"Which Job Is A LOT Less Fun Than Most People Expect?" 26 Of The Most Honest Responses

Teacher. Children are psychic vampires.

I'm a marine biologist. I spent the last week measuring defrosted fish heads.

Nurse. Just kidding no one thinks that sounds fun.

Video game tester.

You aren't spending your time playing completed fully realized games. You are playing the same level of a game over and over seeing if there are bugs.

Being a chef. All the flare and awesomeness they show on vice and Netflix is far from what actually happens in the industry. It’s not all fancy plates and tattooed/cool haired guys doin their thing. It’s a drug infested, law breaking work environment that only benefits the owners of a restaurant

Programmer.

People see it as an anonymous figure typing a few lines of code and gaining access to top secret files.

In reality it’s 10% coding and 90% searching your problems on Stack Overflow.

Veterinarian —

TRULY shocked that nobody has said this one yet. We have the highest suicide rate of any profession.

It’s a lot more talking to people about money and a lot less doing medicine and saving animals than people hope going into it. Not all of the animals are grateful, some of them want to bite you because you’re hurting them and they don’t know it’s in their best interest. Clients can be hugely manipulative jerks. There’s lots of student debt. And don’t get me started on near constant exposure to low levels of anesthetic gasses.

Librarian. It’s not all books and being quiet. There are also spreadsheets.

Zookeeper.

Don't get me wrong, it's awesome to be around so many amazing animals and care for them...

But the smells are ridiculously, insanely foul.

I have a really strong stomach and it's still tough for me...we've had some interns quit over it.

I was warned about the smells when getting into the field, but thought "oh I've volunteered at animal shelters, I know what animal stink smells like"

Nope. Not even close.

Being a Character Performer at Disney.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing perks and truly magical moments. I know I’m super lucky and tons of people would love to be in my shoes.

But the day to day work is EXHAUSTING in ways I never thought possible. Guests are ridiculously abusive...I’ve had things said and done to me I never would have imagined. The company isn’t always great - it highly depends on your leadership. And there’s so much focus on your body and face (good and BAD) that it can be incredibly depressing and difficult emotionally.

Plus, you have to accept that there’s very little upward mobility. Most people “grow out of it” and it’s rough to know that one day you’ll get “too old” or “too fat” and you will have to start all over in a new career field. So you constantly are thinking either, 1) what you’re going to do when you leave, 2) how you’re going to keep yourself there. I personally knew it would be temporary, and I now only work there seasonally while I have a “normal career”. But Disney has a way of sucking you in.

Gamemaster at an escape room.

It's the same repetitive script, resetting the same stuff, giving clues and hints about the same things. The patrons are often competitive families who argue, obnoxious impatient 13-year-olds, college students who have been drinking, idiots who break [stuff] and touch [stuff] that I SPECIFICALLY TOLD THEM NOT TO. They never remember your initial instructions. If something gets broken during one group, you have to hurry and fix it before the next group.

Baker. Coming into work at 3/4 am so you can have a six am baked goods is miserable.

I'm a Forensic Scientist and it's literally the only thing people ask me about on dating apps. It's very technical work and it's extremely routine.

programming. please help me. I need a hug. why did I need to be such a nerdy kid when I was younger.

Lifeguarding. Everyone expects baywatch, act, saving lives all the time. But It’s usually just sitting there blowing your whistle telling little kids to stop [messing] around.

Well I’m a scientist. I don’t know if people usually think of that career as fun, but I think people think it’s a lot more “Eureka!” and a lot less “this data’s has to be manually processed for 600 hours before I can analyze it.

Demolition

Everyone wants to break [stuff] with a sledgehammer. Everyone is tired of lifting that sledgehammer by 5 swings.

Nobody wants to load the broken stuff into bags or a wheelbarrow and take it to the dumpster.

Acting.

All the ones we see on TV and movies are the 0.0001% of incredibly lucky and talented people who managed to thrive in a hostile and overcrowded industry.

And even when you are working, the actual job itself is 99% sitting on apple crate in hot makeup waiting for some grips to move a lighting fixture. Then you say three lines over and over again for an hour, and then you wrap.

Google Street View driver.

You're all alone for 8+ hours a day, can almost never take a break, need to constantly be "on" and focused (lest you crash the $25,000 Subaru with $60,000+ worth of camera equipment on it), you end up becoming an amateur meteorologist to keep track of weather patterns and cloud cover, and in my experience there are a lot of people who just get insanely upset at you, at Google, and the job in general for a wide variety of reasons. I enjoyed myself when I did it, but it was nowhere near as glamorous or fun as I or my friends & family assumed.

Edit: Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in my summer job from almost 10 years ago. I'll just answer the most asked questions here real quick:

Pay? $15 an hour, but contingent on hours driven, which were themselves dependent on clear weather to ensure optimal image quality

Why not drive every day no matter the weather? Google got around this problem by making you re-drive routes whose pictures turned out subpar. To prevent people double billing by driving the same easy route constantly, you also had a weekly quota of unique miles driven, so no double dipping.

What could you do in the car? As long as the camera and the napping software (Edit: MAPPING software, thanks for the heads up) was running properly I was on my own. I listened to music, the news, and lots of books on tape. I could stop for short bathroom breaks whenever I felt like it, and had an hour guaranteed for lunch whenever I wanted to take it, which usually amounted to eating in the car on the side of some lonely rural road 90% of the time.

Who would ever think this was fun or glamorous? All I can say is, back in 2012 most people I talked to were pretty excited, myself included, about getting the chance to do any work with Google, let alone this cool new project that would let you see what any place on Earth looked like at street level from the comfort of home. This was the era of Google Plus being a potentially exciting new thing, of Google Glass being the future of tech, and overall it was a different time. That's why everyone I knew thought this was a cool gig.

Working in a music store ( musical instruments )

Your days are spent listening to 50 different people play 50 different riffs poorly simultaneously, as if they're all putting on their own concert.