How Do I Build A Time Machine?: In which I Pit my job and the managers thereof

The BBQ Pit
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More of a mindless and pointless thing than an all-out rant, really, but I think I might work for the most fucked-up company on the planet. I’m working on a project that is ill-conceived to begin with, but to make it even more enjoyable they continue to revisit the schedule and lop off bits of work they think don’t need to be budgeted. Yesterday, they shifted up the deadline again and rearranged the tasks, such that some of the tasks we haven’t even gotten around to doing are already overdue. It’s no use protesting that this gives lie to any attempt to argue that the schedule is supposed to reflect even a distorted view of reality, and instead violates the whole causal loop issue so important in cosmology; they just say that we need to “accelerate our efforts” and “escalate our priorities”. Never mind we’re all putting in 75 hour weeks as it is, or that we are continually hampered by problems with the computer and network infrastructure, making any effort to stay within ridiculously compressed deadlines utterly futile.

Yes, it’s another episode of The Idiot In The Big Leather Chair. Next up, we have a guy with nice hair spouting semantically-vacuous word salad while clipping his nose hair. Oh, and they recently updated the severance policy to reduce the payout by roughly half of what it was two years ago. Yeah, that’s making me really want to bust ass for your pathetic, tar-baby, dead-end, conceived by inbred tapeworm project.

Oh hell, I’d make more efforts to satirize this but I’m just too damn tired; not that I’ll sleep much, and I’ve got to be back there at 07:00 tomorrow morning, so I can subject myself to another day of frustrating nonproductivity in trying to fix the network problems our MIS people can’t even prounounce.

Anybody have a suggestion for a change in vocation for a dried-up and apathetic mechanical engineer?

Stranger

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I retired. I said, “Fuck this.” and quit. I spend my days brewing/drinking beer, playing pinball and dart, banging on drums and tinkering with motorcycles when its not raining or snowing.

Now, instead of putting up with mindless shit at work, I put up with mindless shit from my wife.

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MrSIn and I kind of opted out three years ago. Do you have that option or are you stuck in the 4 weeks of vacation, 48 weeks of work a year deal?

I’m an engineering prof. who always worked the summer and all holidays (research or teaching) and MrSin always worked his required 46 weeks (he had 6 weeks vacation due to long term employment). Then suddenly (actually upon the sudden death of my 11 month older brother) we saw the light…We didn’t have to work all the time. We now work as little as possible (8 months max a year) and spend most of our time planning vacations, rather than worrying about our thankless jobs.

It is very freeing.

Oh, and by the way stranger, MrSin feels you pain, he deals with the same shit every day. It’s the free time that makes it worth while for us. There is hope on the horizen. :cool:

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[QUOTE=sinjin]
MrSIn and I kind of opted out three years ago. Do you have that option or are you stuck in the 4 weeks of vacation, 48 weeks of work a year deal?

[quote]
4 weeks of vacation? I could only dream; I’m stuck with 10 days plus 1/2 day per year of service of comp time. Oh, what I could do with 4 weeks. :frowning:

Yeah, I need to adopt that kind of attitude, but where I grew up, life was supposed to be hard, work ought to suck, and if you’re supposed to end the day by sucking down a twelve pack of PBR, yell at the kids to go the hell to bed, and beat the wife. I’ve managed to avoid adopting the latter attitudes but still haven’t quite shaken the former. It needs some work.

Stranger