Not that I'm getting all 'Office Space' on the whole thing, but it's getting hard to take anything about this job seriously anymore. I don't make enough money to keep myself afloat, I don't have a real reason to care... I've been told from day one that I'm essentially disposable, so why work my ass off? Some days I just wake up with the best intentions, look over at a drawer of nice dress clothes versus a pair of jeans with studded belt and a sweater, say "fuck it", and wear jeans and tennis shoes on days that aren't Friday. We don't really have a dress code that anybody sticks to - this means you, 55 year old man who wears jeans and various Star Wars, Pink Floyd and Devo t-shirts all the time... hell, he came in in a Sulu yellow Star Trek uniform shirt once. Not even kidding. So the fact that the department's office assistant is a heavily tattooed bitch on wheels isn't a huge problem. Which, in a world where some heavily tattooed individuals take the 'high road' of filing for federal disability so they don't have to work... should feel like an accomplishment, right? Meh.
Definitely did not see myself rotting away in offices as I was growing up. I had fleeting thoughts of how awesome it would be to be a writer, a librarian, or, for chrissakes, a professional wrestler (we aren't all smart in third grade).... and you know what? I sat down at a computer in about fourth grade, got good at it, and now look at me. One of the faceless yes-men trudging into an office every day. Fuck. How did it happen? I did attempt college a few years back - for an Associate's degree in Funeral Service (I figured hell, I like animals more than I like people and I've helped put animals down so hanging with dead people can't be too bad...) until I couldn't pass the simplest damn biology class the school offered. That was the world telling me "Liz! Go back to being a writer, you idiot!" So I attempted 19 credits per semester while working 40 hour work weeks in order to obtain my Associate of Arts. Guess what happened with that? Yep. Burned out. Quit. And not just a little bit - in the 'oh my god, if I go to one more class, get sexually harassed by one more fucking biology teacher, if my boss won't get off my ass about my hours, when's the last time I slept?' gonna-blow-your-brains-out kind of quit. Total shutdown.
After that, I decided work was going to be it, for 'awhile'. I always told myself at about 19 that I would be self-reliant on writing by time I hit 25. Didn't seem too tall an order, things were looking up... yeah, until that whole burnout thing happened, leading to me moving back into my parents' basement and still clawing myself up five years later. No, I've never had a clear-cut idea of what I want. I've never been able to look at my life and say that, definitively, I needed to do anything but write. It's been the only constant. And guess what? I've been ignoring the itch for about two years or so as it stands right now.
Right now, the damn itch has turned into the plague, the 'Pox, whatever you want to call it, and instead of ignoring all the goofy ideas that float into my head every day, I'm opting to put them down, put them on a blog, and make a total jackass of myself for the world to see! Hey, at least it won't just be me feeling like a jackass in my head anymore... right? And maybe, just maybe, it'll get me one step closer to not rotting away in an office for the best years of my life. Summer's coming, after all.
What do you hate about what you do for money?
2 comments:
Good God. I could never do an office job. This one time I worked at a call center and I was ready to strangle everyone around my cubicle. Never again. Do you do any freelance writing at all?
I just fell into offices because it was easy. I walked out of my last call center job. I have been a freelance writer in at least a small capacity for the better part of the last 8 years or so. In the last couple, though, I got kind of burned out, and now I'm rekindling some things but in the boom of Internet freelancing feel kind of lost. So yes and no! Haha.
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