Best job i ever had was maintenance guy at a nursing home. Loved it. Rewarding. Fulfilling. Paid only $10.75/hr so i left it and ‘developed my career’ and now im ‘successful’ but at least once a week i have dreams where im back in the home hanging pictures, flirtin with the ol gals, being useful.
So when people ask ‘who fixes toilets under communism?’ my answer is a resounding ‘me. I will fix the toilets.’
I like handling bureaucracy so I can handle that. Currently trying to get a public office job. I’m bringing it up because I’m aware most people don’t.
Many “undesirable” jobs are undesirable because they’re below living wage and/or may be long-term unsustainable physically (or mentally) with the 40(+)h/week standard.
Reminds me from my own history: the most satisfying job I ever had was cleaning floors and bathrooms at grocery stores at nights.
It didn’t even pay minimum wage, so it was under the table. If I didn’t have to earn 6 figures just to survive I would for sure be in cleaning: I love tidying up dirty areas and then fussing over them, keeping them spic and span.
If I had a job that was cleaning a circuit of 5 grocery stores in my area, and I could survive on that, I would be so happy.
I used to work in programming, I hated being so mentally exhausted at the end of the day that I couldn’t do anything more taxing than watching TV or playing a mindless videogame
Give me a simple physical job that I leave at work any day
My job involves handling dangerous materials. Given how much some of my coworkers stress me the fuck out by being walking safety hazards, I often and happily volunteer to shift the more dangerous tasks to myself.
I’d be snagging post-revolution hazmat volunteer shifts like a fiend just trying to keep less careful people from getting them…
Yeah, I think that’s something worth expanding on - lots of people actually like work. Nobody likes working 40+ hours a week and still not being able to pay the bills.
I really enjoyed the actual work I did at Subway. The only things I didn’t like about it were the rude-ass customers, the fact that I was getting paid shit.50 an hour and the manager was a creep and a prick who was constantly late with checks. Two of those things go away if everyone’s paid enough to live no matter what they do.
Yes, there are people who enjoy doing a simple job well. Capitalism is what makes it miserable by making you poor for doing it (despite society needing it)
not just money, but controlling our time – no time left to do anything for ourselves or too burnt out to do anything during those precious spare minutes …
The job I have, I would do even if I was rich. Well, that’s only partly true.
I work in aviation in the military, and my job previously consisted of being a flight mechanic doing Search and Rescue, maintaining aircraft, and fixing electronics/avionics on aircraft, and it was awesome, and I’d have done it for free if I could maintain my lifestyle without that paycheck.
The only reason I stopped that stuff and started supervising was because I got too old and broken to continue doing the job I loved, but if you had told me doing this job now (supervising people doing the fun work, occasionally helping them with my arthritis-ridden hands, etc) would be the cost of doing the job I did, I would have accepted it hands down (though in fairness I am looking longingly forward to retirement). And when I do retire, I’ll have to find something else to do for work, because I’ll probably just die of boredom if I don’t.
All that to say, there are plenty of people who don’t work just out of necessity. And like the person in the post, just feeling productive and appreciated does wonders to make it worth more than just the paycheck.
Happiest I’ve ever been at work has been fixing and cleaning things that needed it.
The thing that always stopped it was the inhumane work conditions and lack of respect. If you’re happy to treat me as an equal, and make me a cup of tea when I take a break to stretch my back and knees I’ll do the dirty shitty work for you.
If you want me to work to the point of damaging my body and then raise your voice at me if you see me taking a damn breather then we’re gonna have a problem.
Whoever is going to be using it. It’s not fucking complicated. Under (actual) communism the populace is educated to take care of themselves, unlike in capitalism, which purposefully perpetuates the class divide through lack of education to preserve hierarchy.
I’m damn near 40 in a great career and I still miss my old McDonald’s days that paid peanuts. It was a weird mix of monotony, spontaneity and genuine friendships.
Befriending my coworkers is more fun and genuine when dicking around in the kitchen when the manager is out on a smoke compared to sending sfw memes in slack.
Like, I’m great friends with one of my coworkers. I knew him for years before work, but talking with him on slack feels so much more sterile compared to when I see him in the office, which is much more sterile than when I’d grab dinner with him a few years back.
It’s kinda saddening knowing that the environment of a hybrid job will make it so much harder to have genuine friendships with coworkers.
Now, if I stay at my job for a few years and get promoted to leadership, it will be worse knowing that my hierarchy will taint whatever hope I have at forming genuine friendships.
We would need some mathematicians to generalize this to the entire set though. Then we’d have the more elegantly named auto-Natons which is valid for any positive integer N.
I’m from the middle of nowhere West Virginia where a lot of the times you can’t get the county to fill in potholes. Lots of people manually fill them in themselves with gravel. If the tools were readily available to borrow, then there would absolutely be somebody that would fix their own road.
We act like there was no infrastructure before capitalism, and that’s just not the case. If a village needed a bridge, they built a bridge together.
Not to say standing on the back of an asphalt machine is easy. Roadwork is pretty hard, not just physically and logistically, but making a nice even layer out rocks and oil-residue is actually not simple at all.
Everything is hard but very few people have still enough hands to even be considered neurosurgeons or an interest in using meth in order to perform the insane surgeries (need to stay awake and concentrate). Further few are capable of dehumanising people enough in order to be able to cut into them.
Plenty of people are interested in enough things to cover them but neurosurgery at least is almost life destroying in what it demands. I’ve never met anyone entirely whole that’s a neurosurgeon, so it’s kinda weird to imagine people would want to flock to it and we wouldn’t have enough people happy to do other work.
You’re absolutely right, but if the choice is replacing your truck suspension for $1,000 every 2 years or poorly patching the road outside your house for a days worth of work and $100 in materials a year…
It’s not optimal, but needs must. A poor road repair is still cheaper than none.
Edit: While my comment sorta makes sense, I really thought you were replying to the guy who talked about his neighbors doing road repair. But that’s not who you were replying to!
I replied in a context that does not exist. Sorry!
There’s a Youtube channel out there called Post 10.
This guy drives around looking for culverts to unclog. Has a day job in lawn care, decides to spend his free time recording himself raking leaf litter off of storm drain grates and pulling beaver dams out of drain pipes.
He has over 2 million active and engaged subscribers and his videos routinely pull in millions of views.
Given their needs are met and they have the time and energy, people will do the job they see needs doing. Just because you’re too precious to fill potholes doesn’t mean everyone is.
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