d i n a n e . n e t 

In the comments thread for the entry a few days back, I’ve been having an interesting discussion with Utah-Joe. To refresh your memory, he says work sucks, I say I like my job, he says I’m a drone, I say not all work sucks.

When I was writing my most recent response (is this metablogging? ew…), I was thinking about an experience from high school. We were in religion class (yes, religion class, I went to Catholic high school, forgive me), talking about… who knows… probably God in some way or other. But the topic came around to work and play. So the teacher asked the class what was the difference between work and play. I was an extremely ambitious kid, so I always spoke up in discussions.

“Play is fun, work is not.”

The teacher blinked a couple times, and left the room. Everyone stared at me. I sat, confused.

The teacher returned pretty quickly with another religion teacher, the one from next door, in tow. Our teacher asked the other, “Do you have fun here?”

“Of course I do. I love my job.”

I was confused. Our teacher thanked the other teacher, who then returned to his class (which was likely very confused as well). He then looked at me and told me that I was obviously wrong. He also told me he felt sorry for me if I thought that was the way the world had to be.

The discussion continued, and I think the class ended up differentiating play from work because it has no end goal. The whole time, my brain tumbled the problem around in my head. At the time, I was working at a Hallmark store. I occasionally had fun there, when I could wrap presents for example, but most of the time I was a miserable drone. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of fun work.

I took that day’s discussion with me, hoping I’d eventually get it. But my next job didn’t improve the situation. I worked at Friendly’s, scooping ice cream. I couldn’t get promoted to wait staff, no matter how hard I tried, and I came home spattered in ice cream and toppings every night. One day, I even passed out from working too hard - I hadn’t gotten a timely lunch break that day.

With such experiences, how could I not define work as un-fun?

Even my first internship was just a job. At first. But one day, my boss actually gave me a task that seemed almost like play. I was working at the web office at WPI, mostly doing data entry and markup. It was generally pretty boring work. But my boss seemed to think I could do a pretty good job of an actual design, so she let me have the campus police site. I got to work with the police chief to design the colors and work out the content. I made the graphics and worked out the layout. It was fun!

Unfortunately, I didn’t take that opportunity to realize what I had discovered. In fact, the concept of having a job I love has come and gone across my short time in the work force. I have felt every extreme.

But I know now that it is possible to have fun at work. I made it my primary factor when searching for a new job. I asked every single person I talked to at every company if they have fun doing their job. Some people answered right away, with a heart-felt yes. Even better, some people continued on to tell me how and why. But some poor people, who were like the high-school me, looked startled by the question. They’re interviewers, so they can’t say anything bad about their jobs, but you can tell right away: they don’t know what a fun job is.

I picked a fun place to work. I highly recommend that concept to everyone. You spend at least half of your waking hours at your job. Why hate half of your time away?