https://bsky.app/profile/brenthor.bsky.social/post/3krzc7fs77k2i
Best job i ever had was maintenance guy at a nursing home. Loved it. Rewarding. Fulfilling. Paid only $10.75/hr so i left it and ‘developed my career’ and now im ‘successful’ but at least once a week i have dreams where im back in the home hanging pictures, flirtin with the ol gals, being useful.
So when people ask ‘who fixes toilets under communism?’ my answer is a resounding ‘me. I will fix the toilets.’
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Happiest I’ve ever been at work has been fixing and cleaning things that needed it.
The thing that always stopped it was the inhumane work conditions and lack of respect. If you’re happy to treat me as an equal, and make me a cup of tea when I take a break to stretch my back and knees I’ll do the dirty shitty work for you.
If you want me to work to the point of damaging my body and then raise your voice at me if you see me taking a damn breather then we’re gonna have a problem.
I’m damn near 40 in a great career and I still miss my old McDonald’s days that paid peanuts. It was a weird mix of monotony, spontaneity and genuine friendships.
Big mood.
Befriending my coworkers is more fun and genuine when dicking around in the kitchen when the manager is out on a smoke compared to sending sfw memes in slack.
Like, I’m great friends with one of my coworkers. I knew him for years before work, but talking with him on slack feels so much more sterile compared to when I see him in the office, which is much more sterile than when I’d grab dinner with him a few years back.
It’s kinda saddening knowing that the environment of a hybrid job will make it so much harder to have genuine friendships with coworkers.
Now, if I stay at my job for a few years and get promoted to leadership, it will be worse knowing that my hierarchy will taint whatever hope I have at forming genuine friendships.
Fuck work
And so you’re asking me, who does the dishes after the revolution?
Well, I do my own dishes now, I’ll do our own dishes then
You know it’s always the ones who don’t who ask that fucking question
Yes, there are people who enjoy doing a simple job well. Capitalism is what makes it miserable by making you poor for doing it (despite society needing it)
Whoever is going to be using it. It’s not fucking complicated. Under (actual) communism the populace is educated to take care of themselves, unlike in capitalism, which purposefully perpetuates the class divide through lack of education to preserve hierarchy.
That works for stuff like “how do I connect two pipes”, but not so much for more complex matters like planning out a bathroom, or wiring a house. Or worse, things that actually require practice, like plastering a wall or bricklaying.
So skilled workers? You’re afraid people will stop learning trades?
No, I’m saying that’s smarter than doing everything yourself
These things can be learned, so they can be taught. Don’t use the lack of education we’ve experienced as an excuse for further lack of education. That’s super weak.
Of course you can learn them, you can learn anything.
But are you really going to learn every single skill you might one day need? Does this apply to everything, will you, for example, develop your own engine oil from the fractional distiller you hand-welded, with the metals you alloyed at home out of the ore you smelted yourself, just so you can lubricate the electric razor you assembled by hand?
No? Is that perhaps a bit inefficient? Of course it is, because no single human being can learn every skill we have available in society, and that’s been true since we invented agriculture.
There is no shame in not knowing how to plaster a wall, because that’s hard. Just like there is no shame in not being able to hand-weld and operate a fractional distiller. Now, not being able to unclog your toilet, or paint a wall, is up for discussion.
I actually do have to learn to plaster a wall, to fix my house. People should be taught everything they need to know to live on their own, sustainably. I can’t believe you’re trying to argue against that. Capitalism makes everyone weaker, top to bottom. Wake up.
You won’t learn complex skills if you don’t have a chance to exercise them often. In 10 years, you probably won’t be in condition to plaster another wall, if the only time you have done it is now. So you need to continuously relearn stuff, if you can.
I don’t see the problem if people specialize in certain trades and can contribute to the community with them.
I never said people can’t specialize. You’re totally ignoring the point, which is that basic life skills aren’t taught because capitalism assumes the owner will pay somebody else, rather than being actually useful people themselves. Try listening sometime, it may do you some good.
You are simply moving the goalpost. Basically all the comments chain talks about advanced skills. I can see there is a general consensus (and I agree with this as well) about the fact that learning basic skills in multiple areas is both beneficial and achievable.
The whole point of this comment referred to complex skills, and plastering a wall was given as an example of such complex skills. To which you answered “I am going to plaster a wall”. Try admitting that you might have made an overstatement or simply have been too geberic sometimes, nobody is keeping score.
Those are all things where you can learn to do them under the supervision of an expert. And given the productivity we achieved with automation we could have a 20 hour “efficient” work week and use the other 20 hours for our “inefficient” shenanigans.
The job I have, I would do even if I was rich. Well, that’s only partly true.
I work in aviation in the military, and my job previously consisted of being a flight mechanic doing Search and Rescue, maintaining aircraft, and fixing electronics/avionics on aircraft, and it was awesome, and I’d have done it for free if I could maintain my lifestyle without that paycheck.
The only reason I stopped that stuff and started supervising was because I got too old and broken to continue doing the job I loved, but if you had told me doing this job now (supervising people doing the fun work, occasionally helping them with my arthritis-ridden hands, etc) would be the cost of doing the job I did, I would have accepted it hands down (though in fairness I am looking longingly forward to retirement). And when I do retire, I’ll have to find something else to do for work, because I’ll probably just die of boredom if I don’t.
All that to say, there are plenty of people who don’t work just out of necessity. And like the person in the post, just feeling productive and appreciated does wonders to make it worth more than just the paycheck.
I used to work in programming, I hated being so mentally exhausted at the end of the day that I couldn’t do anything more taxing than watching TV or playing a mindless videogame
Give me a simple physical job that I leave at work any day
God this is me. I’ve got deadline coming up so I’ve been tearing my guts out every day trying to finish up a project. I don’t even play videogames, or watch shows anymore; just scratch out some notes in diary, then read in bed.
I wish I was like a letter carrier and got to clock out with a clear conscience. No waking up in the middle of the night thinking about nonsense programming problems for a bullshit domain that doesn’t need to exist.
Mopping floors and peeling potatoes was less tiring than carrying a quota staring at these screens.
a clean floor and peeled potatoes ready to be cooked versus more TPS reports, higher KPIs, more semicolons …
Seems like a no brainer. This stupid fucking late stage capitalism money problem Thing…
not just money, but controlling our time – no time left to do anything for ourselves or too burnt out to do anything during those precious spare minutes …
Do you know the song Working Class The Hero?
time to roll out the Green Day cover to save Darfur again …
You’re good people, I like you. That’s the version I play guitar to after work on Fridays. Impossible to listen to Lennon afterward, has to be first lol (Also glad to know someone else also picks the Darfur interjection version over the audio track)
So when people ask ‘who fixes toilets under communism?’ my answer is a resounding ‘me. I will fix the toilets.’
It’s true, it took ages for the plumber to come so you were the one who had to fix it.
Communism would just end up with everyone being brain surgeons and rocket scientists with nobody filling potholes.
I’m from the middle of nowhere West Virginia where a lot of the times you can’t get the county to fill in potholes. Lots of people manually fill them in themselves with gravel. If the tools were readily available to borrow, then there would absolutely be somebody that would fix their own road.
We act like there was no infrastructure before capitalism, and that’s just not the case. If a village needed a bridge, they built a bridge together.
This is a joke right? Like those jobs are grueling as fuck and require very particular people to be interested/capable.
Not to say standing on the back of an asphalt machine is easy. Roadwork is pretty hard, not just physically and logistically, but making a nice even layer out rocks and oil-residue is actually not simple at all.
Everything is hard but very few people have still enough hands to even be considered neurosurgeons or an interest in using meth in order to perform the insane surgeries (need to stay awake and concentrate). Further few are capable of dehumanising people enough in order to be able to cut into them.
Plenty of people are interested in enough things to cover them but neurosurgery at least is almost life destroying in what it demands. I’ve never met anyone entirely whole that’s a neurosurgeon, so it’s kinda weird to imagine people would want to flock to it and we wouldn’t have enough people happy to do other work.
You’re absolutely right, but if the choice is replacing your truck suspension for $1,000 every 2 years or poorly patching the road outside your house for a days worth of work and $100 in materials a year…
It’s not optimal, but needs must. A poor road repair is still cheaper than none.
Edit: While my comment sorta makes sense, I really thought you were replying to the guy who talked about his neighbors doing road repair. But that’s not who you were replying to!
I replied in a context that does not exist. Sorry!
who needs to repair potholes if the rocket surgeon general puts in streetcars
that’s what the automation is for
But who automates the automatons?
Sounds fun to me, but let’s keep it to like three days a week, six hours per day
The auto-automatons ofc
And who automates the auto-automatons? Hmm checkmate.
auto-auto-automatons
We would need some mathematicians to generalize this to the entire set though. Then we’d have the more elegantly named auto-Natons which is valid for any positive integer N.
Any automaton worth it’s salt contains a smaller version of itself.
They’re called Russian-automatons.
There’s a Youtube channel out there called Post 10.
This guy drives around looking for culverts to unclog. Has a day job in lawn care, decides to spend his free time recording himself raking leaf litter off of storm drain grates and pulling beaver dams out of drain pipes.
He has over 2 million active and engaged subscribers and his videos routinely pull in millions of views.
Given their needs are met and they have the time and energy, people will do the job they see needs doing. Just because you’re too precious to fill potholes doesn’t mean everyone is.
I like handling bureaucracy so I can handle that. Currently trying to get a public office job. I’m bringing it up because I’m aware most people don’t.
Many “undesirable” jobs are undesirable because they’re below living wage and/or may be long-term unsustainable physically (or mentally) with the 40(+)h/week standard.
My job involves handling dangerous materials. Given how much some of my coworkers stress me the fuck out by being walking safety hazards, I often and happily volunteer to shift the more dangerous tasks to myself.
I’d be snagging post-revolution hazmat volunteer shifts like a fiend just trying to keep less careful people from getting them…
remind coworkers: “Safety regulations are written in blood.”
Obviously the blood of morons who didn’t know what they’re doing. I know what I’m doing, so I’ll be fine.
(Until they get an unforgettable live demonstration on optimism bias and cumulative probability)
I have a similar experience but I was driving a cargo van around delivering boxes of office paper. Didn’t even have a cellphone in those days, just a big list of deliveries and a map. I delivered to all kinds of cool places and learned a ton about the city.
I imagine that job is totally fucked up now. Twice as many deliveries on half the time, eye tracking cameras, and the driver is responsible for paying for gas and maintenance. But man, for that one summer in 2001 it was glorious.
Yeah, I think that’s something worth expanding on - lots of people actually like work. Nobody likes working 40+ hours a week and still not being able to pay the bills.
I really enjoyed the actual work I did at Subway. The only things I didn’t like about it were the rude-ass customers, the fact that I was getting paid shit.50 an hour and the manager was a creep and a prick who was constantly late with checks. Two of those things go away if everyone’s paid enough to live no matter what they do.
Maybe if people have less stress factors in their lives, they’ll be less of a prick too. At the very least, if you have less, you’d be able to bear it more easily.
Reminds me from my own history: the most satisfying job I ever had was cleaning floors and bathrooms at grocery stores at nights.
It didn’t even pay minimum wage, so it was under the table. If I didn’t have to earn 6 figures just to survive I would for sure be in cleaning: I love tidying up dirty areas and then fussing over them, keeping them spic and span.
If I had a job that was cleaning a circuit of 5 grocery stores in my area, and I could survive on that, I would be so happy.
Sounds like you need to start a company
Then I’d be competing against the other cleaning companies, and no grocery stores would hire us if I insisted on paying me and the other workers a fair wage.
And given how grocery store owners have been caught profiteering and price fixing, I doubt the leadership would make the right choice for the good of the some workers that they don’t even control.
Capitalism make the good choice the wrong one.
