Most of it. I went to college for Funeral Directing. School will tell you it’s an ancient and honourable job of serving people in a time of need. 50% of school is learning “the art” of embalming and the other 50% is rules and regulations.
In real life, embalming is becoming a rare option, so most funeral homes have one or two directors on staff who can easily do every embalming the business gets. The other directors are essentially just salespeople. Most funeral homes are now owned by a few large corporations who don’t run it like an honourable service but rather like a used car lot. These corporations have found every trick to skirt regulations meant to protect consumers and drive up prices while lowering quality of service.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed by the consumers, who will take out their anger and frustrations on the overworked and underpaid funeral director who are not in on the take. Directors are typically paid for 40 hours a week but are required to take on all clients who call. It’s rare that a director can handle every client a week in just 40 hours. All places I worked were severely understaffed and burnout was incredibly common.
I eventually got burnt out myself and switched jobs. I would not recommend funeral directing to anyone. College acts like you’ll be treated like a doctor or lawyer but they must just mean the gruelling hours because funeral directors get none of the pay or respect.
Yes. The places I worked had about 80% of clients choosing cremation. I assume it’s mostly a cost decision. Cremation does not require a casket or a cemetery plot, which are two very expensive items.
Ironically, understanding the lived experiences of college students.
I’m a professor now, graduated from college in 2010. I actually work at the same school I went to, and I often still feel completely out of touch with what my students actually need and how they approach their education. I have to put real work into connecting with students to meet them where they’re at and create classes they will get something out of. Fortunately I really love that aspect of my job. Most professors don’t give a shit and just assume college is the same now as it was 10-20 years ago.
It’s more of a persistent thing than a series of examples, but a moment that comes to mind is earlier this year teaching a kind of broad social sciences class. I was trying to make a point about something or other and the psychology of capitalism and asked who had ever consciously chosen to stop studying or working to go to sleep or watch tv or otherwise be unproductive. Everybody raised their hands. Ok now who has felt guilty about doing that? No one. Not a single hand. I was astounded.
And in my millennial mind my first thought is of course “wtf are these kids doing at this elite college if they don’t hate themselves properly?” Second thought is “oh cool, these kids don’t hate themselves.”
But following up on what they thought that meant as far as the material we were talking about, it became a conversation about evolving pressures. For me, the concept of “self-care” in college was really the same as “laziness,” which is obviously not great. For them, “self-care” is as much a responsibility as homework, but not necessarily in a good way. There’s a social responsibility to be a certain kind of anti-capitalist while still succeeding in a capitalist system. I had a student say she felt more guilty about breaking her streak on her mindfulness app than getting a bad grade because she didn’t work hard enough.
But at the same time, they truly HAVE to get excellent grades. I might think grade inflation is a huge problem and that they should consider an A- to be a good grade, but the reality is that A- might be the reason they don’t get into law or med school. It’s not like that A- means they don’t deserve or can’t succeed on med school, but it might mean they’ll never get the chance. Do I stand on principle and grade like grades are supposed to mean something, or do I give them what they need to have the future they want?
What about using AI ethically and constructively? I was told I wasn’t going to have a calculator in my pocket by idiots. I’m not going to do that to a new generation. What does it feel like to have to pack extracurriculars to get a post-bac internship even more than they did to get into college? What does it mean to come of age in the era of BLM, COVID, and Trump instead of 9/11, don’t ask don’t tell, and the Great Recession?
It’s just not the same experience. I can’t be. That’s not a problem, but it’s a challenge.
Corporate “motivational” nonsense. Leave the woodpile higher, write everything in pencil, drink your most expensive wine first. Some companies base - quite literally - everything on these nonsense blurbs.
That, and the way many [past] jobs tried to cover up the lack of compensation opportunities and bumps by things like basketball courts, restaurants on “campus” (sigh), goat yoga… I can’t feed my family with a basketball court at the office. I guess I could feed them a yoga goat but I surmise it would be frowned upon.
Drink the expensive/good stuff first is generally good, though. I’ll appreciate the good stuff more while I’m still sober/buzzed, and once I’m drunk the cheap stuff is easier to drink.
The high level of sheer incompetence at all levels, but especially in management. I’m lucky to work with competent folks directly, but the sheer amount of work created by stupidity outside of my department is soul-crushing. I can present definitive proof of systemic failures all day long, and no one is interested in doing a damned thing if the people or departments in question are politically powerful within the organization. Neither I nor my immediate colleagues are perfect, but we acknowledge our failures and try to create solutions. So many others, though, seem so invested in the status quo beyond all reason.
I have to say, I think I was very lucky because College prepared me for most aspects of my job.I really can’t think of one that it could have prepared me for that it didn’t - like it didn’t teach me the specific bureaucratic processes for purchasing or getting approval from management etc, but how could it? I’m also lucky to be working in my field many years on.
Office politics. I was a 4.0 student who was given an award by the faculty as best computer science student two years in a row. Despite being talented, extra hard working and driven, I had no idea how to play the game and my career stalled almost immediately. I watched others with weaker skills get promotions and raises because they knew the right people and served on the right committees. Being slightly autistic, I never realized the rules of the game. I quit after 8 years and started my own business, went back as a contractor getting 4x the pay, and it was awesome. There should be a class for people called “sucking up to management and gaming performance reviews.”
Yep, it is mostly apparent in big companies I would say. I could go on and on, but basically your work is so disconnected from the final output that what end up actually “mattering” is a bunch of made-up bullshit. Putting in quality work and improving your product/service does not benefit most of the people you interact with directly, unless of course you’re working on the popular thing that will get people promoted.
Anyways, I also left the corporate world to start my own business. Life is so much easier when all you need to care about is the quality of your work and not political points. I like my hard work to rewards me, and not just some guy spending his days in meetings claiming credit for “his” “initiatives”. Some of those folks would never survive a job that isn’t a mega corp paying them to improv all day in meetings.
They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.
Ehhh, I’d say that expecting results really varies by the job. Or at least the results are usually KPI that are easily gameable if you don’t care about trying for a random bonus. I kept a job and got pay raises by basically doing the minimum and slacking off pretty hard for a while. I worked another job where they mostly wanted someone to be a warm body ready to talk to a customer, but otherwise didn’t really know if / what you did.
But yes it isn’t too hard to game the system and get rewarded for minimal work. I had to put a shit ton of hard work in to get to that point but if I felt like it I could do minimal most days.
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