I am an Advice & Support Worker for the local housing department.

I am based in a community housing office within the city; I like my job. It involves supporting vulnerable council tenants, "sustaining tenancies", and preventing evicitons. This basically involves helping people with their budget or helping people with any debts they have. I also make sure they are receiving their correct benefit entitlement.

I also help people start up tenancies and more general support, this usually entails applying to charities for help with getting people furniture and carpets.

The pay is okay but I get alot of job satisfaction, independence and it is relatively stress free.

I work in a library at a big corporate law firm. They're not that evil though, so it's not so bad. The incredibly amount of waste is though. The number of books I throw away and all the wasted paper, and the fact that all these fucking books these fucking lawyers use are available online is all really frustrating to me at times. I have absolutely no interest in what I do, save for reading the occasional bit of law or bit of magazine that passes through my hands and on to the lawyers. I write, but am too undisciplined at the moment to make money off that. I do computer 2d and 3d graphics shit, and some design stuff, but have no formal training and have been too lazy and undisciplined to get a good portfolio together. Basically, I suck and need to do something more worthwhile with my time.

I work in a kitchen. I expo food, fry it, grill it, run it, and deal with people on a daily basis. it's draining, soul sucking, I'm underpaid. I drink with the people I work with, after work, because most of them are awesome. thing is I know wont be there forever so I try to take it with a grain of salt as bad as it sucks.

the food industry blows.

caix wrote:Everything we do here is hand-coded. Much more work that way

FYP

I work at the big university in my state. I work in what's called the Middleware group. We do identity management for around 80,000 people on campus. We basically munge data from a bunch of sources of data that we don't control into a single identity. I help provide access to this data via web services, direct DB access, LDAP access, and a few other lame ways. I write code in Perl mostly, some Java. Lately, I have been sitting through meetings, being ridiculed by other staff folks who want me to say yes to them wanting to do bad things. It seems as though it's bad of me to ask why or rather any questions about what they are trying to do.

Anyone know of a job doing this sort of crap in Chicago? Madison is getting too small.

Mechanical engineer in a steel mill. Twenty years and counting. These days I work pickle/tandem. I've also worked coke making, steel making, hot bar rolling, and galvanizing. And a little bit of blast furnace work, but not much. It's dirty and dangerous and I love it. I'd put a bullet in my head inside of a week if I had to spend all day in some damn office. I get dirty every day, the pay and benefits this far into my career is generous, and these sorry folks that employ me really need the help, so I can get away with a fair amount of fuck-off time as long as I get things accomplished...

Wood Goblin wrote:I, too, spent a couple of summers doing this. I'm hoping that STF's duties are more fulfilling than mine. I hated that job.

Ty Webb wrote:I was one of those readers for a summer. That job was torture.

Where?

hessburg wrote:

bigc wrote:Controller for a family owned aluminum manufacturing business with locations in GA, NC, TN and CA.

We have 200 employees and have been in business since 1946, when my grandfather founded this joint.

Working with my family is a source of nearly undending stress. People htink that I get to slack off, show up late and half-ass all the time. The truth is quite the opposite.

It kind of sucks.

The story of my life. No matter how hard you work or how good of a job you do you will always be hated or mistrusted by the rank n' file...which has resulted in many confrontations and I even left and moved out of state for a time. Our shop never had anywhere near 200 employees, though. I can't imagine the horseshit you have to put up with.

i can deal with being disliked for stupid reasons by people who don't know me...hell, I've disliked people for stupider reasons. The real problem is no matter how hard you work, not matter how much you accomplish, no matter how successful you are, it's never quite good enough. The bar is WAY too high.

STF wrote:

Wood Goblin wrote:I, too, spent a couple of summers doing this. I'm hoping that STF's duties are more fulfilling than mine. I hated that job.

Ty Webb wrote:I was one of those readers for a summer. That job was torture.

Where?

Durham, NC. Can't remember the name of the company. I spent 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, reading 5th graders' essays on "A time something funny happened."

At first, this sounds potentially amusing in a Bill Cosby "Kids Say The Darnedest Things" sort of a way. That lasted about 5 minutes. Every fucking essay, every fucking day, was the same thing - barely literate renderings of the time their little brother or sister fell down.

After 2 weeks, I wanted to stab myself in the eyes with my pencil.

busbus wrote:I work at the big university in my state. I work in what's called the Middleware group. We do identity management for around 80,000 people on campus. We basically munge data from a bunch of sources of data that we don't control into a single identity. I help provide access to this data via web services, direct DB access, LDAP access, and a few other lame ways. I write code in Perl mostly, some Java. Lately, I have been sitting through meetings, being ridiculed by other staff folks who want me to say yes to them wanting to do bad things. It seems as though it's bad of me to ask why or rather any questions about what they are trying to do.

Anyone know of a job doing this sort of crap in Chicago? Madison is getting too small.

Start playing around with PHP or Rails - lots of opportunities if you couple that with knowledge of web services / database / LDAP.