I’d love to be sitting 50 feet away from my nearest co-worker, but then the current “leader” of my team is a malingering, ass-kissing doofus and the other co-worker at my level is an old woman tragically trapped in a male body. I’d much rather be in a role that entailed working on my own and not having to deal with this team shit at all, but unfortunately that’s the nature of much of the modern workplace.
Sure, but there’s no guaranteeing you’ll get less depressed. You might get 5 trillion times more depressed, for a trillion years (because time might stop altogether while tripping). No, I wouldn’t want to trip in a downer environment.
One way to cope with a nightmare job situation, especially if you’ve decided to leave soon but haven’t actually decided to quit right now, is to break up your remaining time into two week chunks (it helps if they coincide with paydays). At the end of the two weeks, decide whether or not you’re fed up enough to give notice. If not, resolve to grit your teeth and endure the next two weeks as gracefully as possible, and then reevaluate after that time.
For some reason dividing your time into chunks like this helps. Maybe it’s just the psychology of knowing that you’ve got got a finite number of days to survive until your next “evaluation”, rather than an indefinite number of days until you finally get fed up and walk out. I decided to quit my nightmare job about 2 months before I actually gave notice, and I wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long had I not imposed this kind of mental discipline on myself.
I think it also helps by putting the thought of quitting out of your head until you’re “allowed” to think about it again. Sometimes the only way to keep your sanity is to avoid fantasizing about quitting too much. If you’ve resolved to stay for two more weeks, then you really don’t want quitting to become a possible solution to every minor problem that comes up. You won’t last long.
Of course if you’re not worried about burning bridges, feel free to leave in the most convenient or dramatic way possible…
I like that idea, sovtawen.
I think we work together.
I used to think I made a difference and that I helped people etc. Now, not so much. I do have much less physical stress in my current job, but less “prestige” (if that can ever be said of nursing) and certainly less independent judgement. We do a lot of stuff that is pointless, repetitive and unnecessary and end up putting in time waiting for the clock to change. (of course, we do some good etc, too, but lately it seems there’s more of the first bit and less of the last bit).
If your job is truly soul sucking, you really need to take some steps to GET OUT. Work is where you spend most of your time–life is too short to be that miserable. Start looking for a new job on monster.com or similar. Update your resume–small steps like this will help you realize that you’ve got options.
Hard to say. The boss threatens to fire everyone apparently. The way I look at it, if she wants to fire me after two months, unless I really did something egregious, it’s her management failure, not mine. Anyhow, with 2/3 of her managers having quit in the two months since I’ve been there, I’m pretty sure she’s not in any position to fire me.
Then again, crazy people aren’t always rational.
JR Brown - Your post reminds me of what one of my friends did a few years back while working for some two bit consulting firm managed by some flaky ex-Accenture people. Basically he got fed up doing what you described so when his boss asked him for some report, he basically made a cover sheet and stappled a stack of whatever was on his desk to it. His coworkers were horrified. He said “don’t worry. He won’t even read it, tell me what a great job it was and then say they are going in a different direction.”
He was right.
In my current job I alternative between brief periods of enjoyment and satisfaction (“Rockets are fun! Making Linux clusters work is fun!”) and long spans of boredom and dissatisfaction (“Making rockets not fall over is really, really boring. I don’t have time to do fun stuff with computers.”) Honestly, I never intended to be here more than a couple of years, and got sucked into the current position by a boss that is easily the coolest and most competent guy I’ve ever worked for, which is largely what keeps me here, and coworkers who appreciate my responses to select nonsensical Corporate Announcement e-mails. On the other hand, any time I have to deal with civil servants, half-wit contractors, or people from a certain large aerospace conglomerate which apparently has a hiring policy specifying that they only employ congenital morons, I’m about ten minutes away from quitting and writing the unsaleable Pynchon-esque novel that is always zipping around my forebrain.
It sounds like you don’t even have the compensations for lousy work and the crazy boss. My vote is to look for something else and/or plan a sabbatical trip around the world or some other pointless and cliched but fun exercise in figuring out what you want to do in life. The alternative–starting rumors and riling up coworkers just to watch the drama–is sort of passingly amusing but quickly becomes twee and uninteresting.
Good luck to you.
Stranger
Boss is on vacation for the next two weeks. With any luck, I won’t be here when she gets back.
I’m really quite amazed that my company allows someone like this to sap the morale of the entire group. It seems very counter to the culture of the company.
I had a boss like her when I worked in the Big 4 which is by far a much more stressful and high performance company. One of the Partners on our project basically told him to cut the shit or he was fired.