An attempt to find balance and sanity

[pygma_lion]

Originally published at Short Attention Span Girl. You can comment here or there.

A couple months ago, I wrote this list of reasons why I hate my job, and a list of reasons why my job isn’t so bad. The Hate side won, but it’s worth posting to remind myself of the less craptastic aspects of being completely unemployable and stuck here for eternity.

What’s Bad About My Current Job?                                                                                   

• I have very little respect for my supervisor.
• My commute is driving me insane. It’s 1.5 hours on average, each way, and there’s no way to take a bus. It takes me an hour to get to my carpool buddy.
• I make far less money than I should, especially considering I have a master’s degree and loads of work experience.
• I absolutely hate hassling people to pay their bills.
• Exhibitors can be very rude, demanding, and stupid. Dealing with them makes me want to shoot myself in the face.
• My company is very rigid and inflexible in many ways.

• My company makes poor decisions. For example, they believe in not replacing people who have left, and instead letting the remaining people pick up the slack. I don’t see how they can stay in business much longer.
• I’m not allowed to try out new ways of doing things that I think would make my job easier and make the company more efficient.
• It’s demeaning to still be in this entry level job.
• I have no passion for the trade show industry.
• Most of the people I like have left the company, and the rest will probably leave soon.
• The kit administrator position was offered to me and then taken away, which caused me to not go after some better jobs I likely could’ve gotten, but which are filled now.
• I have a job that requires me to wear a nametag and a polo shirt with a logo on it.
• During busy months, I have to work crazy schedules.
• The cubicle walls are short and flimsy.
• There is nothing challenging about my job.
• There is nothing creative in my job.
• I don’t get nearly enough sick days or vacation days, and they’re distributed piecemeal, so I better not get sick until March. Plus, I have to use them by the end of the calendar year, so I can’t save them up.
• At certain times of the year, I have to work so many hours without breaks that I hardly have time to catch my breath.
• My company is cheap and won’t even spring for a decent holiday party.
• My company promotes people who aren’t good at their jobs or hard workers.
• My job doesn’t really offer transferable skills to anything I ever want to do, as it’s basically customer service, data entry, and collections.
• I rarely get to interact with people who are witty and clever and interesting.
• There’s not really anywhere I want to advance to from this position.
• My company won’t spring for a wireless card so I can actually do my work when I’m at a show or traveling. But they will spend $350 on a dinner and drinks to entertain another city’s clients.
• The new guy makes me want to chew my own face off.

 What’s Good About My Current Job?

• I have the Adobe Creative Suite on my laptop.
• I have a lot of spare time at work that could theoretically be put to good use.
• My work is near my kickboxing studio.
• I like some of the people I work with.
• It’s fun to be part of Team Good Times, even though it has the stupidest name ever, because we get to plan little mini-parties for birthdays and other occasions.
• It’s interesting to see the different kinds of trade shows there are.
• I can occasionally carpool to work.
• I get swag once in a blue moon, and occasionally it’s not total crap.
• There are sometimes opportunities to earn overtime.
• I get to travel once in a while, which means free meals.
• If I’m still here in June, I’ll get to take the train up to Vancouver for a show.
• I can pretty much come and go as I please when I’m working in the office.
• My manager thinks I’m super awesome and wants to make me happy so I won’t leave.
• I know this job.
• Occasionally, an exhibitor really appreciates all the hard work I go through to make them happy, and they express their thanks. Sometimes, they express their thanks with chocolate milkshakes.
• My expenses, like parking, are paid with my company credit card.
• The longer I stay here, the more I build a stable work history, rather than job-hopping every year.
• I can foist off some of the crap jobs I don’t want to do onto the new guy.
• There’s a remote possibility that I’ll get the kit administrator job at some point.
• It pays me money (even if it’s not much) and provides decent medical benefits.