The following piece is part of series on Scud, whereby authors respond to the following non-fiction prompt: What was your best job? What was your worst job? Today, Elie Easton responds. If you are interested in submitting your own Best Job/Worst Job essays, please see the Contact page on this website. Consider publishing anonymously, so you can speak your mind.
My best job was my first: several summers of working in my family’s bakery/restaurant. It was the post-WWII passion project of my grandfather, who died before I was born, and whose father had a sort-of-similar business for decades before. Everyone in my family who lived close enough worked there, too.
I started this job when I was 11. Through it, I internalized the blurring of work and life (solid preparation for academia) and the importance of chosen family. My aunt taught me to decorate cakes using a photo projector. I delivered wedding cakes to hotels and baked goods to nursing homes with my dad and uncle. I learned customer service and how to work a 10-hour day, use an industrial bread slicer, and count back change (still a valuable skill!). In the restaurant, waitresses (always women) who had worked there longer than I had been alive taught me how to serve the regulars: construction workers and bus drivers (always men) who were my friends in the way that adults can befriend children. They were all family to me; I missed them when summer ended and I miss them now, many years after they’ve retired or passed away.
Routine tasks taught me about others’ lived experiences. I served customers who bought birthday cakes with food stamps (then, printed food coupons with overly-strict rules about how much change we could give). Every week, I prepared a specific loaf of bread and pastry for the first Holocaust survivor I met. I spent hours chatting with my favorite maintenance man while he greased the pans and mopped the floors. After work, I watched my dad teach him how to read. The many people I served, worked alongside, and learned from over those years cultivated in me a deep empathy and curiosity for the human condition.
This job shaped my notion of work as a place of learning, growth, and community, and it taught me how to integrate work and life (even if problematic) to meet my goals. There were many frustrating times, of course, but they aren’t worth mentioning. I loved this job, even when I didn’t.
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To select the worst job is almost paralyzing, with so many strong contenders. I could describe the dating service that was a pyramid scheme to exploit the emotionally vulnerable or the academic department that was a toxic hellscape. But the worst job is New Job, the one that sounded promising, that offered an authentic off-ramp from some of the unbearables before it, and that I wanted to like, but whose day-to-day was a tremendous disappointment.
New Job started because the former job that I loved offered no viable path out of precarity. A colleague described New Job as “a gift to [herself],” which made me too uncomfortable to admit that for me this was not a gift, but a compromise for the social, political, and economic hardships that I think will intensify in the coming years.
The job was supposed to be a way to apply my expertise and have work-life balance. But the work itself was more a slog than an impactful application of my expertise. New Job placed restrictions on my personal and professional life, only some that I knew of in advance, and that left me with feelings of deep sadness and isolation. The work could be so tedious that life became very small. Alone at my desk, my actual skills atrophied as I combed through databases, filled in spreadsheets, and frustratingly read and re-read the manual’s passive voice to decipher who it is that approves, or decides, or sends.
In absolute terms, New Job was far from the worst. The organization has a good mission, diverse workforce, and strong leadership. I had much less precarity, appropriate compensation, and some flexibility. Somehow, I was incredibly fortunate to endure New Job’s wrong fit every day. But it, too, was unsustainable, with no clear road for where to go next, if anywhere.