And You Think Your Job is Bad?

by Laura Heffner

Yesterday evening I took my mother out to dinner a local well-know restaurant which nets one of few in our small town.  My youngest child works there and being 17, everything to her is at one end of the spectrum or the other.  It's either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever.  Well she was hostessing that night and it was kids' night so the place was packed.  Kids eat free don't you know?  

As we were leaving she threw up her forearm and in the vein of Scarlett O'Hara went on about how hard her job was and always is especially when they are SOOOOOO busy.  Since I have little sympathy for her dramatics, I just looked at her and said well, you could have had a summer job like your biological dad.  Debeaking chickens at the large chicken farms in the area he grew up in.  She rolls her eyes as if I am the stupidest person on the face of the earth and goes back to her post.

So that started me thinking about all the jobs out there much, much worse than mine.  I sit in an office, air conditioned and heated typing away at a computer much of the day.  Oh, the agony.  How do I stand it?  In the attitude of gratitude, last night and several times today, I thought about jobs I could have. Crime scene clean up, laundering hospital laundry, cleaning port-a-johns, slaughtering cattle, a maintenance worker at an elementary school during an outbreak of a stomach bug.  The list goes on and on and on.  

Or I could work at Chuck E. Cheese, like the article I read tonight in which an employee of the kid mecca gave his insider views on working for the place.  Inattentive parents, out of control kids, dressing up in a mouse suit, cleaning up vomit, the noise and the unsanitary conditions he was forced to deal with at times.  When my children were little, I didn't much care for Chuck E. Cheese with their arcade like games, the cardboard pizza and that darn animated band playing ever so often something really annoying.  To work there?  Sheer hell.  At least for me.  

So I suppose on my next bad day at work, I will have to remind myself that I could be separating out chicken parts or cleaning up vomit at a Chuck E. Cheese and just let that stress roll right off as I plug in my headphones for some quiet music at my ergonomically designed cubicle desk where the room temperature is never quite right but it sure beats the heck out of a giant chicken coop in the middle of August. 

All in how we look at situations in our life huh?