The Futility of Working Life
Prepare to be depressed. Prozac at the ready, people.
I am sick of my job. My boss knows this. We had a chat about it. It was nice.
I work on reception at a very low budget very poorly maintained bed-and-breakfast. I have been doing so for two years. I have managerial experience. I am also fairly sure I know how to spell managerial. I think. I also have quite a scary brain between my ears and have a degree in creative writing. Why then, I find myself asking myself several times a day, am I putting up with being paid £6 an hour to sit behind a desk. It's hardly taxing, it's hardly progessive, and it's certainly not creative. Let's face it, there are really only so many ways you can say "I am so very sorry that your heater isn't working. Please bear with me while I run up and down stairs for you for half an hour trying to find a portable that still has the fuse/stand/safety casing intact."
It's a proven fact - entertainers are NOT cut out for regular office work. We don't understand how it works. We get confused and bored or any combination of the two and generally fail. Either that or we penetrate the deepest layers of pretension to the mundanity of the task that we are paid to perform and realise the futility of our job, which proves soul destroying. And then we have to have a nervous break down and take to drink for a few years, write some poetry, paint some viciously offensive depictions of children being killed and eaten by rabid sheep symbolising the dessication of individuality and personal choice by the capitalist corporate machine that is modern society, and then eventually emerge triumphant and go on to do whatever it is that we're actually good at, but with a damned good story to tell about how much we suffered to get where we are today.
Customer service, as many of you may well know (You're all intelligent people, you know what I'm talking about up there) consists of two people having a conversation during which neither one gives a flying fuck in a high wind about what the other person is saying.
CUSTOMER: I have a complaint about the (insert random thing here). You see I paid (insert tiny insignificant amount of money here) and I was expecting (insert outrageous impractical demand here) so I am very (insert unahppy emotion here) and I don't like sprouts.
ME: I am so very very sorry about that. You see the (insert random other person here) was supposed to sort that but the (insert highly unlikely but unavoidable catastrophe here) happened and so we had to (insert ludicrous surreal scenario here) until we can get hold of the (insert random third party acting as scapegoat here) and assassinate the president of Columbia.
CUSTOMER: Just give me my fucking money back, bee-yatch.
And admin, from what I can see, primarily revolves around stapling bits of paper to other bits of paper. You really don't need to know this when you're spending eight hours a day of your life on this shit.
To top it all off, they are now docking my overtime because there was not really any REASON for me to be staying those extra two hours. I didn't HAVE to help the manager fix the computer or tidy the conference room, so I should have gone home. Bad me. No extra money. No biscuit. Wages guy totally fails to twig that when you're earning £6 an hour, you kind of NEED the £6 an hour... Jerk.
So for all of these reasons, I have sort of lost interest in the job. When I first started it was a challenge and I felt I had something to prove. I was a GOOD receptionist. I am now a crap receptionist. I spend my day pissing about on the internet, avoiding doing the work, forgetting what I am supposed to be doing and ignoring the bits I find too boring. Why? Because it makes no different. There are no rewards, no commisions, no hope of promotion. You do well, they give you a pat on the back and say "well done." You do badly, they.... well, they don't do anything because even though you're rubbish at the job they don't want you to leave because then they would have to hire somebody else who will probably be even more rubbish, so you see where I'm going with this. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. It's not like you can just sing your song and dance your dance and get yourself nominated onto the next round of "Stars in their Filing Cabinets".
The boss has told me not to make any hasty decisions, partly because she doesn't want to lose me and partly because she doesn't want me to wind up somewhere worse, but frankly I have this real ominous sense of forboding, that sort of feeling of impending doom normally manifested in the form of identical seven year old twin girls standing in front of elevators of blood. It's not good.