Friday, May 24, 2013

Rants about sucky jobs

Although I've worked quite a few jobs in my life time, and none of them were what I would consider the perfect job, there are just those that you really really loathe.  I'm working in one of those jobs right now, and to be honest I really hope I get fired.  If you think about it, the average full time employee spends nearly a third of their entire life hours working.  One-third of your life is quite a huge portion of it, especially to spend unhappy.  It's that time again where after managing to do everything as best as I can, I've managed to make it through another few weeks worth of work and still have a job, and then my boss is threatening my job again with his complaints. 

A little bit about my job and why I hate it so much...  I don't do a simple job where a product is simply produced or found and offered to a customer.  I don't do a simple job where things are just repetitive and almost the same every time.  My job isn't like washing a car, or making a drink or a hamburger, or finding a part or a product of some kind.  I have the type of job where I must solve problems, and many of these issues need immediate responses, and I have absolutely little to no training on anything.  I've been at this job for about 2 years now, and everyday a new issue walks in that nobody has ever heard of before.  Things are constantly changing and fast paced.  While you might say that its an exciting fast paced job that we should all be after, and that my work ethic is suffering if I don't feel like busting my ass day in and day out, let me remind you of some other key points. 

First and foremost, my boss.  A micromanager from hell.  The guy literally has nothing better to do than make new rules to make things harder and forget he ever made them 3 weeks later.  They must not be that important.  One of the traits of a sociopath is a technique called gaslighting, in which the sociopath's victim is confused simply by making statements and denying they were ever said later, or putting words in the person's mouth, etc.  Other techniques used are just generally figuring out the weak spots and poking at them.  After a while the person being pranked tends to question their own sanity, or wonder why they are getting so angry for what seems to be no reason.  This is a behavior that my supervisor is very much guilty of.  I'm not the only person who has been broken down to tears from sheer stress and anger in my job, no.  There are many others.  One man I work with calls my boss "the 2nd worst boss he has ever had", and being that this guy is many years older than me, and has had many more bosses, it begs the question of just where my boss ranks on the scale of horrible bosses. 

There was a man I knew who was offered a job with us, and was a happy employee of another client in the same office for about 5 years.  He was left without a job when the client's contract ended and they chose not to renew.  My boss offered him a job with us.  That reliable, intelligent, respectable, hardworking man made it not even 60 days before he came to the conclusion that this job was shit, and he needn't waste further time.  It took only one or two arguments with my boss to convince him to leave and live off of what he had saved, and move to a different area in search of another job.  And how nice it must be to be in such a position where you don't have to take bullcrap. 

You see, I started as a reliable and hard working employee.  I was dedicated and did the best I could, I excelled at every challenge that was handed to me.  I wanted to prove that I could do the job better and faster and work more efficiently than anyone else in the office, and I did.  I made it to various types of authoritative positions where I was given the power to manage the team and its productivity, and I'm glad to say when I had those positions, the people whom I worked with were productive.  Why?  Because they had respect for me.  They knew I worked as hard as they did, and they knew that I wasn't griping about bullshit.  I didn't micromanage, and I only corrected where I saw things really needed to be corrected.  I praised in public and corrected in private.  Very simple to do.  And then...

Along came my boss, and another idiot we have on the force.  People with OBVIOUS contol issues in their own lives who wanted to make up for it in the office.  Everyone in there was someone to push around until every last juicy drop of satisfaction could be extracted to quench the insatiable ego-driven thirst of these god forsaken power hungry heathens.  NO people skills.  NO respect for the individual.  God it must be so good to wake up in the morning and go to work and get paid just to do what you love doing... playing God with a magnifying glass.

The point is, I've been micromanaged to the point where I just don't give a flying fuck about my job.  I could care less if work gets done tomorrow, or how badly things need to be fixed.  I don't give a shit about the customer's issues, and I just don't really care about anything anymore.  LET THEM FIRE ME.  I will be better off and happier with less pay.  Even the possibilty of no pay, and living under a bridge hunting for e-coli infested chicken wing meat to pry off a chewed bone from the dumpster behind the Church's sounds much better when placed in contrast next to another day with this job, regardless of whether the check keeps coming in.  I have really had my fill with this job, and it needs to end. 

I dream of being a bartender.  I went to bartending school and graduated, got my certification, in hopes of finding a part time job just to take the stress off and spend at least a few hours pretending I have another job.  I would love to be behind a bar, taking orders from thirsty, chatty customers who have had a long day and want some refreshement.  They need someone to talk to when they're down, or maybe they just want to knock back a few drinks in celebration of a new job or a new house they bought.  While I may not know every drink in the book, there is a solution in a book somewhere in that bar, and the worst thing I can do is make it wrong and have to start over.  It may not pay as much as much as I make now, and I may have trouble with bills, or be forced to spend less, but money doesn't buy happiness.  I don't think success has anything to do with how much money one makes.  I think success is nothing more than a combination of stability and happiness, and being able to find the time within yourself to love life.  I can easily see a man who is poor and broke, and may not have enough to do everything he wants to do, but he has a home, people that care about him, friends, love, and the time to persue the things that make him happy.  I can just as easily see a man who considers himself a failure in life, living in a mansion but working unhappily and without rest to pay the debts that maintain his lifestyle.  The point is, I choose happiness.