When Work Makes You Wonder

Yesterday, I found myself in the fortunate position to be headed back to work after a nice long weekend in Syracuse w/ friends and family w/out the dreaded “back to work” sentiment a lot of people get after such weekends. I don’t get the Sunday Scaries, or whatever they’re called; that feeling that descends on most people at dinnertime Sunday evening. 

Full disclosure: I have split days off, so when I go back to work on Monday, I only have two days before my next day off, and that tends to ward off the Sunday blues quite nicely. 

But the truth of the matter is that I like my job. Most days, I honestly enjoy being at work. 

I was in a fine mood yesterday when I went in after a few days away. My mood started to decline almost instantly when I saw the state of my work bench. I’m very particular about my work space. I like order in my work space. The disarray that it was left in suggested the person who worked there last preferred to work amid chaos. 

The first half hour of my day was spent cleaning up, organizing and searching for tools that seem to go missing when I’m not there to corral them all to their homes. I’m a firm believer that everything has a home. Nothing shakes my good mood faster than cleaning up after other people and hunting down tools that aren’t in their home.

This is when I started to wonder if this really is the right career path for me. Maybe I had it right at my boring admin job; answering phones, scheduling travel, logging employees’ timesheets. When I’m not invested in the work, it’s so much easier to half-ass it. 

In the kitchen, I care about my work. There’s a huge sense of pride in knowing that people enjoy eating my food. I set the bar high for myself and I like to meet it. I’m not going to be that person that opens a cream w/out seeing if there’s one already open, or who leaves empty boxes in the walk-in, or who doesn’t consolidate when there’s three open bottles of white sesame seeds. I hate that person and I refuse to be that person. 

In the office, I still had my strong work ethic, but I wasn’t going the extra mile. If the phone doesn’t get answered, the earth will keep spinning. 

I can’t help but wonder: is it better to have a job that’s just a job? When it’s just a job, I can walk away. But when it’s my passion, my emotions come into play. I get incredibly angry at the lazy and dumb shit I see in the kitchen; I’m not talking gross and unsanitary, I’m talking about someone leaving a quart of liquid in a four quart container instead of taking the two minutes to transfer it to a quart container. I’m talking about someone taking the cake I made today instead of checking the dates and taking the one from yesterday. I’m talking about the countless little things I see at work that test my patience and try my nerves nearly every day.

Which is it: Doing a job you truly enjoy, but dealing w/ all the bullshit that goes w/ being invested? Or finding a job that leaves you professionally unfulfilled but not ready to stab people w/ a paring knife all day? I really want to know.