Jung's theory of work

When I was a little kid watching every Sunday morning TV Studio Friend with Jirka and Lenka, I was always wondering why in fairy tales every guy is looking for a job. When the client came to Carl Gustav Jung and said he had lost his job, Jung said cheerfully: "Great, let's celebrate!" When the client said he had promoted at work, Jung frowned, saying: "Okay, let's do something about it."

For years I have been trying to find the job of dreams to find my "dent" as it is nowadays technically called. I sniffed with disgust to the digital nomads who earn by advising people how to earn.

So, remembering the good old C. G. Jung's example, with the greatest effort I finally found myself a dream inferior job and started working as a warehouseman in a retail chain. I was excited from day one. So much work and for so little money, old Carl would have praised me. Listen.

It is only at six o'clock in the morning that I have to take the pastries from the several bakeries that supply us and whose delivery trucks are blowing patiently from 5.50 at the gates of the warehouse. It is only some eighty or ninety crates of bread, bread rolls and all that poppy seed and cottage cheese stuff. All this count, stamp, take to section girls inside and return stuff what wasn't sold the previous day. As soon as the bakers leave, it is the turn of the vegetables and dairy products, yoghurts, spreads and so on. There are only about seven pallets, and thankfully I'm on my own. Unfortunately, all of this is quite cool, fortunately then finally the proper chase begins.

There will be lorries with beer, coke, pepsi, dumplings and pizzas, and god knows what and in the meantime more trucks from our central warehouses bringing as Konstantin Biebl would say, "tea and coffee from far away countries." Washing powders, noodles, biscuits, soups, spices, chocolates, crisps, booze, just all we don't know what to buy first. Every time there is a huge amount of something in discount and then people jounce and push and buy it in bulk instead of buying what they originally wanted. For example a padlock that tills 75 CZK. When in action it has a sign: Original price 185 now only 75.

The trucks arrive all day long, thank god I don't have much time to go to the toilet. I run to open the front gate and close the rear gate when they leave because such truck does not turn just somewhere. Then I park and look for a place for all those high-rise pallets (it takes a perspicacity and propper orientation skills, all the space is calculated per millimeter and if not, it costs life a lot of virgin olive oil (cleans up perfectly) and a lot of instant coffee packs. For each pallet received I usually give one blank back and it requires a special paper. Another paper shows who and how much it carries, how much it arrived and gone. Everything that arrives in one day must be registered (digitally, of course) and sorted out the same day. Bar codes become meaningless by registration, better do not ask anymore. In my free time I run to exchange new price tags in the section of mineral water, spring water, lemonade and beer, refill shelves, print and expose advertising posters etc. Also transport full-range pallets with goods in discount to the "market" - as we call it by professional jargon. Milk, sugar, coke, whatever - e.g. a pallet can hold 64 packs of six-packs of coke, 61 ten-packs of milk. So I have a free gym at work, that's the only disadvantage. Fortunately the boss and the section girls chase me badly so that I do not stop too much. It is necessary to take down a few rolls of toilet paper, dog food and so on from the ceiling of 15 meters by the forklift. To do this you need first to clear the path and park the other pallets interfere in the way. Often I can do it in less than an hour - I am still improving.

I also have to run to the vending machine for bottles and sort the empty beer bottles. For this I had to create a special Excel table. Because of suppliers. The chapter itself is Bernard beer and its wooden heavy and fragile boxes with chips and broken corners which do not fit to other common plastic beer boxes. There's definitely a lot of poetry in it. Well.

I have more than enough time for all this. I start at six in the morning and finish at seven or eight or nine o'clock in the evening, so I can make it. In the future I am thinking of making better use of the few minutes when I run up the stairs to the dressing room roughly in the middle of the day to change into running Nikes so I don't feel pain in my legs.

In the evening I just wipe out the whole shop, sweep the outside ramp and yard and park all the shopping carts out there - that's just fun.

I can only blame myself two half hours a day for a dry bread roll. Otherwise, I have no time to think about crap like: who am I, where am I going and what my mission is, and I congratulate myself when I recall my initial fears before taking up the fact that I might have time to read at work.

When it comes to the boss, I can't say one bad word. He is a purely pragmatic man, fast and impersonal and he enters all instructions while walking in a language that is familiar to me but I do not fully understand it. The only exception was a recent interview that fixed my mood after a day's work, swinging on the heels said: “Robin, I will take those three days when your younger son was born off of your vacation. Yeah, and for the bottle of whiskey you brought here as a celebration, I had a big mess.” That - I confess - I felt guilty.

When I dragged myself home that evening I had a short talk to the youngest son who has just a newborn colicso he doesn't sleep, eat, just cry. I said to him: "Work on it a little bit, you're a big boy now, you're almost three weeks old and some of us need to sleep to work." He looked at me and then twisted his mouth and emptied the loudest lament he was capable of. So I look forward to work tomorrow. It's Sunday so unfortunately the work will be quiet.

Original CZ version here (funnier unfortunately)