[Quinzel]

I found my job on a job search website. I originally applied for it in 2013 and got rejected. I got the balls to give it another crack in 2017 and I got it. It’s a technician/clinical role in healthcare - an industry I decided when I was quite young that I just had to be in (unsure why these days I was so fixated on it, I think back then I was very altruistic).

Interviewing was different. They asked a lot of weird questions like “if you were a sandwich, what flavour would you be?” And “you need to find out the weight of a boeing 737 but you don’t have scales, how are you going to figure it out?” (I said “I’d just google it”). I was perplexed by these questions and thought I’d bombed out. The other thing they had me do was a 10 minute presentation on why I wanted the job, and what I hoped to gain. Still to this day, I think I did nail the presentation. I kept it clean. A few years after I got my Job, one of the guys on the panel of my interview was talking to me giving me a pep talk for an exam I needed to sit, and I asked him why they asked me those weird questions and he said “we just wanted to see how you’d handle stress and ambiguity” he also told me I did one of the best interviews he’d ever seen. That was pretty good feedback years after the matter but I’m never quite sure if he was just being nice.

In terms of surviving, healthcare especially the area I work in is not for the faint hearted, some days it really is utter carnage and overwhelming. Staff can be arseholes to each other, and management don’t care if you were hoping to go home on time - you’re probably going to stay late. I cope with my job in several ways, some of them consciously others less so. I exercise every day, it helps with my health but also my mood, and gives me time out. I study things that are separate to what I do for work - like planning for a back up career. But at work, I also dissociate, not consciously but I do, I turn off my emotions at work, and I don’t care too much about anything or anyone. It’s not to be unkind, it’s like self preservation or something. I also just treat my work as the money generating goal that it is. My identity, my aspirations, and my self-worth are not tied to my work, work is a thing I do to get money to live. I am no longer as altruistic as I was when I originally went into healthcare.