Diagnostic Essay Revised

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Phillip Sanders
ENG 111 – 63
Diagnostic Essay Revised
December 1, 2009

Have you ever regret the moment you stepped foot onto a new job? Maybe you were motivated by good pay, or maybe you were fooled by the front put on by management as to appear friendly. Well I’m guilty of both, and even until this day I wish I’d never stepped foot through those doors. Dealing with the work environment was a job in itself; from the filthy, dusty, warehouse floors, to the strong smell of the chocolate powder which filled hundreds of bins. On top of that not only was the work tedious, but the work was constant with very limited breaks. I was prepared to deal with those minor issues, but the management was extremely rude and overly demanding. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect to get paid for nothing; I’m a hard worker, to a reasonable extent, but this job seemed as though it was destined to be my worst job experience ever.

When I heard I would be working in a chocolate factory it never occurred to me that the strong smell of raw chocolate would bleed through every wall in the building. Bin after bin of the powdered chocolate was all over the building, so there was no escaping it. While being transferred, chocolate would often fall all over the floor leaving trails in every hall. I’m sure you can guess who ended up cleaning it up. I think one of the worst jobs I was given was to clean the ovens. There were chunks of chocolate build up from lack of cleaning. Scraping and chipping chunk after chunk quickly became tedious, and I was overwhelmed with frustration. I’m not a neat freak, but I’d be lying if I said that the factory’s lack of cleanliness didn’t play a vital role in my opinion towards the job.

At times I wondered if I were the only one who found this job unbearable. Was I just lazy? Or was this job really as much of a nightmare as it seemed? You would have to be a robot to not be sore by the end of the day. For example: I was instructed to package bags of chocolate candy a specific way as they were dispensed from a machine. Mind you the machine was dispensing the candy so fast that by the time I was finished taping a box, packs of candy were piled up the size of a mountain when I turned back around. The funny thing is that this was the easy task though; so you can imagine why this job was no fun at all.
There was an instance where I was told by a manager to wash trays. In the midst of doing as I was told I was approached by the owner with, “you need to be doing more than washing fucking trays all day!” As you can imagine, I carelessly lost it at that point. That turned out to not be the best move as I was then placed on janitorial duties. While being pushed beyond my limit I remained humble, though there was no reward. The nonsense went on all through the week uninterrupted. It became evident that good days were nonexistent, causing me to hate the job more each day.

Despite all of the negatives, I could’ve hung around had management not been so obnoxious. They were constantly complaining, breathing down my neck, and rushing me. Though they knew how physically demanding the job was, they still always expected more production. I also hated that I was told to do work outside of my job description whenever they decided to pick on me. The most frustrating thing was that no matter how hard I worked, my breaks were always cut short. Though I was hardly pleased with management, I realized that jerks are going to be jerks, and I would never win that battle.

I conclude by saying that this job was in all aspects a dreadful work experience. The work conditions were unbearable, the assignments were unnecessarily painful, and the management was as bad as it gets. What could I do? Doug Firebaugh said “Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.” With all I had been through, I’m able to say with confidence that this job would’ve never done that.