The Eight Ball [8Ball]

For me it’s hard to strike a good balance of challenge and responsibility.  Inevitably there will be times during the year when you really want to do something meaty and complicated, other times you’ll want to just keep it simple and work on things you’re familiar with and maybe good at.

Sometimes I feel I find work is not challenging enough so I ask for more responsibility.  Unfortunately this just ends up making you more accountable for more of the work you were doing before.  It’s not really more challenging, you just end up having more work to do!  Sometimes I’ll get to work on something I’ve never worked on before or work in an area I’ve never worked in before and it’s fresh and exciting but at the same time I’m always asking questions and learning and it can get exhausting and I can begin to long for doing the less challenging easy stuff again!

Round and round in circles it goes, back and forth, up and down.  I always come back to the same conclusion.  Life was so much easier when I was making pizzas for a living.  Lost in my little world of swirling sauce and dropping toppings and slicing and boxing my creations for my customers.  If only I could earn the same amount of money I am now I would be doing that right now no question.

Was it easy or challenging?  It was both every day, I guess that’s why I loved it.  The mornings were easy and the challenge ramped up as the day went on and we got busier and busier until it reached the evening and it was all complete choas just trying to cope with the madness.

But at the end of the day, nothing that happened mattered.  Any decision you made, good or bad, ended once you turned the lights off and locked up the store.

In the real world, my decisions have lasting ramifications and tasks span days, weeks and months and often if you make mistakes you are dealing with the fall out for a long time.

At the end of the day you don’t want your job to rule you or define you.  It should just be the means that achieve the things you need in your life when you’re not there.  If it means more to you than that I think you’ve got a serious problem.  When people ask, ‘What do you do?’ you shouldn’t be telling them your position in the organisation you work for, you should be telling them you do puzzles and water colour paintings! (or whatever it is you actually do!)

Does anyone know of any pizza making jobs that pay about $30 an hour?