Sunday, March 2, 2008

Finding Your Place

Do you ever get that feeling there’s a place for you? I mean a really tangible one – a nice little office with a swivel chair, shelving units with all your favorite books and a fish tank, just waiting for you. Only you’re too stupid to find out where it is, or how to get there, or who you have to kill to get his job. This is how I feel every day.

You hear it all the time. “You can take any other job and still be creative in your spare time.” Thanks, mom. That doesn’t help, but thanks all the same.

When you’ve never had a job you didn’t hate, you have to wonder about all those people who claim they love their jobs. Of course, they only claim this while they aren’t at work, and then only after they’re done complaining about my day. That’s one thing I never caught myself doing after work – complaining. My parents, and girlfriends, and other family members would always ask me how my day was, and I just never wanted to talk about it. I still don’t. Again, maybe that’s part of it. They love their jobs, complete with the complaining about it, which comes with the territory. I found all my jobs so horrible that I was much happier if I simply didn’t think about them while I wasn’t there. Actually, it got so bad that often enough I’d be at work, and my mind would still be somewhere else completely. That’s when the boss starts yelling because you’re not paying attention, but you only get paid $8 or $9 and hour, so you really don’t give a shit. You could be selling you old crap on eBay for money like that.

But to get back to overgeneralizing, I find this is still happening with most of my friends, if not all of them, and I’m starting to get worried about it. Either I’ve got the wrong friends, or there’s something very fucked up with our whole generation. My question is, who are all these people who love their jobs, and what do they actually do?

“I work for the government.” Oh great, these guys. These are the people who get your pension, and do maybe 9 minutes of real work per day. These are the people responsible for your tax refund coming in two years late. These are the sorts of people who don’t get around to filing memos about meetings until the week after they supposed to have met. I high school, these were the kids that drank paint.

And then we’ve got those people who’ve worked at Walmart for 10 year, so that they’re up to $16.50 an hour, and they’re really proud of their work ethic ‘cause they’ve never had a sick day. Guess what? They’ve never had a well day either.

Some days, I just wanna shake the shit out of our work force, you know?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you should try some job that you didn't think was right for you?
Something so completely not you. See how you like it.
I think the thing about the people loving their jobs, it's either that they've given in to the idea that this is what they're going to be doing for the rest of time(I call it the sweetest grapes, kind of a juxtaposition on the sour grapes fable! Brilliant!) or they love their job for the things that they don't do. "I don't actually have to work all that hard, I love my job" "I don't have to deal with people, I love my job" "I don't have to sleep with dirty old men for crack, I love my job".
If you didn't like that comment:
"YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF FUCKING WAGESLAVE ZOMBIES!!!"