Retail, easy. Like, I enjoy what I do for my job but the people that my store attracts, make it cumbersome. People coming to me all the time with phones in my face of listings to other stores thinking we have them, people impatient, people thinking we have everything and people being deliberately vague but getting pissed when you ask them what they mean.
Software development. If you could just do what needs to be done without requirements changing every second it would be so much easier.
Luckily there are good project managers to shield you from such nonsense.
Sometimes the org itself is like a shitty client who doesn’t understand.
Reminds me of this article Programming Sucks
Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.” This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts.
That was a fun read . Thanks :)
Graphic designers suffer from similar customer issues as well… or did until the whole AI art thing came along.
Teaching
That’s a big one. It seems like a career that used to be enjoyable and rewarding, that is now a nightmare.
Tech support, the number of times I had to explain trivial things to some angry entitled asshat, who refused to read the instructions or didnt try basic troubleshooting steps (eg. turn it off and on again).
Also airport jobs. If people in holiday mode would just look up and follow the fucking signs…
I own a contracting company. We are expanding to just doing commercial and industrial jobs because doing smaller 1 day to 2 week jobs for customers on their houses I can be an absolute nightmare if you get a client that’s unreasonable. A lot of the time these small jobs barely make me any money and are barely worth my time, especially trying to manage them with my employees while also keeping these larger jobs moving. Clients want something small done on a wall, for next to nothing, and don’t understand that to make things perfect you often have to tear down to the bare bones and build it back up to make it look brand new. Shoddy framing or old designs can make it impossible to make something look as good as brand new. And then they will come and nitpick and then try to get money off of the job at the end of a project. It’s not worth dealing with a lot of the time.
I grew up in a construction family. Father was a fireman and all his coworkers had other construction skill sets so when they were off work they helped each other build their homes.
I thought it was too hard and too hot work to follow into the business.
So I became a chef…
…and I think about that a lot.
Chefs make good concrete guys. Same work attitude needed.
All the existent ones?
Lion dentist
Pharmacy. The patients that are the worst at managing their conditions are the ones you have to deal with the most. Add to that the issues that stem from insurance, addiction, neglect, or end of life care, it can be really tough.
Health insurance CEO
At least they get to kill their customers
I’ll be honest, the customers are far from my biggest problem with retail. :( I want electronics that work, carts it’s not easy to cut yourself on, an accurate inventory system, and more realistic expectations for how many items I can move in an hour. At least occasionally customers are nice, but policies are never nice.
Actual answer from me is deli work. I enjoyed taking inventory, making sure all the meats were dated and wrapped correctly, pre-slicing the sandwich meats and veggies before customers showed up… Very meditative.
But no one could stick to the menu, they all had to order weird shit like hot capocollo and rare London broil on a sandwich together. There was one woman who ONLY ordered weird sandwiches where each meat required thorough slicer sanitation between uses because they were all rare or heavily seasoned. Taking apart and sanitizing the slicer three times for one sandwich while the line got longer and longer.
[…] people being deliberately vague but getting pissed when you ask them what they mean.
In my experience, this shows up in every single job ever that involves people.
Torturer
I’d say waiters. If everyone was nice to them and polite and smiling I’m sure it would be better
Probably sex work
Probably? 🧐
Police officers.
Would their customers be civilians, or politicians?
Both.
Veterinarians.
