You know in Office Space where Peter asks the hypnotherapist to make him think he’s been fishing all day? Can I ask a psychiatrist for some sort of antidepresent that will make me not hate my job?
While I generally find work frustrating, my last job was at least balanced out by the fact that there were interesting coworkers, I was usually pretty busy and I worked in a nice office in a good location.
My current job is basically like something out of Dilbert, Fight Club or an unfunny Office Space or The Office, but worse. The big issue, other than my loserish coworkers, the shitty location the fact that I don’t sit within 50 feet of another human being is that my boss is a total bipolar psycho who I don’t see for weeks at a time and when I do finnally see her will likely scream and berate me (or anyone else for that matter) because I wasn’t born knowing how exactly her stupid department works as if it’s my fault her right hand guy quit.
I’ve been at this stupid job a month and I already dread going to work. I have nothing on my calendar tomorrow which means 8 hours of staring at my Lotus Notes email, drinking coffee I have to pay for and reading cnn.com (SDMB is blocked).
I realize all work sucks and I should be happy to have a job in this economy (although I wonder if I should have taken the other offer), however is it too much to ask for a boss who isn’t THAT insane and actually gives some direction as to what they actually want me to do on a weekly basis?
If you don’t have any other people that depend on you for support, like kids, I’d advise you to find a different job. Nobody should have to be in a job that they hate.
The problem, as Hilarity N. Suze alluded to, is that it seems like everyone I know hates their job. It doesn’t seem to matter if they are a schoolteacher, investment banker, lawyer or IT worker.
I guess the trick is figuring out the difference between the normal frustrations of work (ie being asked to stay late) vs a work situation that is completely unacceptable (not being asked to do anything for weeks at a time).
Unfortunately, taking a pill won’t solve the underlying issues. There are unreasonable bosses out there. Ultimately, you have to decide whether or not you’re willing to put up with them. If you’re not, look for another job whenever you can and, when you find one, leave the boss behind. A year ago, I left a job for contract work because the job was so bad, it was quite literally giving me nightmares about chewing my leg off. I don’t regret leaving it.
Is there any chance things will get better at your job? Are you growing or stagnating in it? Is there any room for advancement? Is there anyway you can move up or sideways and get a different boss? Is your boss one bad apple in a pretty good barrel, or is the way she acts typical for management in your company? What do other people think about your boss and how do they respond to her? As a rule, if only one person thinks you’re a jerk, you may not be one. If a dozen people think you’re a jerk, you probably are. (That or you hang out with jerks.)
There’s a difference between routine workplace griping, which everyone does indulge in, in my experience, even people who love their jobs, and people who are genuinely miserable in their jobs. You need to work out which this is and act accordingly.
I don’t hate my job. I think there’s a few others on the board that can say the same.
Life’s too short, msmith537. Go find another job.
And as an aside… for me, the absolute worst situation is ask you describe: you’re chained to a desk with absolutely nothing to do. I only get so many hours on this planet, having to spend a whole lot of them sitting bored and idle is utterly unacceptable.
Seriously. The compensation can’t be that great or the thread would have been titled ‘They pay me piles of cash to sit on my ass all day reading cnn.com!’. You spend a significant portion of your day doing this. If you keep going the way you are one day you’ll climb the building and start hucking coconuts and other things at passersby.
Screwing off on the SD and procrastinating doing real work = happiness
Screwing off on the SD because you have absolutely nothing else to do but you can’t leave your desk = ball-crunching misery on a stick
When that happened to me, and the boss refused to give me extra work, “because it wouldn’t be fair to the other workers who didn’t feel comfortable asking for more work,” I ended up writing two and a half novels.
I have been in boring jobs with nowhere near enough to do. What eventually helped me was to take 100% ownership to make sure I had something mentally stimulating going on. Sort of like **phouka ** and writing novels. Learn another language, learn some math you never took in school, or come up with proposals to improve things at work/start your own business. Normally work is stimulating and free time is down time. Sometimes you need to reverse that pattern to stay sane.
I Cornelius Tuggerson do not hate my job. I will be laid off come august, but I enjoyed most of the 4 years I spent here. I went from intern to mid level software developer, I made a bunch of great connections, I still meet with many people who’ve quit or got laid off over the years, I know exactly who to call if I get stumped by some programming question.
All that is true even though company I work for has been dieing since I started, I am one the last of the 400 people that worked here when I joined, our big bosses are extremely incompetent, and a lot of my coworkers have been/are major league losers. msmith537 my job has good parts and bad parts, yours sounds like it flat out sucks. Get the hell out of there.
That works if your boss is sane enough to realize you have nothing to do. In my experience, most bosses go apeshit if they see you doing something not work related.
I once had a job where every few weeks I needed to copy 10-15 floppies. Back in the day, that took a while - like an hour or two. And you couldn’t do it in the background, these were the days before windows and multitasking, so it took up the whole computer. I had no second computer, and I had no work-related reading (I had asked for books/work related magazine subscriptions and had been told no).
So I’d read the newspaper or a book while doing this boring task. One of the owners had noticed me at my desk reading, and told my boss that “it didn’t look good.” My boss pulled me into her office, and told me that I couldn’t read while copying the disks. I asked her “what am I supposed to do while I copy these disks? Stare at the wall?” Her reply: “They’re paying you, so if they want you to stare at the wall, that’s what you do.”
Hell no, that’s not what I do. I quit about two weeks later.
I was actually pretty miserable in my current job for about a year. There were numerous minor reasons, but the short of it was that we were a small regional company trying to handle the workload of a medium-sized national company. I couldn’t get my boss to see that, and we just kept making more and more wild promises and bringing on more and more difficult customers while operations never grew. I was doing the job of about three different people with no pay raise, and vacations were a trial, as one person leaving for a week devastated the workflow.
I did start job hunting at the end of last year and made it known to the boss that I was ready to get the hell out, and as I was the most senior employee and the only one who really knew what the hell was going on, it finally got through to him. Our workforce doubled in size, people were given more defined roles, and we began serious documentation of procedures that until then only existed in my head. About a month or so ago I realized that I was actually pretty content with the job now. Things aren’t too busy or too slow, and we have enough people that we can actually take vacations without the place falling apart.
Obviously the situation’s not analogous to the OP, but the point is you need to take charge of your situation in some way. Find a job, have it out with your boss, run a porno site, whatever, but if you’re unhappy now you’re not going to suddenly change your mind after a month of the same.
msmith537, I think the key is deciding if you hate your job, or if you hate your field/career. If you like what you do, but just don’t like doing it in this company (because your boss sounds like a psycho and they don’t give you enough to do), then I’d switch jobs pronto. If you think you’re just sick of doing whatever it is you do, I’d still switch jobs, but I’d take some time to think about whether you could transition into a slightly different field for a change of pace.
But even if you decide you hate your field but are going to stay in it because it pays well, get out of this job as soon as you can. It sounds soul-sucking.