This post is about 800 words

 If you’re lucky, you’ve had a bad job. It you’re blessed, you’ve had a terrible job.

I’ve known people who have worked themselves up from near-squalor and I’ve known others who’ve had charmed lives and probably never washed actual dirt from their hands. No judgment either way from me. I can’t begrudge people for the lives into which they were born.

But there’s something to be said for having a career where everything didn’t go your way. Not only are these opportunities to see how you deal with the crucible, but they add a different level of appreciation to what you’ve achieved.

Here’s an example from my own varied work history.

In college, I worked for a temp agency that regularly sent me to a food processing plant. Most of the jobs were mundane: picking burnt chips off a conveyor belt or pulling mislabeled cans off the line. I could literally turn off my brain while I did these tasks, and actually, I wrote a lot in my head during my overnight shifts.

Those aren’t the kinds of tasks I’ll describe here, however.

One night, the shift manager took us to a more secluded part of the factory, where the mercury vapor lights seemed dimmer. As we walked past ovens, labelers, and mixing casks, he explained that we were disposing of ruined food. Bacteria had spoiled a large batch of ranch dressing that had already been bottled. Our task was to open the bottles and pour them into fifty-gallon drums.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

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