What I Learned from My Worst Job

My father has a job in a shop. He works for ten hours every day. He stands a lot. He is tired in the evening. But he likes his customers. He says 'thank you' a lot. The pay is small but the job is okay.

Last year, I had a difficult course at school. The teacher was strict and the homework was very long. I was working in the evening every day, and I was tired all the time. Sometimes I wanted to stop. But I did not stop, and I finished the course. Now, I know I can work hard for a long time. I also learned to ask for help when I do not understand. Before, I was too shy to ask. I learned this from the difficult course.

When I was twenty-two, I moved to another country alone for a master's course. I had imagined it would be exciting. The first six months were not. I did not have many friends, the language was difficult outside the classroom, and my small flat was always cold. I remember sitting on the bus one Tuesday in November and realising I had not had a real conversation in three days. I cried quietly all the way home. I did not leave. I am not sure now whether that was bravery or just stubbornness. What I learned, slowly, was that I could be alone for longer than I had thought and not break. I learned to make a meal for one without feeling sorry for myself. I learned to walk into a room of strangers and start one conversation, just one, knowing the rest would follow. I would not say the experience was good for me in any clean way. There were weeks when it just hurt, and the only lesson was that things could hurt this much without anything being fixable in the moment. But I am also more sure of myself now than I would have been if I had stayed at home. I trust myself in difficult rooms. I do not panic when a plan falls apart. I would not give that back. I would, however, tell my younger self that it is allowed to be lonely. The loneliness is not a sign of failing. It is sometimes just what moving alone to a new place involves, for a while.

I spent eighteen months, in my mid-twenties, working at a small charity that I will not name and that, I have come to think, had no business existing in the form it took. The mission was real — supporting people in difficult housing situations — but the organisation was held together with the goodwill of underpaid staff and the increasingly strained patience of a director who, I would later realise, was very obviously burnt out. I came to it eager. I left it tired in a way I had not been tired before. Some of what I learned in those eighteen months has been useful. I learned how to hold a difficult conversation with someone in distress without flinching. I learned the language of housing law, in fragments. I learned that a thirty-minute home visit can sometimes do more good than a fifty-page report, and that the people best placed to design a service are usually the people who have used one. These are real skills and real understandings, and they have shaped most of what I have done since. But I should be careful. There is plenty of what I learned that I have spent the years since unlearning. I learned to say yes to things I should have said no to, because saying no felt like letting clients down. I learned to interpret my own exhaustion as commitment, which is a habit it took several years to undo. I learned to mistake the chaos of an under-resourced workplace for the urgency of meaningful work, when in fact most of the chaos was avoidable. The two kinds of lessons sit, in my memory, on top of one another. They were taught in the same conversations, by the same people, in the same staff room. Untangling them, in retrospect, has required more honesty than I find comfortable. I would not, knowing what I know now, tell my younger self the work was good for her. The work itself was good. The way the work was organised was not. If I could speak to her on her first morning, with her new ID badge and her notebook, I would say three small things. That she is not responsible for the structural problems of the organisation, however much it feels otherwise. That the tiredness she will start to feel in month four is information, not weakness, and she should treat it as such. That when the time comes to leave — and it will come — she should not interpret the leaving as a betrayal of the people the charity serves. They will be served, or not served, by the political and economic conditions of their lives, mostly. Her staying in a role that is making her ill is not a price they need her to pay. She would not entirely believe me. The young version of any of us rarely does. But she would, I hope, hear the third sentence later, on the morning she finally hands in her notice and feels — wrongly, fleetingly — like she has failed.

I spent the first eighteen months of my twenties working at a small charity in a city that was not my own, doing housing support for people whose lives had become unmanageable in ways I had not previously had to imagine. The mission was real, the work was, in patches, useful, and the pay was so far below the cost of the city that I supplemented it for the first nine months by sleeping on a friend's sofa and eating, mostly, lentils. I left, eventually, when a senior colleague — a kind woman whose own salary I knew to be only slightly higher than mine — sat down on the desk next to me on a Tuesday morning and said, 'You look like you're being eaten by this. You should go.' I went home that night and started looking for other work. I do not, looking back, think the charity was a bad institution. I think it was a small under-resourced organisation trying to do too much with too little, run by people who had themselves been depleted by years of exactly that, and the resulting culture had a way of converting the staff's tiredness into evidence of their commitment. I absorbed this culture quickly. Within four months I had stopped distinguishing between my values and my exhaustion. Within six, I was treating the absence of weekends as a sign that the work mattered. By the time the senior colleague spoke to me, I had been managing a caseload that should not have been one person's caseload for the better part of a year, and I had begun to feel that any failure to keep up was a personal one. There are things I genuinely learned in that year and a half. I learned how to sit beside someone in a council office while they cried and to be useful in that situation. I learned how to read a tenancy agreement. I learned that bureaucracies fail people in patterns that are visible if you watch closely, and that some of the patterns are accidents of policy and others are not. These have shaped most of what I have done since. They are real. But I have also spent the years since unlearning a number of things the same eighteen months taught me. I have unlearned the conversion of exhaustion into virtue. I have unlearned the feeling that saying no to a request is a betrayal of someone else's need. I have unlearned the habit of treating every problem as my problem to solve, which is, I now think, one of the more efficient ways an under-resourced workplace exploits a young employee. The unlearning has taken much longer than the original learning, and is not finished. I should add the asterisk that I have come to add to this story whenever I tell it. I could leave that job because I had savings, a partner who was working, and a passport that allowed me to look for work in two countries. Several of my colleagues, including some who had been there longer and were doing harder work, could not have left. The lesson I extracted — that the leaving is not the betrayal, that the institution will not be saved by my staying — was available to me on terms that were not available to all of us. I will not pretend otherwise. If I could go back, I would not tell my younger self the work was good for her, or that the difficulty would build something. I would tell her that the senior colleague she eventually listens to is right, and that the right thing to do is to listen on the first hearing rather than the third. The work she is doing is real and worth doing; the way the work is organised is not, and her body is sending her information she will spend years failing to translate. She would not, knowing her, take the warning. But she would, perhaps, recognise it later — sitting at a different desk in a different city, in the soft surprise of having become someone she might not, six years earlier, have been able to imagine.

I spent the first year after my undergraduate degree as a 'research assistant' on a small academic project that I will not name, on a contract whose pay just about cleared the rent of the city it was based in. The project was real and the work was, in patches, useful, but the contract had been written in such a way that I was, in practice, doing the labour of a junior researcher on the wage of an intern, and the principal investigator — a person I have come to think of with more complication than the form of this essay normally allows — knew this and did not name it. I left after a year. I did not, at the time, leave well. I was angry, and the anger took several years to settle into something more accurate. There is a version of this essay in which the principal investigator is the villain and I am the wronged employee, and I notice the pull of writing it. There is also a version in which I left, learned what hard work meant, and grew up. I notice the pull of that one, too — it is, I would estimate, the version I have unconsciously rehearsed at dinner parties for most of my late twenties, and it is the version that the people on the receiving end of those dinner-party stories most willingly accept. Neither version is honest. The honest version, as far as I can reconstruct it now, is that the project was held together by a generation of underpaid early-career researchers, of whom I was one of many, and the principal investigator was a person who had themselves been shaped by an academic labour market that had taught them to extract this labour without examining the extraction too closely. That she did this to me is true. That she had been done to first, by a system she is not personally responsible for designing, is also true, and the personal essay is a form that handles only one of these truths well. The artefacts I came out of that year with: the ability to read a contract carefully, the habit of checking the actual money against the actual hours, a healthy suspicion of the word 'opportunity', and a sentence I have used many times since — 'this is interesting, but it is not free' — which I owe to a colleague on the same project who said it to me one Friday afternoon over tea. The colleague was older, was being paid no better, and stayed for several years after I left, partly because the city was where her ageing father lived and she was not free to relocate. She has since moved into a different role at the same institution and is, by all accounts, doing better. We exchange messages every few months. She is not a character in my coming-of-age. She is a person. I should also say: the principal investigator and I were not in equal positions. She had power over my reference, my next contract, the trajectory of an early career in a field I had thought I wanted. I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. The asymmetry mattered, and it is worth keeping in view. What I would say now, knowing both that I have grown from the experience and that my colleague had less room to grow from it, is that the lessons I extracted were extracted on terms my colleague did not have. My current carefulness about contracts is partly a small political education and partly a luxury I have access to because I was, eventually, able to leave. Not every reader of this essay will be in that position. Most will not. The most this kind of writing can do is to say so, on the page, where it can be read by someone who needs the asterisk written down.