Dear LPG readers,  

In your youth, how many times do you remember being asked this leading question?  It is ironic that we often ask really young children about what job they are going to do before they ever actually have one, as opposed to what sort of work we end up doing.   

I came across an online survey the other day which tells that the average Baby boomer (person now aged between 64 and 78) would have stayed in their job roughly three times as long as a person who is part of Generation Z (someone aged between 63 and 44).  It also says that the average person will have 9 jobs during their lifetime.  

That got me wondering just how average I was.  I am now well into my eighties, which makes me a member of what is called the silent generation, and that got me thinking.   

I went to school in Jamaica at a time when there was no careers advisor to tell you what sort of work you would most be suited to.  I got thinking about my so-called career, although in the 1940’s version of the West Indies, your average female school leaver’s job prospects were often more about getting paid than worrying about a life-long vocation.   

I left school and went to commercial college for a while (studying typing and shorthand, and office administration), then I spent a bit of time helping out at home before answering the Windrush call and deciding to become a nurse in the UK.  It did not take me long to work out that I was never going to be a success in that career, so I did a bit of sewing at a clothing factory in the East End for a while.  But I soon fell back on my office skills and found myself working in central London in an office, which allowed me to hobnob with the music stars of the day.  Well, I say ‘hob nob’ but perhaps the occasional greeting would be shared as people like Shirley Bassey, Frankie Vaughn and Liberace came and went. I left after realising that I needed to work closer to the schools that my children attended, and ended up in an office that dealt with heating and plumbing supplies for more than 15 years, before doing a bit of social work and ending my working life as a carer for a decade.  If you include the years that I stayed home with my children, a time when I worked as hard as anyone else, I think that makes eight changes, so I am nearly average. 

It is funny.  I think that while I was one of the world’s workers and going backwards and forwards to whatever work I was preoccupied with at the time, it was accepted as one of my defining characteristics.  To an extent, it is perhaps the second most asked question when you are first introduced to someone, but we so quickly forget the important role we played in the world’s industrial past once we don’t have to do it anymore.  How quickly the tasks we did for a living can get lost once we retire.  Some of us will have done the same thing throughout our whole working lives, but many people chop and change.   

The other thing that gets to me is the way that the jobs I did all those years ago have changed, and in some cases have been taken over by computers.    

Once we retire, we often lose touch with the people we leave in the work place and that were such a big part of our working lives, and it occurred to me that over the twenty or so years since I left work, many of those old work colleagues would now have the time to become closer friends again if we just remembered to look up those old telephone numbers.  There is nothing like a good reminiscing session about what it was really like back in the day.  I am not only talking about the job.  The tea break gossip, the bits of the job you liked least, what you really thought about your boss and the politics have to be just a few of the other aspects to be taken into consideration. 

It is so easy to forget the details of things that we don’t do anymore, and while work is often something you can’t wait to give up when you are in the middle of doing it, the memories make a good subject to look back on…  

ER, Bellingham.