I Hate It Here

I hate my job. There it is.  This is not news.  In fact, this has pretty much been par for the course for most of the last fifteen years. 

This blog post nails it – if a job was fun they wouldn’t have to pay people to do it.  To quote in bulk:

Right now I have what by any criteria would be considered a good job. I’m paid decently, I have basic benefits, and the position is as close to Stable as jobs get these days. Yet I’m not happy because I’m expecting the job to make me happy. I expect it to not suck, when in reality on many days it does suck because it’s a goddamn job. Nowhere was I promised that it would be rewarding and fun all the time, or that it wouldn’t be frustrating, or that I would have days where I come home and wonder why I bother. I bother because they pay me, and getting paid is very useful to me. But that’s it. That’s the deal: I show up and fulfill my responsibilities, and then I get a check. Nobody said anything about fun.

As often as I give this advice to other people, I give it to myself lately. What I can’t figure out is why people in my age group (or younger) have this idea that the task for which they get paid will also be personally enriching. Is it because we lack fulfillment in our personal lives? Is it because we’re spoiled, believing that the working world owes us self-actualization in addition to a means of supporting ourselves? I’m not sure. What is certain is that we should be careful what we wish for. Those factory jobs that no longer exist start to look pretty appealing as our Career-as-Spirit Quest theory runs into reality.

It’s like this blog – I do it, I enjoy doing it, but it’s not something really monetizable.  Because to do that, I’d need to go out and hustle ads, I’d need to produce a base minimum of content, I’d have to start tailoring my output to maximize page views and draw traffic, and next thing you know, I’m not blogging anymore.  I enjoy writing what I feel like, when I feel like it, and I’m pretty sure that shortly after having to meet a deadline on SEO-maximized topics day in and day out, I’d wind up hating it.

When I took my first full-time job out of grad school, I remembered telling people that my job was as easy and profitable as picking up money in the street. It didn’t take that long to change, largely because our management situation melted down within a year to the point that our lead tech was reporting directly to an out-of-touch and irrationally unreasonable vice president.  But thanks to the foxhole mentality and the relentless churn of the dot-com era, we were quick to build a team of techs that weren’t just whip-smart and capable, but pleasant to work with and a boost to morale (lest we forget, “morale” is a measure of “how people are doing when they aren’t doing well at all,” to quote PJ O’Rourke, who famously pointed out that you never hear about the morale of people on spring break or at vacation resorts, just prisoners and soldiers and the like). 

So what would make my job suck less?

To borrow from Great Place To Work, employees believe they work for great organizations when they consistently:

1) Trust the people they work for;

2) Have pride in what they do, and

3) Enjoy the people they work with.

Well?

1) This is tricky.  I was lucky to direct-report to the greatest manager I ever knew for most of the first seven years out of school.  Since then it’s been a mixed bag – and almost without fail, my management from the director level up tends to be indifferent at best and actively antagonistic at worst.  The most constant problem in IT support comes from management that fixates on “customer service” and interprets it as how good we make the end-user feel rather whether the problem was resolved successfully and in the timeliest possible manner.  This frequently stems from managers who aren’t technical enough to understand the problems their staff is solving, along with the misbegotten notion that a company’s IT staff is providing a customer service to their co-workers instead of a peer function.  I never hear anybody going on about whether the electricians or the security or the custodial staff are providing excellent customer service.

2) I’m Winston Wolf.  I solve problems.  May I come in?  I daresay the one thing I do better than anything else in the workplace is solve problems – if you have a thing that needs to be made to work, or linked or integrated or just figured out, I’m your guy.  And inasmuch as I do that, I enjoy it and take pride in my success.  If there’s a real live disaster and I have to shovel coal twelve hours a day for a week to save our asses, I take pride in that too.  What I don’t take pride in is having to spend those twelve hours mopping up somebody else’s foreseeable mistake, or cleaning up from a disaster that we saw coming and which management ignored.  And I certainly don’t take pride in an endless array of having to walk around hand-holding the kind of people who never think to try rebooting the computer or sit in front of an open browser window with the cursor in the address field and ask “how do I get to webmail?”  (HINT: the address is webmail.company.domain, and if you were to just type “webmail” and hit return, YOU WOULD ACTUALLY GET THERE.)  Inasmuch as tech support is about problem-solving, I enjoy it.  Inasmuch as it’s a blend of babysitting and veterinary medicine, I hate it.

3) This is the problem…there are two splits here.  One is co-workers, and one is end-users.  End-users are always a problem.  Some are worse than others, some are really a pleasure to work with, but as the computing environment has evolved over the years, less stuff breaks.  We’re not using Token Ring some places and Ethernet others, we’re not struggling with System 7 and trying to make TCP/IP work reliable and trying to pass AppleTalk so people can print, we’re not running Windows NT 4 and terrified every time the virus alert pings.  Ten years of Windows XP, for better or worse, led to most of the rough edges being filed off, while OS X has gotten more robust and reliable with every passing release.  It’s reached a point where support issues, especially with a Macintosh, are only occasionally about “something is wrong with the computer,” and even those are mostly about a Java plugin that stopped working or a printer that requires deleting the queue and setting up a fresh connection – things that any user with admin rights ought to be able to figure out and fix themselves in 5 minutes.  And in the case of the younger users, they pretty much do.  That’s why I think the job is going away in ten years – partly because the technology is simplifying, but also in part because the generation that entered the workplace before their computers did is finally starting to retire and go away. Ten more years will be thirty years since I was in college, at which point it can be safely assumed that anyone in an office workplace has been using computers in an office since they started working.

The other split is co-workers, and here I was ruined, because my teammates at the first job were the perfect crew.  Replicating that has proven impossible, largely because we failed to weed out the toxic people quickly enough at my first California job and because I haven’t really had that peer-group environment since.  When everyone’s responsible for their own area, there’s commiseration, but not that common experience, that banding-together-against-the-common-foe.  Right now, I have a decent enough group of folks, but few if any are the sort of people I’d want to spend 8 hours at the Four Provinces singing and getting knee-walking drunk alongside.

So what’s the solution?  Right now, the plan is to agitate to move within this existing employer to a job with more future-proofing – something in data center or infrastructure administration, something that will still be necessary when all work is being dictated into iWatches from your home-working desk.  Something that will get me away from a customer-facing environment, something less interrupt-driven (well, slightly) and more project oriented, something not keyed to the workday hours of a call center.  And in the meantime, 5 PM means work is done, not to even be thought about until 8:30 the next morning (or Monday as the case may be).

Maybe this is all just project-related stress. Maybe once encryption is over and done with, it’ll be possible to have a more normal relationship with work.  But given that this was pretty much my situation and feeling for most of 2012, I suspect probably not.  This isn’t run-of-the-mill dysthymia either.  I don’t need antidepressants, I need something for stress.  And probably a ton of Xanax.  And let’s face it, a couple of cocktails wouldn’t hurt at all.  Not likely in the near future.  Of which, etc.

 

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