The Hardest Job Ever

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – What do you think would be the hardest job for you to do?

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There are two ways I can approach this question. I know that the hardest job I have ever done is being a parent. Of course, like all parents, I am grossly underpaid. And there’s no vacation. No days off. I’m still a parent, even if I’m sick. It can kinda suck. On the other hand, once in a while the boy says “I love you, Mom,” which basically negates all the bad things. It’s a hard job. The hardest. I feel horribly underqualified. Yet I do it every day and both boy and mom seem to be doing all right.

Now, if I were thinking of career style jobs, the hardest job I could have is any in which I was required to make a ton of phone calls. I think I’d be sick everyday. You see, I have social anxiety (though most people who know me find that hard to believe). For all the years of therapy and medications the one thing I still can’t do without overwhelming terror is make a stupid flipping phone call.

I do make phone calls, of course, and sometimes with little to no anxiety. But if I have to cold-call someone, say for example a program director at the National Science Foundation, or a land owner who’s land I’d like to work on, I flip. This may be one of the reasons why my current job suits me. I don’t have to make those calls. I call vendors from time to time to ask for parts (which can still be difficult). Most everything else I need to do can be done with e-mail. I can handle e-mail – most of the time.

So retail jobs would be a nightmare for me. Secretarial jobs, panic city.

Sitting in an interior laboratory with no windows, just me and the mass spectrometer, just fine. I’ll stick with what I got.

For 12-12-12