One of the main problems with my job (apart from the stultifying mundaneness) was driven home to me today.
After spending quite a lot of time over several days sorting out the details of a particular death certificate: getting the original returned & amended, finding the correct address, verifying details, placating agitated funeral directors, etc (and doing several dodgy things with the databases that aren't strictly allowed but that with any luck won't be noticed..), I
finally got the thing straight and sent off. At no extra charge to funeral director or bereaved.
What occurred to me, as the funeral director was effusively thanking me and telling me I'd made an old woman happy (the wife of the deceased)(which I doubt much since part of the problem was her advanced dementia and inability to remember anything coherently for long) and that they appreciated it too, was (sorry about theses sentences - they make sense in
*my* head), that no matter how good a job I do, how many extra miles I go, or paper-cuts I sustain in the course of my duties, my work *never* makes anyone happy. The best I can hope for is making a bad time slightly less awful.
Mine is a job of minimising pain, reducing negativity. Never actually increasing happiness.
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