So, I spent the United States holiday of Labor Day, designed to honor those who labor, floating in a pool with friends. It was nice, relaxing and sun-burning.
Today, I paid attention to the construction workers that surround my work right now. They are truly laboring. I know I cannot stand the smell and noise but they are with it day and day out and when this job ends, there will be another one (or I hope there is).
I was also thinking about my work and what I do most days. My first “real” job was selling popcorn at the local movie theatre. A job that still exists.
My current job, supporting faculty in their use of technology in teaching at a community college, did not exist then. In fact, it didn’t exist when I graduated from undergraduate school. I wonder how many jobs didn’t exist then?
A quick visit to monster.com revealed even catagories of jobs that didn’t exist back when I was pushing popcorn:
- User Interface
- Information Architecture
- Web Development
And the job titles are just great fun:
- ASP Developer
- Voice User Interface Designers
- Emerging Technology Lead
There are also gurus and evangelists in the techno-world now.
It is an interesting time to labor and I celebrate all who labor, with their body or their mind or both.
I was thinking about labor too- a friend of mine in high school went to a vocational school for fire fighting. It sounded cool to me(the vocational schools) but it was not “cool”. Andy is a forest fire fighter still (last I knew) and still loves it. I was thinking about how it feels to put in a lot of physical work and how good it feels to eat and sleep after a physically hard days’ work. Sometimes I miss that.