I was just coming to say that! I get the "best" of both worlds, Excel sheets to track production while I sit in this shitty factory and breathe God only knows what!

Bonus: I can't even afford a home after it all! Yay America!

Can be both!

Yep.
At some of the Excel jobs, the toxic fumes come from your manager's mouth.

Yeah, I live in a area of the country where (only since 2020) we can expect long stretches of days where the sky is orange and the AQI is 300+. Climate change has made sure the toxic fumes are for everyone!

If you tried working at your company for a week with no paperwork or spreadsheets you'd realize their necessity pretty quick. You are a bureaucromancer. Very little gets done, and none of it on budget, without you playing with spreadsheets all day.

Soldiers might fight a war, but logistics wins one. It's no different for business.

I felt the same thing watching my partner working this morning. I've been with him 10 years and I still can't explain his job beyond its title because as far as I understand he oversees people as well as works on software that's developed, deployed and managed by another company, but they don't manage software or services or develop anything but they deploy it, but that's not not his team, and it's this one specific program, but it's actually 12 integrated programs, and he's working on one that's in development but he's not a developer, but is not part of anything they're actually doing yet, and that's not his main role.

Everytime he explains it, I get more lost...

What is this job? It's obviously stressful, a lot of other companies rely on on whatever this service is, and my partner, as of this year, makes 8x my income, so it must be important.... Right!?

Right!? He's not making 8x my income pushing pencils....right!?

I teach General Education at a community centre for people who missed out on formal schooling.

My job is 3 words "I teach SOSE", and you know almost exactly what I do you can picture the main tasks and also picture my output (educated graduates)

His job did not exist 15 years ago, the concept of a job like his in software for the masses did not exist 50 years ago, a desk job to this degree of pencil pushing did not exist 100 years ago.

Sometimes I think about how my job is technically one of the oldest in the world, but never a well paid one.

Sometimes I consider a pencil pushing job for a few years, to just get my retirement fund sorted, but if I don't even understand what the job is how can I expect myself to do it?

Humans have a complexity fetish I'll never understand. Nothing is ever as complex as it seems (in the way it seems, anyway).

You're so right. You should be mindlessly using an ERP!

apply to lower jobs without most of your resume.

Is your experience IT exclusively, or do you also have (even rudimentary) programming experience? Industrial automation is a great option. I feel blessed, having started from below the bottom (not all people are fit to be parents!) working as a metal carpenter while still underage, to have managed to get into this field, through hard work and, most importantly, a good amount of luck.

VBA is horrid and incredibly outdated. I've written c# code that ran identical calculations on data being run through excel at literally over a million times the speed.

If you get a standing desk, your knees can be fucked as well.

That makes you a well rounded person. Getting the full human experience. It's not always fun, but it makes life more complete.

My body releases some toxic sheets sometimes.

Just leave my stapler alone this time.