3 Jobs
Want to make the world a better place? Do one of these for a while.
There are three jobs everyone should work at some point in their lives; if everyone did then we’d live in a nicer, more polite society. It’s better if you do them when you’re younger, but getting them in is helpful any time in your life. We talk sometimes about needing to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, and that’s what this is about. The lessons these jobs teach are important.
First, everyone should work a job in food service. My first job ever was in a junior college cafeteria. I was a grill cook, mostly burgers, but with some breakfast croissants on the weekends. I got to mooch cheese all day--not bad for a 16-year old dorky kid.
What did I learn? And what can other people learn from this kind of work? You learn what’s going on behind the counter at a food place. You get a sense of what commercial kitchens even look like, and what the employees are doing back there. You get a better understanding of what’s possible in a commercial kitchen, and what’s unrealistic. More than that, you understand what drudge work it is, and what a really bad day everyone in the place is probably having. Almost no one wants to be working in a commercial kitchen (fast food, sit-down, you name it). The chef may love the job, but nobody else decided one day that their career aspiration was to be a dishwasher, or prep assistant, or fry cook. Experiencing that world can make us all more sensitive to the people who serve us. It’ll make you nicer when you order, and it’ll make you nicer when something goes wrong. And that means you’ll just get better service all the way around.
The second job everyone should do is service counter work. By that I mean service work in which you must stand face-to-face with a customer and try to satisfy whatever their need is. Toward the end of my college time, I took a job as a front desk clerk at a historic old hotel in my college town. I worked 2-11 pm four or five days a week. Hotels are crazy environments. I’ve seen some things.
More important, I also had to deal directly with people. Some were tired, some were cranky, some were drunk, and some didn’t speak English very well. And I had to listen politely and try to address their concerns. Few of them really even noticed me. They had problems that they felt were major, and they wanted service right now. Sometimes I couldn’t provide what they claimed to want. I had to deal with that.
Any customer service job will work here. Low-end retail may be especially excellent. No matter the venue, you need to work a job at some point in your life that requires you to physically face a customer and tackle their problem.
If you do that, you may find that you’re much more understanding of customer service people that you encounter. Even when you’ve got a problem, you’ll understand that the person you’re talking to can’t do everything, and you’ll be more patient and understanding. If you are, you may find that the clerk you’re talking to will go the extra mile for you. Just smiling may be a big step.
The third job we should all do, and this is a big one, is a job that involves talking to people on the phone. I did telephone survey cold-calling back in the day, and to this day I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and take a phone survey.
The biggest thing working a phone job taught me is the primacy of the script. Every phone job involves a script. Phone workers have specific things they need to ask or say, often in specific ways. Companies spend a lot of time and money figuring out the most efficient way to work their phones, so when you talk to someone who has called you on the phone you need to understand that this is how their job works. Getting testy about that helps no one.
Cold-call phone jobs are nearly gone, as both surveys and sales have either gone online or been automated, so nobody has to deal with that much anymore. But phone jobs still exist; they just shifted purpose. Inbound call-center jobs are still thriving.
Have you ever called for Tech Support and talked to “Frank”, who is obviously in India? Yes, none of us believe his name is Frank. But that’s neither here nor there. At this stage, I am very patient with the Indian tech support rep. I speak slowly and wait for him to read his whole script, and I work through my problem with him. Because I’ve done similar work, I understand that he’s required to read his script. He’s probably also being recorded or monitored by a supervisor, and if he messes up his script he’s going to get in trouble. So I let him do his job. If he’s clearly doing his best, sometimes I’ll even take a moment in the call to break the fourth wall: I’ll raise my voice just a little bit and say “Hey, supervisor who is listening to this call! Frank is doing a great job! Give him a raise!” And then I share a laugh with Frank, and he’s even more invested in my call. He gets that little bit of positive motivation to try as hard as he can to fix my problem. We both win.
Everyone should, at some point, work a food-service job, a customer-service job, and a telephone-speaking job. If all of us did these, preferably when we’re young, what a much nicer, more empathetic world we would live in. We would also get better service as customers, because we would understand service employees a little bit better. If you’re young and considering what you should do to build experience, or you have some influence over a young person entering the job market, you (and they, and all of us) would be well served remembering these.