YESTERDAY MORNING I WAS WONDERING HOW some people can do particular jobs. Everyone needs to work, obviously, but what causes some to select jobs that seem, well, not on most folk’s list. I had gone into a local lab to get blood drawn for my doctor. The women that do this work (and I’ve yet to meet a male doing it) are called phlebotomists. What they spend their days doing is poking needles into people’s arms to fill up little vials of blood for testing. I can’t imagine! Unfortunately, I’ve had plenty of exposure to these people and some of them are not too good at their job. I’ve had them jab me three, four times before they got the task done. Then there are dental hygienists, who fill up a work day poking around in the mouths of strangers. Morgue staff is another one. Who wants to do that? “Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it,” said Stephen Hawking. That sounds so uplifting, but in the above examples, I’m having trouble matching it up. If certain kinds of jobs draw certain kinds of people, what does that say about the doctor who chooses to be a coroner and perform autopsies? I saw a doctor whose last name was Stork shilling on a TV ad for some joint medication. Why isn’t he an obstetrician?
Hello HenryM.
Unless we have the privilege of being able to ask these workers, (and get an honest answer) we can only guess at their reasons for undertaking such roles. On the other hand, since you posed the question, My own occupation was with maladjusted individuals & families, which was a job that (generally) other people did not want to do. Further to this, my colleagues, in the same profession, had particularly ‘difficult’ or ‘dangerous’ clients, that they did not want to deal with (so I had a niche within a niche).
These were the people that I seemed to be able to work with best, and I often pondered on why that might be so.
Below are some of the more obvious reasons:
a) My ‘AIMS FOR TODAY’ were conducive to an honest and open approach, which these people appreciated and contrasted with the bureaucratic skulduggery they were accustomed to from the agency.
b) Whereas other workers attracted hostility from them, I seemed to attract a healthy, sceptical, repartee and very little of the ‘trouble’ that others experienced.
c) Many of my clients were potentially ‘dangerous’ towards people they did not like in some way; Apparently, I did not fit into this category , so it was encouraging to delude myself that I was possibly having a positive effect working with them.
d) Two characteristics that I always felt were beneficial in that job was 1) I had naturally low blood pressure, so the job raised it to somewhere near ‘normal’; 2) I was never afraid to ‘die’ – so my clients did not have that ‘trump’ card to play.
e) By far the most beneficial aspect of working with these people, was that my line- management tended to be afraid of them (& rightly so). This had the effect of allowing me to work with them in my own ‘unique’ way, without too much bureaucratic intervention.
On the odd occasion when my methods were questioned, I had a standard response which was along the lines of : ‘ If you think you could do any better – then I suggest you give it a try!’ Needless to say, I was never taken up on this suggestion.
f) Job satisfaction must come high on the list of motivations for undertaking work that other’s don’t want to do and I had plenty of that.
g) I used to ‘prove’ to my clients that I had listened (and was empathetic ) to everything they told me. This was done via the writing of rhyming verse and then giving the verses back to them for their comments as to whether I had captured their thoughts, ideas and concepts (a process I labelled - ‘Inverse Feedback’ ).
h) There are not many professions or occupations that offer the multiplicity of additional roles within them such as researcher/writer/poet/lecturer/ and the opportunity to simply ‘be kind’ to people who are seen by others as undeserving of this ‘kind’ of treatment.
i) I am long-since retired from that mainstream work, but in my old age I can look back and feel proud of what I did,and I also like to think that my writing (in its various forms)will be a suitable historical account of what went on in that scenario I called ‘The Fringe-edge’ .
j) There are many other things to explain taking up such an occupation, but if I listed them all here it would be the equivalent of writing another book, so, I will curtail my enthusiasm at this point.
Best wishes
Bill
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All I can say Henry is who in god's name wants to be a chiropodist eew cheesy feet and dirty grubby nails yuk xx
