The (Mis?)Adventures of a Perpetual Job-Hunter/Job-Hater

Can’t it all just work out for me for once? So the new job is fine, but it lost quite a bit of its lustre this afternoon when my supervisor told me that I can’t work early hours until my “newness” has diminished. She wants me to get more traning under my belt before I begin working without a supervisor in the office (the earliest a supervisor arrives in the morning is 7). The problem – IT’S A BIG PROBLEM – is that I’m supposed to intern from 2-5. I was supposed to work from 5-1, which would’ve worked perfectly with my internship hours, but now my plan that was neatly tied up with a pretty little bow has gone completely to hell.

I want to be a part of this magazine – seriously, I NEED this experience. Since Friday is a short work day at the company I work for, I can intern from 12:15 to 5, but the internship requires a two-day commitment. I’ve already emailed the editor of the magazine with all of the details re: the schedule debacle and told her I can come in for an hour Monday to Thursday (to discuss new developments and assignments that I can take home) AND dedicate all my spare time to completing tasks on my own time (I completed some fact-checking on my own this past week and it went really well!)… I just hope we can work something out.

What am I supposed to do, though? While I need to intern for the magazine to help me get on the career path that I want to be on, since I haven’t won the lottery yet, I also need this job. And for the first time in a very long time, I can say that my job is decent… and the company is more than decent. It’s a truly solid company, actually. Probably the best I’ve worked for in terms of taking care of employees. I’m on contract, but the chances of getting hired permanently are quite high… and once that happens, I could work the hours I want, receive awesome benefits (maternity leave top-up!), and eventually work from home FOREVER if I choose to do so.

At the end of the day, though, I don’t think it would be enough. Yes, I do think I would be able to learn to accept having a “meh” job at a good company. But it still wouldn’t be enough… I could never permanently quiet the nagging voice inside my head, which would constantly remind me that I’d be happier doing something else.

I just hope that nagging voice never leaves me – because so long as I’m armed with it, there will always be potential for my continued evolution. I don’t ever want to lose the ability to want better for myself when I know I can amount to so much more.

First off, the new job is okay. After my last nightmare of a job, it’s such a huge relief to have a boss who doesn’t breathe down my neck. It’s an eerily quiet, anti-social environment for the most part, but such is life when you work in legal publishing. I knew what to expect before starting. My co-workers seem nice and good-humoured enough, so hopefully I get to run into them more often in the halls or library to strike up more conversation (how ironic, yes, striking up conversation in a library – again, such is life when you work in legal publishing).

Anyway, I’ve already got some work to do, which is good… I guess. To be honest, I was hoping to cruise for the first few days or so reading lame training material, but because I’ve got moderate editorial experience under my belt, they’ve decided to put me to work already. It’s not fun work, but it never is in legal publishing. I can’t stop thinking about the work I have to complete for the magazine – it’s so much more interesting… today all I kept thinking about was making calls to verify some details in a few articles I’ve been assigned to fact-check. I was really distracted. I wish they would just pay me! I’d be elated if they said they could pay me minimum wage to work for them… sigh, maybe one day.

Anywho, these updates are going somewhere today – for once, I have a point, haha. Reflecting on my varied work experience, which consists of paid and unpaid positions and ranges from God-awful to “meh” to, now that I’m working for the magazine, warm, fuzzy-feeling-eliciting, I’ve realized that it has definitely given me a better appreciation for the value of a dollar. I know someone who’s a pretty ridiculous character, quite happily leeching off of others to pay for her gym membership, satisfy her penchant for name brands, buy things she shouldn’t, rack up enormous debt in their names so that she can spoil herself, etc., etc., etc. She doesn’t pay rent, people. She’s been unemployed for several years and lacks any job skills (or people skills, for that matter!). She’s 30-something and virtually the only thing she can put on her resume is her short-lived experience working at a fair, for Christ’s sake. You would think that someone who takes, takes, takes from wonderful people who give, give, give would do what she could to show her appreciation. But no, she doesn’t even help out at home in any adequately quantifiable way… and she’s completely unapologetic about being thoroughly USELESS  to her family that’s selflessly and painstakingly helping her out. She’s pretty crappy in my books, so these days I’m not surprised when I hear about something effin’ stupid that she does.

But the other day, my husband and I gave her daughter a monetary gift for her birthday. Sure, it wasn’t huge or anything, but I hadn’t worked in weeks and we had to be modest because of our situation. It wasn’t a paltry amount either, though, so I expected a polite “thanks” in return. But when her daughter gave her nasty mom the money and told her it was from us, nasty mom just looked down at it and said nothing… not a word. Nor did she tell her daughter to thank us. She looked down at the money like it was infected. I could see it on her nasty face: she was thinking, “CHEAP”. It wasn’t even HER gift! And still she passed judgment! I’m baffled by how she feels entitled to pass judgment with NOTHING that she’s EARNED SELF-SUFFICIENTLY to her name.

Funny that someone who’s too useless to generate an income would think that, huh? Apparently people who are “too good” to work honestly for a dollar are are still “too good” for monetary gifts/free money.

Maybe if the dumb b!tch actually WORKED a damn day in her life, had a boss who made her want to crawl into a hole and scream, had a job like my husband’s that made her body ache every day, had to settle for all of these not-so-wonderful things for the sake of DOING WHAT’S RIGHT… maybe then she wouldn’t scoff at our gift. She simply hasn’t evolved enough to understand just what kind of bullsh!t and sacrifice goes into making an honest dollar. And the fact that she revels in her ignorance enrages me – a 30-something ADULT who lacks this insight is a sorry waste of human life! ARGH!

I’m glad I’ll never be like her. Without a doubt, she’s the biggest idiot I have the misfortune of knowing.

I wrote yesterday’s post with some relative clarity, I thought… but today the potential employer called to let me know that they’re proceeding in the recruitment process since yesterday’s interview went well. They will be contacting my references, and their final decision will be made by the end of next week. My gut feeling tells me that an offer of employment is pending.

And that gut feeling is accompanied by a feeling of disappointment, I guess I can call it. I’m not being ungrateful… this is a stupid, stupid initial reaction from an unemployed bum, I know… of course I’m pleased that I have another prospect, especially since I quit last week without anything to fall back on. While I’m glad that I can return to the work force almost immediately after leaving my last job quite spontaneously, I’m also a little disappointed because I have a feeling I know what my pragmatism will guide me to do. Sure, it’s an uninteresting job that pays an almost laughable salary… but it’s a job that pays… and even though I was intially unfazed by the unpaid aspect of an incredibly exciting magazine internship, I feel my pragmatism enveloping my idealism again, telling me that I can’t turn down an actual job… because I just can’t.

Ugh, it’s so unbelievably frustrating to be yoked to this kind of pragmatism. Even after all these posts that seem to trace an evolution (however slow and winding) in my approach to finding the right career for me, here I am, taking two steps back, thinking about settling for something that I already know will not make me content.

Oh, what am I doing.

During the last 26 minutes or so of my lunch break this afternoon, I sat in my car and almost convinced myself to give in to the overwhelming urge not to return to the office after my glorious one-hour respite was over. I wanted so very badly to be fearless, to let my thirst for sanity dictate my course of action for once, to drive out of the gloomy parking lot and cross the threshold into happy, sunny freedom. But at 1:54pm, I knew I couldn’t retreat. I have bills to pay, I thought… four dogs to feed… gas to buy… a husband to consult before making significant, perhaps ludicrous decisions of the sort and to whom, along with the rest of my family, I’d have to justify the spur-of-the-moment action that would have such final, irrevocable consequences. So better judgment took a hold of me despite the fact that my insides were practically screaming for me to get the hell out of there. And by 1:56pm, the gut-wrenching longing to leave my God-awful job was quieted by overriding Reason – in an eerily robotic (and highly disappointing) manner, I was already walking back into the building that houses so much of my misery.

It’s absolutely terrifying, this Reason, isn’t it? Because oftentimes what Reason can force us to do isn’t truly reasonable. Is it reasonable to stay in an environment that actually makes me hate myself more and more with each passing day because it nurtures my habitual participation in the murder of my own brain? Is it reasonable to feign politeness (however obviously forced it is) toward my belittling, control-obsessed boss? Is it reasonable to continue doing a job that I didn’t even sign up for upon my initial hiring, and one that I still haven’t been properly trained to do, four freakin’ months later? Is it reasonable for me to accept being severely underpaid in proportion to my education, capabilities, and job experience? Of course, not, no… and yet the ritualizing of all these somehow “reasonable” things tricks me into thinking otherwise.

This, though, is the most terrifying thing about the trickster, Reason…

My brother-in-law’s father passed away just a couple of weeks ago both unexpectedly and before his time… life is fleeting. We’re all on this earth on finite terms, which should galvanize our thirst for relishing each day fully so that not a single day is wasted if it is the last… this job, though, essentially makes me scoff at that important (perhaps even most important) realization – it makes me wish each day would end sooner. Would Time just hurry up so that I can get out of here, I say to myself constantly while staring vacantly at my computer screen. And if something is so unbearable that it makes us want each blessing of a day to expire faster, causes us to try and make ourselves numb during work hours just so that we can sit still, and teaches us to ultimately appreciate life less… then we have to let it go.

But many of us don’t. I’m one of the many. So why in the world do we do this to ourselves? Because we have to, is the resounding answer, I’m sure. But there it is again, what we believe to be Reason telling us to accept something wholly unreasonable. We don’t have to… we don’t have to do anything. And yet even as I write those words, I still don’t believe them 100%. You know how I know that? Because I know that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and get ready for work, hop in my car and drive (all the while dreading the start of my work day), and carry out the same ol’ foolish ritual all over again.