I mentioned last week that I told my boss about my upcoming bike ride and how that would be the end of my employment here. I thought things would get smoother but to be honest, it hasn’t. Like most things, it reminds me of a girl. In college I dated a girl pretty seriously my senior year. Let’s call her Miley (because I’m listening to Wrecking Ball right now). With the exception of my current partner Miley is really the only woman I can still look back and say we could have had a long-term thing, but it didn’t happen that way. I got a job in DC and she was continuing her graduate studies in Charleston, and neither one of us could really do the long-distance thing. After we realized our relationship had an expiration date things got rocky… we tried to make it work and tried to focus on the present but that didn’t work. We had an expiration date.
The same is with my current job. I wonder if it wouldn’t just be better to rip off the bandage or if I should try to hang in there for another couple months. Neither my boss nor I are really “wrong”, but knowing that this won’t last has made small problems seem much bigger and my misery at work is increasing. So here I sit, with only written words to help me clear my thoughts. This is probably going to be mostly for me to vent, but maybe there is a boss or something that will stumble upon this and something good will come of it. Here are the reasons why I am unhappy at my job and why I’m not sure if I can make it another couple months.
The Old Way of Doing Things: Maybe this is a generational issue (am I a millenial?) or maybe this is just me personally, but I hate the office environment. My job requires me to wake up at 7am, commute to work, sit at a computer from 9 til 5, and then commute home. When you factor in commuting my “work day” is 12 hours. And why? Why the hell should I put on dress clothes and commute to work on a computer that has half the power of my laptop? Well, it is because that is how things have been set up. The office is dying, I know this but my boss doesn’t. I waste moments of my life to warm a seat. I am not judged on the quality or quantity of my work but am constantly critiqued on my time in the office and my attire, two things that should be irrelevant if I am doing my job.
Money Only Motivates So Much: When I can live off of 30ish hours a week at about minimum wage and still save for my retirement there isn’t a lot of monetary motivation. I don’t care about things, I care about my time and experiences. No raise is going to convince me to stop spending time with my partner or miss a weekend bike ride or not go to a rave. I just don’t care about money. If my boss wanted to motivate me he would give me days off or let me go home when my work is done… instead I sit in an office because someone needs to be here to answer our landline phones, because apparently landlines still exist.
I’m Never Off Work: This is a big one for me. I am salary which apparently means “haha, sucks if you had plans on Sunday we have an asshole client who needs something done ASAP”. When I spend 3 hours commuting each day I really need my evenings and weekends to myself. This wasn’t something that was mentioned during the hiring process and I wish it would have been, I may not have taken the job.
Industry People Suck: I work with a lot of people in “the industry”… basically movie and television assclowns who have egos similar to people in Washington DC. I don’t deal with most people in general very well, much less pretentious dicks. It stresses me out to deal with them, particularly when I don’t feel like I have any type of back up from the rest of the office. When someone is incredibly disrespectful, angry, or unreasonable there is this idea that I should just shrug it off because that is how the industry is. I guess I might be able to shrug it off if I was somehow compensated for dealing with these people but even if we charge assholes more than nice people I don’t see a dime of that… I still have to deal with the assholes.
As I look back at things now I am glad I took the job but wish I would have asked more questions and discussed things before accepting the job. This was my first time working in corporate America so I learned a lot of things, a necessary if sometimes painful lesson. So now I must decide what to do about it. I can quit soon and find something part-timeish to get me through until April, or I can stick with it and hope I don’t lose my mind in the process. There really are only two reasons to stay in my mind: I don’t want to abandon my office spouse (she would be dealing with a lot of bullshit if I left) and I don’t want to hurt the reputation of the guy who recommended me for the job. I don’t know… writing things out some helped but I’m not sure what to do still. It seems really likely something stupid will just set me off and I’ll quit with no notice.
Wandering Oak 