Life Lessons From Employment

Having a job can be a great way to gain some experiences about earning money and making a living on your own. It can also be a strong lesson that people learn about the path it takes to actually get a job. However, on the contrary to all of the benefits of employment, there are still lots of challenging aspects that require real efforts to overcome, in order to achieve the goals of living your life independently and earning your own money. Nothing can happen by magic, and nothing in life is easy. But when you dedicate your very best efforts to make something happen, you will definitely accomplish it regardless of how hard and challenging it can be.

Finding a job and having a job are completely different concepts, and they both have their own easy and difficult natures. In regards to finding a job, it can be very easy and simple if you live in a place that has plenty of restaurants, food services, grocery stores, supermarkets, or even shoes and clothing stores, because, with access to those, you can easily come in to ask for a job if they are hiring new employees. On the contrary, the challenging aspects of finding a job would be the places that you are applying to work at do not need new employees, that they have the sufficient amount of workers that they need, and also the summer time is not a good time for them to hire because there are not that many people around, so the store’s function can be slower than normal. So even though looking for a job is a very mature decision to make, but it still requires lots of efforts and patience to obtain, because it does not happen immediately.

On the other hand, regarding having a job, it can be a fantastic experience and very easygoing if you are in a safe, friendly, and respectful working environment. You can feel safe, supported, and respected while doing your job, and in that great environment, you are able to motivate yourself to work harder and do more of your job every day, and can get excited to go to work every day. Or you might even want to renew your contract to reapply to work at that same business again. However, on the dark side of having a job, your job can be an exhausting, hard, and a frustrating experience if you have to deal with difficult co-workers and supervisors, and also ridiculous customers. They are the reasons for plenty of misunderstandings and miscommunications to happen at the workforce, and they can also be the causes for you to get fired if those misunderstandings cannot be resolved and clarified.

This is the way it always happens because your main boss who does hire you will only and surely listen to and trust the words that come from the supervisors, not you. For instance, let’s say you come to your first day of work for the first time in life, and you accidentally wear the wrong outfit, such as the wrong shoes. If you have a nice and thoughtful supervisor, when they see you walking into the door, they will gently pull you aside and nicely remind you that you are wearing wrong attire. In contrast, if you have a sassy, bossy, and thoughtless supervisor, they will just call you out in front of the other employees, pinpoint your incorrect attire, and kick you out of the business. In addition to that, those unkind supervisors will always criticize you if you ever make a mistake or do your work to slowly, even when you are still learning how to function and manage your job for the first time.

Not only that, there can be some very careless supervisors, who randomly disrupt you in the middle of your work and make you do something else, such as when you are busy making food and serving a long line of more than 3 customers. Those careless supervisors will randomly grab you and tell you to either go grab some items in the storage or servE at another station. In these types of cases, the misunderstandings will happen when you are unable to leave what you are already in the middle of doing to go on and do what those careless supervisors tell you to do. Like when you are not 100% entirely done with making food for your customers, you will have to keep standing there to finish serving them before you can go on to follow their request, because you feel that you cannot leave the burning pan running by itself, and also the unwashed pans in the sinks by themselves, because you are the only person serving in that big station, even though in your head you get their directions and for sure you will do it. Ridiculously, those thoughtless and careless supervisors do not think exactly that way. Instead, if they did not see you doing what they asked you to do, or if they did not see the items that they initially requested YOU grab for them, they would consider that as you not following instructions, you not cooperating with them, you not being a responsible team player, and also you not doing your job. This right here is the misunderstanding, the miscommunication, and the cause for you, the hardest working and nicest employee to get fired, because right there, those supervisors will go ahead and report you to your main boss about your assumptive lack of cooperations and responsibilities.

Yes, it is wrong, it is unfair, it is hard, and it is ridiculous, and a big struggle to those who have never been employed before in life. However, on a personal note, another lesson coming out of all these hardships that the girl who writes this piece has learned would be finding clarity. She has learned that before these types of miscommunications happen, when she gets asked to do a different thing in the middle of what she was already doing, she should pause and ask if she could finish up with what she was in the midst of doing and move on to those thoughtless supervisors’ requests; or if she should just leave what she was doing there, follow their requests, and then come back to what she was doing afterwards. This is an ongoing process, it does not end here, it does not stop, regardless of what kind of job you get, not just in the food industry. So with this hectic reality, the girl who writes this piece does hope that this little lesson can hopefully resolve many of the misunderstandings, that they would not happen over again.