You've fallen out of love with work, now what?

And why is nobody good at their jobs anymore?*

Before the Gen-Zers come for me, I’m not looking at you. This isn’t one of those Millennial rants about how nobody wants to work hard anymore. In my experience, there’s good and bad in all generations, Gen Z workers being no better or worse than any other. This is still a rant though, so hold tight.

Why are so many people bad at their jobs? (*Ok I didn’t totally mean nobody is good at theirs, perhaps I was over-dramatising for the benefit of the headline), but seriously, why...? Today’s example being that I’ve spent countless hours preparing an order for a major retailer. We booked a courier company and spent a grand on the delivery. The delivery driver was outrageously rude. A middle aged male, kissing his teeth at me, talking over me, showing me pictures of jobs where he’s delivered items ‘worth millions’ and completely ignoring the two critical points I needed him to note… the retailer has strict rules, it only accepts certain size pallets, and also only provides a 15 minute delivery window. If this window was missed then 10 pallets would be coming back from the north to the south of England with nowhere to be stored. Not to mention missing all sorts of other deadlines for the retailer.

I wish I wasn’t so psychic about these things, but heading to bed last night I knew it wasn’t going to be fine. And here we go again, the delivery window was not met (amongst other errors). As you can imagine, the repercussions of this are very inconvenient and costly for all parties. I get that this is a first world problem, and that’s why I’ll maintain perspective with my reaction to it. However, I wish this was an isolated incident and not something that has become the norm. SO many times, we’ve recruited a supplier to support on one aspect of a business or another, and often people just don’t deliver on their promises. I just simply cannot understand why this is? If I think about people at work over past decades, I have an idealistic view of good old fashioned hard work. Grit, determination, a stoic approach, ultimately having pride at being good at what they do. And in my close network, this is my experience too. I’m surrounded by lots of really good people. But then, when we venture out of the network, it seems we constantly encounter people and businesses that don’t deliver the goods (quite literally in this instance). I’m utterly confused as to why this is, and I appreciate I’m not really offering up any pearls of wisdom here either, but letting it out helps.

It’s times like these where you can feel like you’ve fallen out of love with work. My cynical premonitions becoming a reality contribute to a negative cycle, that makes it hard to stay motivated. When you’re always expecting things to go wrong, because they do usually go wrong, does this make you a pessimist or a realist? Either way, it’s not a particularly healthy headspace to be in. So, what can you do? Today for me, I am writing this. Getting it out on paper, for possibly the most boring Substack story you’ll have ever read (apologies!). But sorry to say it, this isn’t for you, it’s for me. Secondly, proactively engaging my focus on the things that really matter. For me that means thinking about my children. My love for them and caring about their wellbeing gives me focus for where my priorities lie. But this has been a lengthy process and not an easy mindset to adopt. I might still have a little cry with frustration today, but that’s better than the total devastation that I would have felt by this type of situation two years ago. Unfortunately, when so many things crop up over time, you do start to become numb to them. But, I’ll stick with having better perspective, rather than numbness, as I like that explanation about my reaction more. If you find yourself having a little cry about the things going wrong or out of your control too, I’m giving you the validity that it is ok. Some people are useless. Some things are just shit. And it’s bloody annoying.