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I run a small window cleaning company, no high rise.
It hits the spot. Jobs are on rotation, consistent, predictable. Work is adaptable, requires active problem solving, easy to notice what’s finished and what needs detailing.
I did customer service for 14 years, and I thought I hated working. Turns out I just hate stupid people and wasted effort.
I’ll work hard, if it makes sense.
ahh, that’s beautiful. Gives me hope
Literally how my brain works. Not diagnosed with anything, though.
I was a custom picture framer, that fit the bill if anyone’s looking for recs
Where are you based? Are you hiring? And what’s the income?
I traveled a lot, there were shops in NOLA, Iowa, and Houston I went back and forth between. The reps for the products knew me and could recommend me to the shops in whatever area I wanted to go. It was great there for awhile. I’ve been fully disabled since 2010 though, and at that point I was a manager, but still only made $10/hr. The cost of owning a frameshop and supplies makes it pretty hard to pay employees what they’re worth, regardless of how the owners feel about you as an employee. If you want to get started in the industry though, I would ask around different shops and see who has time to train you. I ended up liking to work for The Great Frame Up brand bc their miter saw is German and much less likely to chop limbs off than the chop saw a lot of private owners use. One of my former bosses almost lost her arm that way.
This is why I’m stuck as a line cook 🙃
I actually kinda found it. If not for upper management it would be perfect. I’m a metrology tech, I do precision measurement all day, whether that’s gathering the data myself by using a laser tracker and physically measuring it or sitting behind my keyboard for 6 hours straight, repeating the same analysis functions again and again in spatial analyzer to see whether our part is in tolerance, then creating a customer deliverable report highlighting the deviations from nominal. Or maybe a part wasn’t machined to the correct surface profile, guess I’ll set up and sand the part while tracking how many .001in increments I’ve removed. Do I have a boss? Absolutely, gives me my list of things that need doing for the night. The leaves me to fuck off and formulate an attack plan and execute. Occasional break ins between parts to assist the mills with accuracy testing, or levelling a pallet station to +/- .005 flatness or training mill technicians on metrology collections.
The variety is as endless as the parts we manufacture. Aerospace is pretty cool. Too bad I have help process these parts for fuckheads like beeeezo and leon. Other cool things too, science mission stuff, which kinda help make it tolerable. Kinda.
I’m in a similar position with aerospace manufacturing but on the welding side of things, always something a little bit different but also all within the same realm of action and requiring a fairly high degree of precision. And yes , fuck the current big players in the space game, but hard to deny some of the stuff the companies are doing is pretty dang cool
Try my life, autism + schizophrenia. That means I’m obsessed with my own schizophrenic hallucinations. Yay!
That must be difficult for you. I hope you do well.
Thanks
Sounds like a recipe for making art! Good luck fellow traveller
I made cable filler (the stuff in the lines that goes under the ocean) for an Employee Owned Company.
It was the BEST job I ever had. Hit all the markers, AND we were respected as emoloyees being EO.
Left during the pandemic. The company… tbh, tanked. My payout (not even close to what I could have walked with if I stayed til retirement) would have been 12k (after taxes/fees) the day I left. I had to wait 5 years to get my stock payout due to resigning. Walked with $2k. So… I left right when the culture shifted, and though pissed at losing 10k, my leaving feels validated.
But I know I wont ever find work like that again. Yes im sad about it.
There will be more employee owned companies when we make them.
Teaching meets all of these criteria. The one it doesn’t meet is “make enough money to survive”
Yeah I’m AuDHD myself, got the diagnosis in my late thirties after finally seeking help after burning out at my seventh engineering office job. Stimulant medication has helped a lot with the ADHD side of things, but I’m just done with office jobs at this point. It’s possible things might work better with another one, this time with proper medication and support. But I’m just done. I’ve spent so much time and lived through so much misery trying to be productive in engineering office roles that I have some degree of PTSD about the prospect now. At this last job, even though I didn’t know what was happening, my subconscious sure did. I quit in a panic after three days and had to be convinced to come back. I gave it another shot and made it nine months before total burnout.
I need a new career path. And I needed to try something different. And I think teaching is it. Prior to this year I have some experience teaching undergraduate students and doing a lot of K12 tutoring, but my K12 classroom experience was limited. To explore this path, I got my substitute teacher’s license over the summer. This year I’m substituting basically every day, and honestly I’m having a blast.
It works with my brain in a way almost nothing else does. Mine is more the inattentive form of ADHD than the hyperactive form. I really struggle with executive function and focus when working on long repetitive tasks, especially those with no immediate value. I’ve studied engineering extensively, up to the doctoral level. I love it as a subject. I love teaching it. I love learning it. I love applying it in hands on ways. But stick me in a cubicle and ask me to grind out calculations all day, day after day? I break. By the time I reach burnout on the job I’m basically catatonic, staring blindly at a screen or wall, disassociating the whole day away. That’s what office jobs are like for me. Hell. And I say office job, but the actual setting is irrelevant. I’ve tried work from office, work from home, and hybrid. It’s the work itself that is the problem, not the environment.
But teaching? Substitute teaching is hard. There are days that I leave frustrated, as some classes you just can’t ever get any traction on. There are some classes I’ve taught that no matter what techniques I use, I simply cannot get them quiet enough to teach. There are days when the kids really get to you, and you wonder how some of these kids are going to possibly survive in the real world without just immediately ending up in jail the instant school isn’t covering for them.
And yet, I wouldn’t trade my worst day substituting for my best office day. (At least any office day past the first few months, when I’m usually able to maintain focus when things are new and the learning curve is still steep.) Teaching just works so well for my neurology. The regular schedule. The defined work and work hours. The immediate feedback and sense of purpose in your work. It’s everything working as an engineer in a design office isn’t.
Yes, the money sucks. If I substituted every single school day of the year (not really practical), I would make 40% of what I made doing engineering work. If I go enroll in a program, get a formal teaching certificate, and become a proper teacher? 60%. But honestly, I don’t even mind. It’s not like the engineering salary is really a sustainable thing to begin with. Thankfully I at least have a spouse that is able to make the engineering life work, so we’re fine no matter what. But it would be really hard to make ends meet doing what I am now if it were just me.
Teaching is such a joy.
It’s shameful how the US treats its teachers.
It’s shameful that teachers are treated wildly differently based on zip code.
Being a draftsman kind of hits these boxes. Sometimes it’s a struggle to get through the bits that you don’t like to do, and everyone is different in that regard, but part of the creative aspect imo is finding inventive ways to automate as much of the tasks you don’t like as possible and then enjoy the ones you do like.
Mechanic,
Every day is a new puzzle that at the end of the day fits into the box exactly as it should.
No matter how out there and strange the problem always makes sense at the end. It’s so rewarding
Not to mention people are optional. Some of the best mechanics i know don’t talk to customers they have a receptionist who deals with that
I wad about to say, welcome to the trades unions! Show up at 6am and do a manual labor puzzle!
They’re typically called Service Managers, not receptionists.
The good ones do a lot more than take info and pass it between the mechanics and customers. They know a lot about troubleshooting and can help give a ballpark estimate on cost and time. They also typically sell the general stuff like tires, brakes, batteries, etc.
Tho in some places they actually make more than the mechanics, cause they’re there to upsell, not assist. You want to avoid those places as much as possible.
Yeah my bad service manager is the better wording.
Though to also play devils advocate as I know people who do it they literally have receptionist to just answer the phone and do nothing else.
The great service managers know what questions to ask. Customers say the dumbest things. It’s the difference between a mechanic getting"Customer states it makes a womph womph sound sometimes." and “Customer states it makes a Womph Womph sound when they’re trying to get on the highway.” The first one could be anything the second one points to a transmission problem. The mechanic still needs to diagnose it, that’s not the service managers job but they can make it a lot easier.
Engineer at a tech startup. Extremely fast-paced and nearly everything is resolved in a day. My train commute enforces strict boundaries on my working hours. It’s like an episodic procedural TV show, except instead of finding a murderer I’m finding out why these widgets are wrong today.
Me too!
Best reality can do is a boring predictable job where the only real variety is when you get bollocked and what for.
This is universal human experience, right? Right??!
For my son it was working in the library. Quiet organizing, different every day.
It’s software development. You get your stupid little Jira tickets like little quests and you get to solve them however you see fit. And then they get put on the deployment belt and run through all the checking steps in a satisfyingly rigid way. And then you’re done with them and you don’t have to think about them ever again. It’s the perfect cycle.
It’s perfect when you know the application inside and out. A completely different story when you get dropped into a project that uses sixteen frameworks and libraries, including widely employed features that are barely documented. You get to do guesswork on whether this pattern is recognised by that library, while your system is constantly swapping under the weight of dozens of browser tabs with the docs and StackOverflows.
You cannot imagine how much must go correctly to end up in such a blessed state. And if the stars do align, enjoy every single one of those ephemeral minutes because inevitably, the PM leaves, there is a re-org, and the PM replacement who never touched jira before and has never delivered software is steering the team one week at a time without spending any time putting in the work to make jira smooth. I hate jira. It is a real skill (read: tolerance for bullshit) to arrange shit so that work is well organized. And it is massively missed when absent.
You get a JIRA Ticket
“Customer says X doesn’t work”
Try to reproduce the issue
It clearly works
Get to find edge cases and do 10 roundtrips with customerMany such cases
Or, JIRA ticket: complete the entire 18 month project
Honestly I don’t mind this one that much. IFF it is well designed, the entire team is in the loop of what’s to be done, and you don’t get immediate unrealistic time pressure.
I’ve always preferred working on JIRA tickets that were meatier than having to work on 15 different tickets in one day. The context switch just eats a bit too much energy for me every time.
Your mentioning of Jira alone gives me the shivers. For some project I had to use it, and it sends you like a hundred emails a week.
That’s easy, just filter them away in a separate folder and never look at them
Yeah I know, but why do I have to jump through a hoop to get a normal user experience?
It’s atlassian software 😅
I wish it was like this. But instead were getting tickets with barely a title. Or there’s a report that the application misbehaves ones or twice per month with no reproduction steps, fix it. Or the delivery schedule is set, but there are no feature roadmap or milestones to track what is yet to be done and if we are on track. Or the project manager has got their position because they sucked at coding and the company couldn’t figure out what else to do with them and you have to keep explaining basic technical decisions over and over to them. And everything will come back haunting you as long as you are in the company. One ticket keeps being resurrected for you because client keeps changing their mind on how it should work or keeps finding more esoteric edge cases. Or you’re roped in to some legacy project over and over again, because you managed to do a minor fix for it two years ago and you’re the only one left who has ever touched it.
I’m a manager with an engineering background, and this is exactly what good managers should solve for you. I love Jira but I know it sucks to configure correctly. Your problems are not because of Jira, but managers fucking up the process. But more than Jira (love it or hate it), this is about organization: People don’t know how to do their jobs correctly, decisions not being made by the right people or the right time (or not at all), too much planning and not enough execution or vice versa, people not empowered to say no, all that stuff. Everybody always hates on management but it’s a thankless and tough job to keep the whole operation running smoothly. It’s like that old IT joke “everything is working already, what do I pay you for? vs nothing is working, what do I pay you for?”
The curse of competence
So, it’s an adventurer’s life from your typical isekai. I see. Makes sense now. Only that the things asked are never clear, change midway, the finish conditions keep being altered, the validation at the end keeps being enforced differently or that 3 weeks later someone will ask about the thing done and you have zero memories of that place. Or that because you did it one time now it will always be pushed onto you, even when you don’t want it anymore. All of this while slowly killing you on the inside. Yep. Perfect.
