Reasons Why I Love My Job #29

by Crazy Ivan

The older I get, the smarter it turns out my dad was all along.

When I was a kid my father and I were talking about the omnipresent question of "what are you gonna be when you grow up?"  I believe that at the time I was going to be a novelist, though it's just as likely I was still leaning toward fighter pilot.

"It doesn't matter what you do," my dad says, "It's all about who you're working for and who you are working with."

Turns out he was right.  I've had several jobs by now and the truest measure of how much I liked the job was how much I liked my coworkers.  If you like your coworkers enough, going to work is basically just going to hang out with your friends.

The job I have now exemplifies that about as well as any could.  I literally work (and live) with all my best friends.  I look at the schedule for the weekend and I think to myself "nice, I'm working with Mav on Saturday", not "darn it, I've got to work on Saturday again!"

There are a lot of advantages to working with your friends and there are also quite a few advantages that come with living with all the same friends you work with.  One of the big ones is that everyone knows what's going on with you.  See, I've had jobs where if you had to call in sick for a day you'd have to start by convincing some manager or another that you're really sick.  You'd try to sound extra hoarse and pathetic over the phone so that they'd understand that you really were just too sick to work and not angling for an extra day off.

This occurs to me today, of course, because I'm out sick for the day.  I thought I was going to make it through the whole winter without catching a cold but apparently some colony of malicious bacteria thought differently.  I was feeling worse and worse all day and by last night it was clear that there was no way I was going to make it through a day at the office today.

But that's okay because Kid and Pinky saw how sick I was and they don't want  me in the office.  Mav, Monk, Animal and Kore saw how sick I was and figured they wouldn't mind picking up some slack for me.  No feeling guilty because the manager thinks I'm faking it... nobody saying "can you pick this day up next week"... instead I just get a "Cool man, sleep late, drink fluids, get better."

This advantage is great when you're sick, but let's face it, everybody gets sick.  When you get a job they usually give you a prescribed amount of sick days because we all know it's going to happen eventually.  But sometimes you have to miss work for weird reasons and that can be tough when you're not working with all your buddies.

I can give you a perfect example.  We were having a bit of a Nerf Gun war at the house a while back, as we often do and I discovered the hard way why it is that they say to always wear eye protection when you play with Nerf Guns.  An errant dart leapt from Unknown's gun right into my eyeball.

It hurt about as bad as you would expect.  It was one of the velcro darts so I got little velcro loops right in my cornea and one of them got stuck there, scratching my eye pretty bad before I could work it out.  And yes, that's just as not fun as it sounds.

The next day, I couldn't work.  My eye was swollen and wouldn't open right, I was tearing up constantly and I couldn't look at one thing for very long before I'd have to close my eyes.  Now if I'd had a normal job, I'd have had to call my boss and explain to him that I couldn't come to work the next day because of a Nerf-related injury.

Can you imagine that call?  Not sure what your dad does for a living, but ask him if he'd get away with calling off because of a Nerf gun incident.  My guess is that he's be dragging his butt into work regardless or he'd be out looking for another job.

Luckily for me, all the people who I'd have had to call were actually in the room when it happened.  They all saw the Nerf dart hit me in the eye, they saw my swollen, discolored aftermath and they were telling me I couldn't work the next day before I was even certain of it.

-----

When you're young, people are always asking you what you're going to be when you grow up.  I'm not sure why they do this... I've yet to meet someone who is working in the job at 30 that they had predicted at 10, but they keep asking nonetheless.

So I've got a suggestion for you.  When you hear this question, respond with a shrug (since that's the only honest answer) and simply say, "something I love."