I feel bad about it, thinking about unemployed people and all, but eh, I’m not one to give 110% every day on the field. I give more like 50%. (The Dope gets the other half, natch.) I’m incredibly lucky. I feel ungrateful, of course, taking from my company and not giving back all that much. I can’t summon enough will to care about what I do. I heard this changes when people find a career they like, and when their work starts to mean something to them. I can’t wait until that happens.
No prob…cash your big Earned Income Credit check and buy something nice for yourself. You deserve it every bit as much as the rest!
Don’t feel too bad about it - that super hard-working 110%er that’s unemployed is a myth. Everyone is lazy.
I can’t tell of the responses are sarcastic or not.
Maybe you need to work harder at it.
Naturally.
With the unemployment rate so high, this board practically gets ignored.
Moving from retail work to office work has taught me that there seems to be an inverse relationship between payscale and hard work (at least at entry-level). The people who get paid the least (retail, toilet scrubbers, unskilled caretakers of elderly) work the hardest. I pull down double minimum wage and work about half as hard as I did in retail. It’s sad but true; who you know and the impressions you make matter much more than what you can do.
I used to care. Then I got the boss from hell. So now I don’t
I have the same problem. I just cannot maintain concentration on my work for very long.
Yep! My bosses do jack shit and get paid 3x as much as me. It’s a cruel world.
Also the penalties for screwing up. You can wreck a Fortune 500 company and walk away with a golden parachute. If you screw up in retail, you’re fired.
Yeah, hard work only applies to physically challenging, minimum wage positions. Anyone who sits at a desk in a climate-controlled environment with indoor plumbing nearby and a computer at hand can’t possibly work hard. It’s physically impossible. Buncha slackers. OK, maybe not totally slackers - I’m sure part of the time they’re thinking hard about how to spend all the loot they’re raking in…
Yup. I used to care so much about the early ‘unskilled’ jobs I had, and used that same metric when I started working an office job. Now, I’m a honey badger, but so is everyone I work with. I stay more productive than a lot of people I work with but boggle at how much less work it is anyway.
I don’t work well without consequences, and when I start to slip up and… nothing comes of it, that starts the beginning of dangerous cycle in which it becomes a game to see how much I can phone it in and still maintain stellar reviews. I’m beginning to think that pit is bottomless.
Of course, in interviews, I’ll play up what a self-starter, take-initiative guy I am. Lies. All lies! Unless I actually enjoy the job and the tangible rewards of a hard week’s work. Then it’s true. But those jobs are quite rare.
ETA: the most gratifying job I ever had was the summer in college I spent landscaping. At the end of the day, when I could physically perceive that I’d moved tons of gravel or built a substantial portion of a retaining wall, I was as close to fulfilled with my workday as I imagine is humanely possible.
I had a lazy as employee for years. My pay raises are merit based, so she never got a raise until minimum wage was increased. It actually worked well for me, and allowed me to be more generous with the hard workers.
I went from being in an underfunded network engineering position, where every accoimplishment was something I could feel proud of…sure, OTHER parts of the machine were seriously fucked up, but at least my part of the world was in order, and I felt was a better place as a result…
…to a VERY high level policy position. All soft skills. I have no CLUE if I’m doing good job, if I’m making a difference, or if the place would be better or worse without me.
Still working for the same pay I had (in 96…less losses in benefits and no COLA) as a network security engineer.
That’s what Homer Simpson said: