting in combat and being part of what is euphemistically called an exchange of lives is a life-changing experience, even if the precise circumstances aren't in themselves unusually traumatic - which they often are. Secondly, there's not really a good answer to give to it: if the answer is 'yes', it's easy to feel like a murderer, while if the answer is 'no' it's easy to feel like a coward.

I was a soldier myself, and the job definitely changes you. Even today I can recognise off-duty and former military people simply by their appearance: an athletic-looking, clean-cut man with short hair and an upright bearing nearly always has some military experience. There was a time at which British soldiers (my own regiment especially) had an 'off-duty-uniform', whereby everyone's default civilian attire was a tight maroon t-shirt, stonewashed jeans and desert boots, plus one of those softshell outdoors jackets when it was cold. Then there's the inability to arrive less than five minutes early for anything, the involuntary swell of irritation when you see somebody else arrive late or looking sloppy in a professional context, and the peculiar psychological adjustments. You grow so used to living in an environment where people are moulded to be a tight-knit team and to be able to rely on each other that you forget that you can't expect that elsewhere. That was my career, and until recently I didn't have any other long-standing jobs, though recently working with cadets has made me appreciate the flaws of the military approach to life.

 

[Pegasus_77]

I always have respect for soldiers. Standing up to protect the country demands courage.

 

[Borachio]

Undoubtedly.

I've mixed feelings about individual soldiers, though. Those who engage in combat are almost invariably young. And too young but to do anything but abnegate the moral responsibility, for them killing others, to someone else. And the ones they kill have had to abnegate their moral responsibility as well.

So, there you have two groups of people each trying to kill the other for reasons they don't understand, or care to understand.

Courage, I will grant you. Not a lot else, though.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Soldiers don't abnegate the moral responsibility any more than the rest of us. And the role of the soldier is as much, if not more, to be killed as it is to kill. Yet for every soldier who dies another one kills him. Nicely circular.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Working in a public library has made me more contemptuous of public education and public assistance, two rotten houses leaning on one another. I'd say I've gotten more cantankerous about modernity in general -- we're overwhelmed with people doing manual labor jobs who came to the library because prospective employers are requiring resumes from them. They aren't comfortable with computers, yet white-collar bureaucrats expect them to know how to craft a communicative resume? Neither we nor the local job center have the resources to cope. How can I spend twenty minutes with someone interviewing them so I can compose a resume when the welfare office is sending hundreds of people a week to the library , expecting impoverished and illiterate people to navigate four different websites they can use to print verification letters (for another welfare office to read) , websites that invariably require information (online access pin numbers, case numbers, etc) no one knew they were supposed to have brought. The case workers don't eve know how the system works; they just blithely send people our way. You'd think all these welfare offices could communicate with one another instead of sending in people who have no use for computers and would never have bothered coming into the lab if they weren't being forced to.


On the bright side, I've gotten very good at being patient. Stupidity and meanness are simply the nature of the centralized beast. I also earned kudos for creating an instruction manual for explaining which each site was used for what, which welfare departments wanted which information, which sites needed what information, and so on, then making copies for every department of the library. Now even patrons come in and, at the first moment of confusion, ask for "The Book".

 

[Labtec600]

My last position made me feel that people are nothing but a bunch of lying, self-centered, shady pieces of garbage who have no care about how their actions can impact others financially.

My current position get's me away from that section of human emotions and is more of an analytical spot. I love my current position.

 

[Commodore]

when you saw the dead bodies, did you feel bad?what did the army do to comfort the soldiers who felt bad?

It was actually the wounded that bothered me more than the dead. Yeah, it's terrible that the dead are dead, but at least their suffering is over. For the wounded however, there suffering has only begun. Even if it was a guy that had just been shooting at me a few minutes ago, I still couldn't help but feel bad for him.

One instance that stands out in particular was a little girl I met when on patrol. I was talking to her father, assessing whether or not he might make a good intelligence source. After talking with him for a bit, his wife comes and says that their daughter needs her bandages changed. At first I just saw an opportunity to build rapport with this guy by offering to have our medic take a look at his daughter. When he brought his daughter out, she had burns over most of her face and torso. When I asked him what happened, he told me his daughter was caught in the blast of an IED. That absolutely broke my heart, and it is the one memory from over there that I still have not truly gotten over. I had our medic change her bandages and give the family any medication he could spare that would help.

As for comforting, most soldiers would talk to the chaplain, even if they were atheists like myself. We all also had to go through mandatory counseling sessions when we returned from deployment, but in my opinion the chaplain did more to put my mind at ease than the counselors did. Each individual soldier also develops their own way of dealing with what they experience.

 

[Bugfatty300]

I rode in the back of a pickup truck in security convoys on backroads between Durango and Zacatecas. The roads had become so dangerous that local police refused to travel on them. Mostly we had to secure murder and shooting scenes until Mexican Marines and Federal Judicial Police arrived. The worst single thing for me was the smell.

On a lighter note, I get death threats over the internet occasionally from people claiming affiliation with a certain narco group. Once, someone made a facebook account and posted a shopped picture of my ex-wife (sans her head), apparently they weren't not aware we had been split up for nearly a year.

 

[Traitorfish]

After working retail for I think seven years, at this point, I tend to come to the conclusion that there aren't many actually bad people in the world. People are ignorant, or stupid, or selfish, or short-sighted, and they can be all of those things in abundance, but they're rarely actually malicious.

It also convinced me that wage-labour is an offence to human dignity, but I suppose I wear that on my sleeve.

My time in the Army gave me a better idea of what true poverty really is when I deployed to Iraq. It kind of makes the complaints of people in the Western World ring hollow. Every time I hear someone here in the US hollering about how poor they are when they have a car, a place to live that isn't a shanty, and nearly unlimited internet access I can't help by think to myself "shut up it could be worse, a lot worse".

I'll remember that if I'm ever mugged. "Sure, this sucks, but I could be on fire!"

 

[Flying Pig]

After working retail for I think seven years, at this point, I tend to come to the conclusion that there aren't many actually bad people in the world. People are ignorant, or stupid, or selfish, or short-sighted, and they can be all of those things in abundance, but they're rarely actually malicious.

It also convinced me that wage-labour is an offence to human dignity, but I suppose I wear that on my sleeve.

Working in retail, I imagine you get a lot of insults to human dignity unrelated to your pay packet!

 

[Cheetah]

That was my career, and until recently I didn't have any other long-standing jobs, though recently working with cadets has made me appreciate the flaws of the military approach to life.

I've always found your insights into the military world very interesting, and I think a lot of the aspects of military life has certain virtues that the civilian world might do well to adapt.

But can you expand on that last point (make a thread please)?