Saturday, April 6, 2013

Hunting for that Elusive Job (and Ruminations on Life)

         I'm not sure I know anyone who enjoys job hunting. I personally don't enjoy it. I guess the one upside is that it gives you the opportunity to decide who you're going to be. So far I've been a few things and I often wonder where my life would be now if I was still one of those things, or if I had never been one of those things. In my mind, each decision you make in life leads to a new path for your life to take. And in some parallel universe where you didn't make that choice, or you chose a different path, your life is completely different from what it is today.
        For example, imagine if I had never quit my job as a tele-interviewer (which is kind of like being a tele-marketer, but you're trying to get people to participate in a survey rather than trying to get them to buy something). Imagine if I was still working that job, rather than the one I have now. If I had settled for that rather than moving on to new things. I would still feel like I was at a standstill, still feeling like I wasn't going anywhere or doing something I loved. It's nothing against that sort of work - I'm sure there must be someone out there who maybe enjoys getting sworn at by complete strangers over the phone - but it just seems like the type of job that was created by someone who never actually had to test it out and see if it was effective or not, because if they had, they might have realized that for every interview you get, you probably get at least 50 rejections. And that's a lot of rejection for anyone to face in an 8-hour shift. It's tiring. It's exhausting. And it's frustrating. It's the type of job created following the notion that if you were to have a million chimps typing away on a million typewriters (for a million years!), one of them would eventually spit the words of William Shakespeare out of that archaic machine and onto a piece of 20lb bond paper.
        There are plenty of routes I could have gone in life, and plenty of things I could have been right now - I could have become an archivist, a graduate student (which could have lead to being a research assistant or again being a teacher's assistant), a canvasser for charity, a graphic designer, a civil servant, etc. But I am where I am now, and the choices I have made have brought me here. I can either like it or lump it, because if job hunting has taught me anything, it's that you never have to settle. You can usually always change what you don't like about your life. There are always new opportunities out there if you look for them. I guess that's the upside to job hunting.

No comments:

Post a Comment