Many of us (especially you poor souls who don’t enjoy the work that you do) often forget to raise our heads and look at more than just the work of the day. We get into this routine of working, going home, sleeping, going to work… rinse, repeat. It’s a bad habit, albeit an understandable one.
But I urge you to look at the bigger picture. What you do matters. And if you look back at your work history, and perhaps do a little dirty math, you’ll realize that you do a heck of a lot.
For example, I operate the University Bridge here in Seattle. Depending on the time of day and the time of year, and the whims of the various boaters, I can open anywhere from 0 to 18 times a day. When you think about the fact that I work here 5 days a week, and mine is not the only shift per day, that’s a lot of bridge openings.
I happened to stumble upon a report that details the number of openings each month and year for my bridge and the 4 others that we operate, from 1996 to the present. It was very eye opening. As a quick and dirty estimate, my drawbridge is opened about 3,000 times a year. Given the fact that I do approximately 36 percent of those openings, that means I do about 1080 openings a year.
Wow. I had no idea. That’s about 4 openings a day on the average, which doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up. I’ve worked on this bridge for 10 years. And in Florida I mostly worked on a bridge that had about three times as many openings. I just passed my 23rd anniversary of being a bridgetender.
That’s a lot of sailboats that wouldn’t have gotten to where they wanted to go without me. That’s billions of dollars’ worth of gravel being transported on gravel barges. That’s millions of tourists riding on the sightseeing cruises to Lake Washington, taking pictures of my bridge opening with looks of awe on their faces. That always makes me smile.
And in all that time, I’ve never had anyone get hurt due to my actions. I have watched out for every pedestrian, cyclist, driver, and boater that has passed by, even though most of them don’t know that I exist. And yes, I’m sure I’ve made about a million people late for work. I hope they at least took a moment to take a deep breath and enjoy the view.
Every job has value. The world would fall apart if all of us just quit doing what we do. We wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves, the garbage and sewage would pile up, we would be wearing dirty rags, our children would be deprived of an education, and none of us would be able to maintain our health. The world would be an uglier place without artists. We would forget our past without historians. Our lives would be poorer if we lacked singers and dancers and musicians and writers. Child rearing is one of the hardest jobs of all, even if it often goes uncompensated. And volunteers make worthy contributions every day. All these things matter.
Many employers would like you to think that they are doing you a favor by paying you for your trivial contribution to the gross national product. But I look at that much like I do of dog ownership. We all know, and most dogs know, that if they turned and attacked us, we wouldn’t stand a chance. It’s just due to our mutual cooperation and our sidestepping that elephant in the room, that we are able to maintain this delicate balance between love and animal instinct.
But no matter what you do for a living, you have a right to be proud. There is a certain dignity that each person deserves for simply doing what needs to be done to survive. Even if no one acknowledges it but you. I hope you’ll take a moment to do the dirty math of your day to day and year to year labors, and pat yourself on the back for them.
For added perspective, at the time of this writing, I have written 77,547 words since I started this blog back in December 2012. Isn’t that something? I wonder how many of them actually were read by someone other than myself!
I hope you don’t take this post as a ringing endorsement of capitalism or some twisted effort on my part to shame the retired or the unemployed. Yes, there is much that is broken about the system in which we live. Like it or not, though, it’s where we find ourselves, so we should take our kudos wherever we can find them.
You, as an individual, have survived, and I’m sure that that was through no small effort on your part. So take a moment to appreciate the fact that you’re reading this now because you’ve done your best. Be proud of that. Sadly, it’s an achievement that many of us have been taught to overlook.
Let’s put a stop to that, shall we?
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