A little background..the majority of my work experience (excluding as child), 20 years now, has been jobs that for the most part were not difficult, nor required a great deal of brains (although some of them havd been mind-numbingly boring). I've worked for the same company for 12 years now. The first 9 1/2 years as a security guard. While this was a pretty creme' de la creme' security guard job (excluding really unusual jobs like 'filthy rich celebrity bodyguard', it was still about 95% made up of the sort of work a bright chimpanzee could do. Except for the pay and the title, I'd have been utterly content to do that job for the rest of my life, as I don't define myself by my work, and the job was for the most part very pleasant. I can entertain myself quite nicely, and a typical 12 hour shift for me included 2 hours of work that I was required by the company to do, 2 hours of work that I made up for myself to do, and 8 hours of time when I could do whatever I wanted - television, internet, reading, skipping rope, talking on the phone, scrapbooking, watching traffic, shooting rats in the parking garage with my bb gun (well you get the picture)..., so long as I was alert enough to hear the phone ring, or an alarm go off and respond to such appropriately.
Anyway, a position became available within the company at one of our manufacturing facilities just across town (Dallas) from where I worked, and the company has a policy of attempting to hire/promote from within before hiring from outside, and as a consequence my boss got an email from the HR director saying "Hey, would any of your guys be interested in applying for this job?". My boss immediately thought of me. The optimist in me wishes that this was because I had been (and I had in fact) so responsible and self motivating for 9 1/2 years, and the cynic in me suggests that it was because I was making two bucks and hour more than all the other guys due to longevity, most likely part of both. Anyway, I applied and got the job - called a "chemical process operator", with an hourly pay raise of about 60%, and with the same amount of typical overtime worked, a pay raise of about 85%, with an overtime potential (if I were a workaholic who sucked up every opportunity) of 250% of my earnings working the same hours at my last job.
It turned out to be a really, really, difficult job. It is very dirty. It's frequently painful. It burns grotesque amounts of calories (but not enough lately), it's usually beastly hot, and it is complex beyond what I'd have thought an on-the-job-trained manufacturing job could be, not by intensity of brainpower required, but by the breadth of brainpower and retention required. For the first six months of the job I hated life, I wished I'd never taken it, and I left work each day feeling like a whipped puppy. I'd say to learn my job, it takes the rough equivalent of the time required to learn a trade (I mean to the master level) such as being a plumber, carpenter or electrician. They turned me loose on it after six weeks of on the job training. The messes were enormous, and I had to clean them all up by myself (usually, but then again it is amazing that people in a really tough job so often feel sympathy for a newbie and help out, even though they've got plenty of work of their own to do). Anyway, I've been doing the job on my own for two years now, and I'd say I'll be a "master" at the job in another three. Not to say I'll know everything, just to say that in another three years a reasonable person should be able to expect me to be able to do my job well, and only have to call in a "specialist" when the going gets extremely tough.
Anyway, a long and terrifically rambling post to get to a pretty short point...sometimes there is satisfaction in a difficult job "well done", for no reason other than self fullfillment.
For the past year my boss (who started out doing my job, so he knows how tough it is) has begun to give my my working orders without giving me the "?" look after telling me what to do to see if I know exactly what he wants. In the last few months, he has begun to call on me for extra work, overtime assignments, has started asking my opinion of operational stuff (as an example, thinking out loud as you would to an equal, rather than to a subordinate, "hey, do you think it would crystalize better if we upped the temperature on such and such".
But my pinnacle of success at the job occurred yesterday. One of the maintainence men (and to be fair to the maintainence guys, in a fairly titled career, they'd be called engineneers, as they're the most highly skilled guys at our plant) came over and told the guy who had just relieved me, "we need you to turn off and do a lockout on xyz, we're going to do a linebreak on it.." and the guy who had relieved me (a twenty year veteran of the job, my closest work associate, and a heckuva decent guy as a person - the kind of guy you'd call and ask to take care of your family while you were laid up in the hospital) turned to me and said "I've never done that before, I better call the boss.." in which I turned to him and said, "let's see if we can figure it out first and then call him to check our work..", and then we went back to the pit and I followed steam lines until I found the valves we needed, opened and closed as neccessary, and then after the boss had came over and checked "his" work I checked with him to see if I'd gotten it right.
Anyway, made me feel good for the day. "Self fullfilled" if you will. Probably much of it is gobbledygook to most of you as written, but if you plug in job/task definitions of your own career to the parts that your not familiar with, you probably have your own similar story.
