I manage a front desk at a hotel, and as a second job, I am a front desk clerk. I absolutely love my job. I get to help people from all over the world to enjoy what is for many, a once in a lifetime vacation. My personal favorite thing to have happen is get a person who is extra cranky and stressed make them laugh and be happy. I understand, vacations are stressful. Especially since we are 5 hours from any and everything. Travelling is hard, and people want everything to be perfect on vacation, yet it seldomly is. Being able to help people on a daily basis makes me happy. I have worked all kinds of jobs, IT tech in the 90s, fast food, bartending, serving, and many more. I have made tons of money and bought whatever I wanted and travelled all over the place, but I hated those jobs. I make less now, hence the two jobs, but I love coming into work. It is sometimes less stressful than my reef tank.
What's your job?
Why or why don't you love it?
What is your dream job?
You may meet me in a few years...I need some much needed time off fly fishing and travelling out West.
I got a job 24 years ago doing what I wanted to do, work at a state trout hatchery. I'm 51 and can retire in 2026....well if can afford it. I don't want to need to get a second job, I would just stay where I'm at until I turn 60.
Within the past few years we had my manager forced to retire due to reduction in force, made two other managers step in for partial duties until they could "officially" rehire someone due to need. Then a couple years after that we were given the "shut the facility down ploy" to save money and lay the staff off....except the new hire to maintain the grounds. Our budget got passed and we were still working last winter and through this year. We have to do some major work to comply to water quality standards or we'll hear about the shutdown again.
Recently our new manager has really been putting a lot more work on us, he has a new vision for the hatchery and seems to want to implement all the new protocols within his first 5 years of employment.
The fun of going to work, feeding the fish, cleaning raceways, maybe mowing the lawn or talking to visitors has evolved to massive data collection in every aspect of our job, writing SOP's for everything, more computer training, effective time management, never ending lists of duties. It's not that I don't want to implement the new things, but it takes time which we generally don't have. I'm in the twilight of my career and he is in the dawn.
Also I have over 2000 hours of sick time...rarely take a sick day....and have about 2 months worth of vacation time on the books, I cap at 360 hours annual leave and get about 4 weeks worth of hours a year which I barely use on top of holidays and other leave time.
The wife and I had planned two cool vacations this past year which we cancelled, we are hoping things get better by winter and we want to go south to Key West and possibly drive out to Utah or Arizona.
