Jobs That Seem Easy But Are Actually Incredibly Challenging
Reddit user CeleryLover4U asked: 'What's a job or profession that seems easy, but is incredibly challenging?'
When we hear about other people's jobs, we've surely all done that thing where we make assumptions about the work they do and maybe even judge them for having such an easy or unimportant job.
But some jobs are much harder than they look.
Redditor CeleryLover4U asked:
"What's a job or profession that seems easy but is incredibly challenging?"
Customer Service
"Anything customer-facing. The public is dumb and horrendous."
- gwarrior5
"My go-to explanation is, 'Anyone can do it, but few can do it for long.'"
- Conscious_Camel4830
"The further I get in my corporate career, the less I believe I will ever again be capable of working a public-facing job. I don’t know how I did it in the past. I couldn’t handle it in the present."
"I know people are only getting worse about how they treat workers. It is disturbing, embarrassing, and draining for everyone."
- First-Combination-12
High Stakes
"A pharmacist."
"You face the public. Your mistake can literally kill someone."
- VaeSapiens
"Yes, Pharmacist. So many people think their job is essentially the same as any other kind of retail worker and they just prepare prescriptions written by a doctor without having to know anything about them."
"They are very highly trained in, well, pharmacology; and it's not uncommon for a pharmacist to notice things like potentially dangerous drug interactions that the doctor hadn't."
- Worth_University_884
Teaching Woes
"Two nuggets of wisdom from my mentor teacher when I was younger:"
"'Teaching is the easiest job to do poorly and the hardest job to do well,' and 'You get to choose two of the following three: Friends, family, or being a good teacher. You don't have enough time to do all three.'"
"We all know colleagues or remember teachers who were lazy and chose the easy route, but any teacher who is trying to be a good teacher has probably sacrificed their friends and their sleep for little pay and a stressful work environment. There's a reason something like half quit the profession within the first five years."
- bq87
Creativity Is "Easy"
"Some creative professions, such as designers, are often perceived as 'easy' due to their creative nature. However, they may face the constant need to find inspiration, deal with criticism, and meet deadlines."
- rubberduckyis
"EVERYBODY thinks they are a designer, up until the point of having to do the work. But come critique time, mysteriously, EVERYBODY IS A F**KING DESIGNER AGAIN."
"The most important skill to have as a designer is THICK SKIN."
- whitepepper
Care Fatigue Is Real
"Care work."
"I wish it could be taken for granted that no one thinks it's easy. But unfortunately, many people still see it as an unskilled job and have no idea of the many emotional complexities, or of how much empathy, all the time, is needed to form the sorts of relationships with service users that they really need."
- MangoMatiLemonMelon
Physical Labor Generally Wins
"I’m going to say most types of unskilled labor and that’s because there’s such little (visible) reward and such a huge amount of bulls**t. I’ve done customer service, barista, sales, serving, etc; and it was all much harder than my cushy desk job that actually can be considered life or death."
- anachronistika
Their Memory Banks Must Be Wild
"I don't know if I'd call it incredibly challenging, but being one of those old school taxi drivers who know the city like the back of his hand and can literally just drive wherever being told nothing but an address is pretty impressively skilled."
"Not sure if it's still like this, but British cabbies used to be legendary for this. I'm 40 and I don't think most young people appreciate how much the quality of cab service has gone down since the advent of things like Uber."
"Nowadays it's just kind of expected that a rideshare/cab driver doesn't know exactly where you're trying to get and has to rely on GPS directions that they often f up. Back when I was in college, cabbies were complete experts on their city."
"More even than knowing how to get somewhere, they could also give you advice. You could just generally describe a type of bar/club/business you're looking for, and they'll take you right to one that was spot on. Especially in really big cities like NYC."
- Yak-Mak-5000
Professional Cooking
"Being a chef."
- Canadian_bro7
"I would love to meet the person who thinks being a chef is easy! I cook my own food and it’s not only OK to eat but I make a batch of it so I have some for later. So, to make food that is above good and portion it correctly many times a day and do it consistently with minimal wastage (so they make a profit), strikes me as extremely difficult."
- ChuckDeBongo
Team Leading, Oof
"Anything that involves a lot of people skills and socializing. I thought these positions were just the bulls**t of sitting in meetings all day and not a lot of work happening but having to be the one leading those meetings and doing public speaking is taxing in a way I didn’t realize."
- Counterboudd
Not a Pet Sitter At All
"Veterinary Technician."
"Do the job of an RN, anesthesiology tech, dental hygienist, radiology tech, phlebotomist, lab tech, and CNA, but probably don’t make a living wage and have people undervalue your career because you 'play with puppies and kittens all day.'"
- forthegoddessathena
Harder Than It Looks!
"Sometimes, when my brain is fried from thinking and my ego is shot from not fixing the problem, I want to be a garbage man... not a ton of thinking, just put the trash in the truck, and a lot of them have trucks that do it for you!"
"But if the robot either doesn't work or you don't have one on your truck, it smells really bad, the pay isn't what it used to be, you might find a dead body and certainly find dead animal carcasses... and people are id**ts, overfilling their bags, just to have them fall apart before you get to the truck, not putting their trash out and then blaming you, making you come back out."
"Your body probably is sore every day, and you have to take two baths before you can kiss your wife..."
"Ehh, maybe things are not so bad where I am."
- Joebroni1414
Twiddling Thumbs and Listening
"Therapist here. I’ve always said that it’s pretty easy to be an okay therapist—as in, it’s not that hard to listen to people’s problems and say, 'Oh wow, that’s so hard, poor you.'"
"But to be a good therapist? To know when your client is getting stuck in the same patterns, or to notice what your client isn’t saying? To realize that they’re only ever saying how amazing their spouse is, and to think, 'Hmm, nobody’s marriage is perfect, something’s going on there'?"
"To be able to ask questions like, 'Hey, we’ve been talking a lot about your job, but what’s going on with your family?' And then to be able to call them on their s**t, but with kindness and empathy? Balancing that s**t is hard."
"Anybody can have empathy, but knowing when to use empathy and when and how to challenge someone is so much harder. And that’s only one dimension of what makes being a therapist challenging."
- mylovelanguageiswine
Constant Updates
"For the most part, my job is really easy (marketing tech). But having to constantly stay on top of new platforms, new tech, updates, etc etc is exhausting and overwhelming and I really hate it."
"Also, the constant responsibility to locate and execute opportunities to optimize things and increase value for higher-ups. Nobody in corporate roles can ever just reach a point of being 'good enough.' More and better is always required."
"Just some of the big reasons I’m considering a career change."
- GlizzyMcGuire_
Performing Is Not Easy
"Performing arts and other types of art. People think it’s a cakewalk or 'not a real job,' not realizing the literal lifetime of training, rejection, and perseverance that it takes to reach a professional level and how insanely competitive those spaces are."
- ThrowRA1r3a5
All About Perception
"I suspect everything fits this. Consider that someone whose job is stacking boxes in a warehouse has to know how to lift boxes, how many can be stacked, know if certain ones must be easily accessible, know how to use any equipment that is used to move boxes around."
"Not to mention if some have hazardous or fragile materials inside, if some HAVE to be stacked on the bottom, if a mistake is made and all the boxes have to be restacked, etc."
"But everyone else is like, 'They're just stacking boxes.'"
- DrHugh
It's easy to make assumptions about someone else's work and responsibilities when we haven't lived with performing those tasks ourselves.
This gave us some things to think about, and it certainly reminded us that nothing good comes of making assumptions, especially when it minimizes someone else's experiences.
People Share The Best Examples Of 'The Laziest Person Will Find The Easiest Way To Do The Hardest Job'
There are 10 ways to do just about everything.
Or so they say.
Who among us hasn't figured out a shortcut to so many things people have been doing with more effort than necessary?
Lazy. Or genius?
It's a coin toss.
One thing is for sure...
Some people will always find a way.
Redditor lauvnoodles wanted to hear about the ways certain types of people get the job done, regardless of effort.
"Bill Gates said, 'I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.' What's a real-life example of this?"
Work smarter, not harder. That's what personal trainers say. Let's see...
Be Lazy
Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra GIF by 20th Century Fox Home EntertainmentGiphy"I had a math teacher that actively encouraged his students to be as lazy as possible, defining lazy as actively searching for ways to do as minimal work as possible. His logic was that the way math is now, it could always be simplified and still work the same, someone just needs to be lazy enough to find that."
Dovahnime
My Way
"I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12 pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one. On my first day I just placed the 12 pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment. From that day everyone did it my way."
necropants
Alexa
"Start of lockdown, my 9 year old son was having worksheets emailed to complete at home. One day, left him at the laptop doing his maths while I made some dinner with my 3 year old daughter. Walked into the living room with his dinner to find him asking the Alexa all of his maths questions."
SparkieMark1977
Daily Tasks
"Worked as a laborer at a nursery one summer. Daily tasks included manually watering 15,000 plants each day. Put together a back of the napkin plan to build an irrigation system and spent the next few weeks building it with some money from the boss. That system is still running 15 years later and does all the work now."
"I did automate myself out of the job and had to find another eventually. Couple years later got my engineering degree. I’m convinced Engineers are inherently lazy people that will spend a disproportionate effort to make things easier."
InquiringKata
Parchments
Take This Job And Shove It Vintage GIF by US National ArchivesGiphy"The clerk was asked to bring 145 white papers into the office. He doesn't want to count the papers manually so he printed 145 blank sheets and took them in."
Rino_samuel
Is this lazy or GENIUS?! What a fine line.
Midnights
Alarm Clock Float GIF by jjjjjohnGiphy"I plug clocks in at midnight so they're already set."
january21st
Massive
"My brother in law spent a whole summer trying to figure out how to fix his sagging deck at the lake which he could in theory crawl under and jack it up. It would have been a tunneling project. It's a 60x60 area all long 2x6 boards. Massive."
"I sat there long enough with enough beers in me to come up with the idea of just cutting a square out of the sagging area about 3ft x 3ft, jacking it up then re-screwing down the boards."
"He paints the thing every spring with a roller anyhow so it's not like the square cut shows up. He thought I was a genius. I was just lazy."
bbbbbbbbbb99
chemistry class
"We had to hold a thermometer in water in chemistry class. It probably was only 20 minute experiment but your arms get tired after a couple minutes and you can’t let the thermometer touch the bottom of the pan or it won’t get an accurate reading. So instead of sucking it up and just holding the thermometer, my lab partner built a contraption out of lab books and paperclips to somehow hold the thermometer in the water without it touching bottom."
"It was the stupidest looking thing you would ever see in a lab class and our professor even walked over and said 'if it looks stupid, sounds stupid, but it works, then it isn’t stupid.' My lab partner and I joke that he wasn’t talking about the contraption but the intellect of my lab partner."
cojallison99
'Rock Me Gently'
"One of my favorite examples is Andy Kim. And I'd like to preface this by saying that I don't think Kim is lazy so much as a genius. Andrew Youakim was a singer/songwriter who became famous under the stage name Andy Kim. He achieved success writing songs for bands like the Archies, possibly most notably 'Sugar, Sugar.'"
"After his success he coasted for awhile until his record label dropped him for lack of output. At that point he created his own label and cranked out hits like 'Rock Me Gently.' When they saw this, the big record labels then bought his label under the assumption that they would then profit off of the songs he wrote and performed."
"He then very shortly stopped writing songs and largely lived off the sale of his label. Work smarter not harder."
Microwave_Warrior
Me Too
Saturday Night Live Eating GIFGiphy"Eating dinner out of the pot so there’s fewer dishes to wash."
jackrussellenergy
"Not gonna lie, since this stay-at-home thing, I've been eating standing at my kitchen counter or stovetop. Single life is great sometimes."
ehmmes
I've learned so much today. I feel seen. Sometimes the minimum effort can have maximal results.
Do you have similar experiences to share? Let us know in the comments below.
Image by SnapwireSnaps from Pixabay |
Nothing is as it seems. Well, sometimes somethings are just as they appear. But the first is a good mindset to have.
Never assume something, like a job is easy. There are so many layers and backdoor dramas to everyone's way to make a living.
Every job has details and responsibilities that outsiders will never know or understand and in some cases be able to accomplish.
People who do great work, make it look easy.
Redditor u/paikiachuwanted people to know about the careers that people take for granted by asking:
What job or profession seems easy but is actually very challenging?
On the outlook my jobs may seem simple, I'm an actor and a writer. So of course people assume, well that's a cakewalk; I promise you, it isn't. Learning lines and the life of a character is a trying task. Yes, there are far more difficult jobs in the world, but this one is mine. And it can be grueling. So be nice to me.
Puppies and Kittens...
"Just about any position at a Veterinary clinic. I get so tired of hearing how fun it must be to play with kittens and puppies all day.Yes, there are puppies and kittens but we don't play with them. We may sometimes sneak cuddles if time permits on a bad day. The reality is that most of the time we are dealing with clients who are rude and unreasonable. Or even worse sometimes, clients who would move mountains to save their pet but nothing can be done."
"And the smell gets bad sometimes, obv. Once you smell Parvo you never forget it. And expressing anal glands can be quite nasty as well. But the hardest part is euthanizing a geriatric or injured pet in one exam room, holding it together, and then entering the next exam room for a new puppy check. Be kind to your veterinary professionals."
Daytime Issues
"Daycare teacher. Draining, difficult, sometimes heartbreaking. Worst experience I ever heard was a kid (3y) that was explosively violent. Hitting, pinching, occasional biting, screaming till other classrooms complained, hair pulling to the point that she ripped out CHUNKS. They would pick up other kids by the hair, even ripping out some of mine. I LITERALLY started going bald because of this kid. My anxiety went through the roof, panic attacks galore."
"Cuz see, when they were doing all of this, I'm also conducting class, toilet training, serving lunch out snacks, keeping other kids safe. Soo of course I'm also having to explain to parents when their kid has another bruise, more hair pulled out, another bite mark. At the end of the day, it was the owners fault because they refused to kick the kid out. I've had great kids, great parents, great bosses even."
Tired Fingers
"Massaging humans is like never-ending arm and leg day at the gym. I don't think a lot of people know that second-handed. Just think when you're asking for a massage, how do you last before 'your fingers are tired'. Hint: if you're using your fingers you're doing it wrong anyway."
Crushed
Schitts Creek Comedy GIF by CBCGiphy"Veterinary Technician. Back breaking, brutal and emotional crushing work. You don't get to pet puppies and kittens all day. Also the pay is crappy."
I can relate to those on so many levels. I could never massage people who I'm not intimate with, I barely massage people who I AM intimate with. So bless those people. And it sounds like I should bring gifts to my vet's office.
Trauma
Season 10 Hug GIF by FriendsGiphy"Social work especially when working with traumatized people. The amount of emotional pressure you have to deal with is insane. If you don't have excellent coping strategies and are not 100% professional this job will break you."
Putting down the sleep...
"I always thought being an anesthesiologist would be the easiest job in the OR. Cover the patients mouth with some sleepy gas and kick back with a magazine until the procedure is over. Turns out it's an additional 4-5 year residency with multiple gruelling exams and that's after completing your medical training."
Emotions High
"I thought nursing would be way easier than it turned out to be. I thought it would be technically difficult (actual physical skills) and emotionally difficult (in terms of trauma and seeing people suffering) but It's actually really draining; dramatic coworkers, demanding patients, bad bosses, angry families."
- lhuthien
Stand Up
"I don't if it really fits this post because it is already pretty obviously hard and dangerous, but, damn. Hardest job I ever had and I had some hard ones. 14 hours standing in place using both arms to grab trash flying by and throwing it into one of four various bins set up around you."
"Even though it's straightforward, it's mentally exhausting to think that quickly and constantly while having to execute physically. There's no rhyme or reason to what's coming down the chute so its not rhythmic like manufacturing or quality control. Truly difficult work."
- rvrdrppr
Bless the Chef
Henry Danger Wow GIF by NickelodeonGiphy"Cooking in my opinion, once considered it until I realized how pressuring it is... lol."
"Literally everyone I know who works kitchen staff is at least somewhat angry as a person lol, it seems like it must be very stressful."
So what have we learned? Be kind to your waiters first and foremost. Well be kind to everyone, but even more kind to any people in customer service. There is so much happening behind the scenes there. And don't assume about anyone's choice of job by degree of difficulty or lack.
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People Who Clean Crime Scenes Describe The Worst Thing They've Ever Witnessed On The Job
Cleaning up is hard enough when it's just clearing a month of dust bunnies. Can you imagine cleaning the debris left by murder, suicide and violence? I have a really great friend who used to do crime scene clean-up for a living. The pay is incredible; it starts at $55 an hour. But there is a much higher cost in mental well being. Death affects you in ways you don't always feel immediately. My friend has stories of nightmares, depression and pain after leaving scenes of horror. Why make all that money just to spend it on therapy? It takes a certain type of person.
***TRIGGER WARNING. CONTENTS ARE SENSITIVE ***
Redditor u/MemegodDave wanted to hear from the people who have the stomach to come in after crime and tragedyto try to bring back some form of normalcy to the location by asking... People who make their living out of cleaning murder scenes, accidents and the like, what is the worst thing you have experienced in your career?
Wrapped Up
Dad had to saran wrap a guy's intestines back into his body once.
Dude had surgery and pushed too hard on the toilet. Dude was fine, according to Dad, just holding himself together on the toilet while a group of firefighters tried to figure out why the hell they were sent instead of paramedics.
Update When he pushed too hard he opened a scar on his torso/ab area and it all fell out onto his lap. Should have mentioned this when I wrote the post.
Flesh
One that stuck with me was a suicide in a bathtub, we couldn't drain the tub, so had to use a coagulant then scoop up the bloody mess into biohazard bags. Same for the toilet. Another was a suicide by gun in a basement full of boxes which was a nightmare to clean as even the smallest bit of flesh had to be found and cleaned up. The smell of the smallest piece of flesh meant the job wasn't done until it was found.
One scene, the cops thought it would be helpful to put newspaper on top of the leftover melted body oils which dried to the floors and was terrible to clean up. Sad cleaning up these things when family is in the other room as well. Not working the job anymore but definitely gave me an appreciation for the hard work biohazard clean up crews do. Mostly on-call as well so you never know how long you will be away from home.
Walk Away
Medic here, first responder to a motorcycle collision. Guy who crashed was a friend. He'd been torn in half and almost decapitated.
Had to walk away from the scene and let my driver and another crew handle it. Think about it daily.
All over the House
I posted this on another thread so just copy and pasted it but this was one that I had to do
Clean up after a murder. It was a rehab house for ex cons, 4 bedroom house with communal bathroom and kitchen. Sunday morning and guy A is in his room listening to music pretty loud, guy B is in the kitchen cooking his breakfast, B knocks on A's door and tells him to turn it down, there's a small argument and B returns to his breakfast and A turns his music up. So B grabs the biggest knife in the kitchen, kicks in A's door and stabs him through his left shoulder, entering by his collar bone.
A runs out of his room, across the landing, down the stairs, out the front door, back inside, back up the stairs and collapses on the landing. When I got there it was like a scene from a movie, walls and ceilings, everywhere A had been were caked with blood. Apparently after B stabbed him, he returned to cooking his breakfast. There was a half eaten breakfast in the kitchen when I got there.
"ride-alongs"
Not a cleaner, but my brother's best friend is a police officer and I heard all about this horrible experience:
My brother's friend took him on "ride-alongs," all the time. One day, they were responding to a welfare check. This guy's neighbor saw his apartment door cracked open for several days and called the police. They went to check it out and found a college student (18-19) who had shot himself.
The most disturbing part to my brother was that the kid had all of his belongings boxed up and labeled, he had letters written out and labeled for who they were supposed to go to, and he even went as far as laying out a tarp, and then putting heavy blankets over himself before he shot himself - as a courtesy to the people that would have to clean his remains.
This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision, this was a very well-thought-out suicide and the guy was obviously thinking about everyone who would have to deal with it too. So sad to imagine such a thoughtful person in so much pain that he meticulously orchestrated his suicide. My brother said the scene messed him up. Not because of the gore, but the lack thereof. Because this guy so meticulously and thoughtfully offed himself.
Melt Away
When I was a bartender, a couple of clients told me the worst part about the job is cleaning melted bodies.
I don't know the science behind that, but from what I understand is if a body stays for a while in a certain condition of temperature and humidity, it melts. And those guys have to remove that person's remains in buckets.
Audrey
I had a great uncle who helped clean up the bodies left behind by hurricane Audrey in 1957 and he said that the smell persisted in his nose for weeks after. It got so bad that he went to the doctor to see if they could do anything and they clipped all of his nose hairs and the smell went away. It was explained to him that the smell had soaked into the hair but I don't claim to know the validity of that statement.
The hurricane hit south Louisiana in June of that year and most of the bodies recovered were found in the salt water marshes that cover the area, so it's safe to assume that they were in an advanced state of decay. I've heard it said that the smell of the decomposing bodies was so bad that the alligators would actively avoid the areas
Hazard
One of my first jobs after moving I did this, and the job that had me walking wasn't even a scene as described. We did all types of hazmat cleans and the worst was actually a couple went on vacation and came back to backed up sceptic. Think about 1 ft thick hard dried out crusty sceptic waste spread throughout the entire 1st floor of a house. Not going further into detail here. Was nasty.
Septic, not sceptic. On break and mobile, so yeah...
After the Crash...
Working for a tow truck driver that get the calls after crashes. The worst one for me was a family of 6 coming back with over 10 pizzas for a baseball team. It was a head on with a tractor trailer (18 wheeler). The ambulance took the bodies away of course, everyone died but one little guy. There was so much blood and vomit, diapers, toy dolls covered in blood, the pizza was everywhere inside of the car like 2" thick on everything and all over the road.
There was so many backpacks and things just covered in pizza blood, It is hard to even describe it to this day. it was oozing out all over the road and was like an exploded pizza pocket. Everyone that was waiting in the traffic jam looked horrified.
Fresh Meat
Friend of mine does this.
His worst was an elderly woman who died in a bath. Skin falls off like long cooked meat. So he just saw piles of skin/flesh
God just writing this makes me gag.
If you or someone you know is struggling, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
To find help outside the United States, the International Association for Suicide Prevention has resources available at https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/
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