not hate my job

I was attending training for 2-year staff, and I was overwhelmed with feelings of incompetence and futility. My position is administrative, so I’m not getting the traditional practical experience that all these young people are getting, which simultaneously will make it impossible for me to have the judgment (or the credibility) to do my administrative job.

On the other hand, my boss has strong motivation to keep me on. I’m his “transition plan,” and he wants to retire in 10 years or so. His clock is ticking, and it will cost him to have to start over from scratch with someone new. So if I just manage to keep him happy, I’m in like Flynn. Of course, then there’s the 15 or so more years that I’d need to be filling his shoes without the wherewithal to do so. But maybe I’ll figure out some “transition plan” of my own by then.

Still, I can’t help thinking that if I got myself fired instead of quitting, I could at least collect unemployment while I tried to find a different job.

Processed World

It was funny and political and subversive.

It was also the source of an article that first brought home to me the understanding that “fulfilling” or “meaningful” work was a limited resource, that believing it was within everyone’s reach or else the fault was theirs was a sort of oblivious “let them eat cake” elitism.

Right now at work management is encouraging everyone to read The Fred Factor. After looking at some of the reviews on Amazon, I worry that it will just deepen my cynicism. And I’m constantly balancing on the knife’s edge at work: cynicism on one side and a “bloom where you’re planted” positivism on the other. But you’ll notice that, dammit, Kurt Vonnegut is invoked on the book’s page I linked to, which muddies the waters even further.

If anyone’s read The Fred Factor, I’d be interested in hearing what you thought of it.

It’s called “Work Happy Now!”

http://www.workhappynow.com/2009/06/what-do-i-do-if-im-unhappy-at-work/

I was feeling low, so I was looking at some 43Ters’ “daily gratitudes,” which are often great pick-me-ups, and I got to thinking that if I’m not in a position to change jobs right now, and if the things that suck really do suck and I can’t fix them, then I just have to try to fix what I can. (Yeah, this is pretty obvious when I write it down, but I’m a master at overlooking the obvious!)

So I looked up the Happiness Project on Google, and eventually came across the Work Happy Now site as I tried to find ways to apply the Happiness Project specifically to work. E.g., there are certainly at least one or two things, if not five, that I can probably think of each day to be grateful for at work. Back when my husband and I had both recently started our current jobs, when we had a bad day we’d come home and tell each other, “At least I didn’t get fired today!” And there’s always the paycheck, for which I am very grateful.

There’s probably a lot more good stuff like this out there if I keep looking.

I wrote this goal as “Not hate my job,” but I was still conceiving it as “make my job less hateful.” Well, even if I can’t do that, I can adjust my attitude. And I don’t mean become a pollyanna, but I think I can learn to accept unpleasantness with more grace so that it weighs less heavily on my spirit.

Some tasks are more painful than others.

There’s no one I dislike in my office, but some people are so much better to work with than others. If I knew how the hell to do my job, it wouldn’t matter so much whether I’m working with an effective leader or competent co-workers, for instance, but I don’t, and some folks just don’t know how to give direction, and that makes work a living hell sometimes.

I hate feeling incompetent. I know I’m not stupid, but this job sometimes makes me feel like a bumbling idiot. And seriously, I got better training on how to clean bathrooms at McDonald’s than I have at this so-called “profession.”

And since I’m now on the road for the next couple of weeks at least, I don’t have home and hubby to recharge my batteries. So I sit in a hotel room and drink. And stew about work. And gripe about my job on 43T. And hope that tomorrow isn’t any worse than today.

I HATEEEEE my job and its not even permanent! I got it thru a temp agency because I was that free spirit who just walked out of jobs and didnt come back…i graduated school last year then worked for a bank, went on vacation and never came back… lol…im a musician who loves music to death and cant see myself doing anything but making music, writing, and acting. The mere thought of an office jobs makes my stomach hurt…theyre so depressing and grey. PLEASE help me and listen to my music at www.myspace.com/dirty845, at least indulge me for that long lol…for now, i sit at this computer and pretend to look busy while i really just surf the internet.. HA

It’s amazing what you can put up with in a job when you have a positive relationship with the people around you—and how even the best of jobs can be bad when you don’t. I loved my current job when I first started, but since then a lot of the people who made it worth coming to work have left, and the new ones who have come in make me want to stand on my desk and yell obscentities (or worse). With the position shuffling my job itself has gone downhill too, when I started my work had direction and purpose, but now I’m just someone to do the dirty work and blame when things go wrong. I’ve got another posibility on the horizon, but it’s taking a while to come through.