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Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot  Service, service .... I dunno, I'm a bit short on ideas here. 
Sometimes I think I would like to be a college professor; push out important ideas into the world; teach & educate people, you know? On the other hand, many people on this forum seem to think that college is useless, a waste of time, a scam job etc. So whether being a college professor is an avenue for serving people is, I guess, a highly subjective question.
I used to be a deputy public prosecutor (or district attorney, in US terms). Work with the police; catch the baddies; prosecute them in court; make society a safer place for citizens and all that. Does that count as service? The job left a pretty sour taste in my mouth, in the end. I saw that many criminals were in fact victims too. |
Yeah, it's hard isn't it.
I've worked for several types of companies now, in several different industries, for some fairly prestigious companies, and some that were not at all. I'd have to say that the job I liked the most, and did the most good in, through fifteen years of work, was as an entry level tech support agent fixing people's DSL.
It was solid, honest work, and I was just stellar at it. The average call center employee was taking around 20 calls per day. I could answer 50-60 calls per day and fix almost all of them. Nearly everyone I spoke to got online within 8 minutes or less.
Most people hated that job. Speaking to so many customers who barely knew what a browser was, being under the pressure of diagnosing and fixing multiple issues on a single call, dealing with rude customers and ESL speakers, people who still ran Windows 98 and had it so bogged down with spyware it would barely function..
After all these years that is still my favorite job. At the end of the day, I knew that 50 people a day were able to get online to explore the vastness of the internet, the entire spectrum of human knowledge available there at their fingertips, because of my troubleshooting.
Now I make three times as much money, my job title in much more impressive, yet I no longer feel that same passion for my work. That feeling that I could just totally exhaust myself doing it, yet still fully know it was the right thing to do.. simply because the caller on the other end on the line was now that much better off.. it was good stuff.
