What is a "soul-crushing" job?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Missed the dang 5 minute <insert shaking fist here> insert window.

This happened in 23 August 2010.

I worked like a madman to stabilize the platform at the Philippines installation after Jean and I got back home. Eventually I was successful, and it worked.

It proved my invention was successful. My ideas that I had been growing in my head for well nigh 20 years made sense. Someone, somewhere had finally realized that I, Gagundathar The Inexplicable had created a genuinely innovative software idea that could be used to track and trace units of pharmaceuticals or any other high value product (our test market was high-end hair products, believe it or not. Boy, do those folks hate it when the product is supposed to go to a really tony salon and it ends up at a CVS down the street).

And then, almost certainly because of my ‘betrayal of company’ that I had done in the Philipines and because I had created a viable software solution, my entire unit (4 techs, a project manager and Gagundathar) was laid off in November 2010.

“Thanks for all your hard work, but we don’t need you now”

By OG, that sucks doesn’t it?

She died 2 July 2011. I am still technically unemployed (though I do online freelance work).

OK, maybe I should have created my own thread, but this is pretty dang embarrassing.
Somehow, posting it here makes me feel better.

**MODS: move this where you will.
**

22

And see, to me, that sounds soul-affirming. You were Important and Did the Right Thing.

If I did the same, I’d be fired because I didn’t submit the correct personal time request. Not because anybody would miss me.

Edit: Not to say that’s not an AWFUL, AWFUL situation with an awful-sounding outcome. Just that it sounds…rather soulful.

23

I’m with typoink - you did the right thing!

And honestly, they were assholes. They can’t put off a project for a day or two (or a week or two) because your wife has to go to the hospital? That’s corporate bullshit. If the project was THAT IMPORTANT, they fucked up by having only one person - you - who knew how to do it.

For what it’s worth, I was in a similar situation last fall. Big project (for my tiny company at least), and I’d been not only the primary developer, but the project lead, the product lead, and basically the only person on the project who could answer questions and knew the whole thing inside out. Then one Saturday morning I take my mother to the ER because she’d been feeling ill. Diagnosis is cancer. Emergency surgery slated for the following Monday, followed by a good month of up-and-down recover. Over 20 days in the hospital, trying to get healthy enough to start chemo.

My company said “Do what you can; work if/when you can; your mother & your family is more important than this project.” And honestly? I wouldn’t have expected anything else.

24

Mindless adherence to strict rules outside of any other logic or common sense is a typical component of any definition of a soul-sucking job. I am thankful I don’t have to deal with that most of the time but some people do.

I like the core part of my IT job which is to keep a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical operation up and running 24/7. My job isn’t in drugs. It is in body parts and people really need those when they need them. The express service part of the job is literally manufacturing surgical replacement parts for people who have been in accidents and are already in the hospital awaiting life-saving surgery. We are really good at it and it rarely fails. That part is stressful but rewarding.

The soul-sucking part comes from the corporate red-tape outside of our team of fast movers. I have done really well at my current job so the seem to be training me for a project management position and pushing me in that direction. Those pay a ton but I don’t think I can do it. It is literally filling out forms all day long and executing test plans that have no relevance to anything in the real world. They are more strict about wording, signatures, initials, and verbiage than most lawyers would ever hope to be. I spent the last three work days gathering signatures for something we all know already works only to have a team of people review and reject it because we used multiple colors of ink or someone gave the initials in the bottom left-center of the page instead of the bottom FAR left of the page. Once a terrible mistake like that is made, you can’t correct it according to the strict rules. You have to discard all previous work and start the whole process back over again starting with corporate committee approval again. No thanks. Nitpicking paperwork isn’t my idea of making a meaningful difference.

25

Well, here’s mine.

I told my employer that he had a thief. There was a salesperson that was padding his expenses.
So my employer instructed me to stay late and create a spreadsheet of all the expenses he had been reimbursed for over the past year or so. I was at work very late that night. As I knew it would, the spreadsheet proved what I had suspected. He was turning in gas receipts that were obviously not his since other expenses on the same date showed he wasn’t even in town on the day the gas was pumped. There were many other things. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but it was still theft.

So a decision was made to fire this guy. He gets called into the office and is shown my spreadsheet. Long story short, this guy was a good salesperson and made a lot of money for the dealership, so they decided to allow him to repay the money and claim it was just bad bookkeeping on his part. Problem was, he knew I had made the spreadsheet, so he started to treat me very badly. I was so disgusted with my boss. My attitude got so bad that I was only there another few months.

The only good thing about this story is that the thief went on to steal hundreds of thousands after I left. My greedy boss got just what he deserved.

26

I have interesting well-paying jobs that were (nearly) soul-crushing and still remember a horrible factory job I had in high school fondly. Trite as it sounds, a lot of it was the people I worked with.

But I think that lack of respect for the person or the work itself is what makes a job soul-crushing.

27

My first job out of high school was as a minimum-wage nurse’s aide in an inner-city hospital. It was my responsibility to get the patients up and out of bed, help feed, bathe and toilet them when they couldn’t take care of themselves and clean them up and change their linen when accidents happened. Most of the patients on my floor had chronic long-term illnesses, and more than a few of them died during their stay.

For me, this wasn’t a soul-crushing job because I was young, headed for college, and knew it was a short-term gig. But I can imagine how I would have felt if I had been 40, and doing it for 20 years.

28

Soul crushing means whatever you think it is. For me, in my current job, it means the utter lack of ability to move forward. Very small office, I’ve learned what I can, there are no raises, there is no way to get ahead within the company. I live in a part of the country with a very high unemployment rate. There are really no other jobs in the immediate area.

I’m literally stuck in my work life. I’ve been there 4 plus years and there is no hope to move up within the company nor get job outside of company. I do what I do for EVER.

In order to keep some sanity I’m working on my dietary and budgetary goals, at least I can have some little bit of control. Anything that will keep me from drinking every night.

29

I worked for precisely two weeks at a place that makes automatic sliding doors for supermarkets. The boss put me with a guy who was supposed to teach me how to make the aluminum frames. He appeared semi drunk most of the time and criticized everything I did. I was beginning to catch on, but the job sucked to the point that I dreaded going to bed at night because I knew I would just have to get up for work. I was told “three lates in a year and you are fired.”
One minute counted late.

At the end of a long annoying shift, the boss would come up and say “I need you to work two hours of overtime tonight.” And it was best you did it. He also told me “you have to come in on Saturday” when it was Friday evening. Again, this was not mandatory, but strongly encouraged.

I was earning a pitiful wage, but I needed work. I couldn’t see ever getting anywhere. The only guys who made money were the guys who did the motor assemblies—they did piecework. That was sad. In order to earn more, those guys busted their butts to work fast, and skipped breaks and lunch, just for a few more dollars. It seemed such a hopeless place. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever get out of there.

They solved my problem at the end of week two: my boss canned me. I had probably turned down OT too many times, or maybe I had made too many mistakes, ruining a couple of frames. How crappy can it get that even a miserable workplace rejects you?

But all ended well. That was at three PM. I got home early, in time for the phone to ring with a temporary job offer I never would have received had I not been canned. That was 21 years ago. The temp job turned permanent and they paid for my education. I’m still there today :slight_smile:

30

Observant Jews?

31

Obligatory Onion article:

Teach For America Chews Up, Spits Out Another Ethnic-Studies Major

32

I got a job once that probably qualified in some ways. The job was working for a company that resolved legal issues between failed banks and their customers, and my function was to take complaints that had been sent to a senator or representative (state or federal), write a succinct summation of the problem, send it to the person in charge of resolving the problem, keep on it for a certain amount of time until it was resolved, and then report back when each case was closed.

The first couple of days I found myself thinking, “I hate this–these people are despicable–I can’t do this–they are vultures,” because the nature of the thing, judging from the ongoing cases, was that somebody had been screwed out of their house, their live savings, their grandchild’s college education funds, etc., and the resolution was always ALWAYS “We can find no instance of wrongdoing in this case,” i.e., suck it up, consumer, YOU LOSE. And the people I was working with had no sympathy.

Now, there were some stories where the consumer did something stupid, i.e., lived in their house and didn’t make mortgage payments to anybody for three years, because “We never got a notice that our mortgage had been sold”–but they didn’t pay it to the old mortgage company, either, and they admitted that. Okay, those people I didn’t feel so sorry for. The bank did nothing wrong in that case. However, most of the time, somebody had profited off these people and left them sometimes homeless, sometimes destitute. In one case a couple had pulled out money to pay their grandchild’s college tuition, out of a fund they’d established when the grandchild was a baby. The bank went under and essentially pulled a like amount of funds out of another one of their accounts because due to the timing it looked like a preferential payment. Huh? “We can find no instance of wrongdoing in this case.”

After a couple of days, though, and with no other job offers coming in, I kind of got inured to it. I went to lunch with people I had first thought were horrible jerks, and there were all these team-building things like chili cookoffs, on the clock, to establish good feelings, and they worked. I thought I was being oversensitive. I was still reading the sad stories but I didn’t sit there and cry, and the horrible jerks who did things like put the wrong legal description on a property, so a guy ended up buying a parcel that he thought was right next to a parcel he already owned but it really wasn’t, and then they wouldn’t give his money back, and the horrible jerk didn’t even think it was worth an apology (never mind giving the guy his money back)–well, I was chowing down with these horrible jerks and laughing at their jokes.

And then a local newspaper started investigating these people and it all came back.

Now my part in this was very small and inconsequential. I didn’t screw up the legal description, and I didn’t go in and steal the money out of the old couple’s retirement account. I just wrote them a letter telling them we were concerned and we were looking into it and everybody was very hopeful that we would solve their problem. In short, damn lies. And then I got USED to that and it seemed NORMAL. And then I realized that, in fact, I was part of an evil empire. Just a little cog in the machine.

The great thing was that memos went out telling us not to talk to anyone from the press. Not just that one newspaper, but ANYONE. We were supposed to sign and swear that we wouldn’t. I refused to sign it (mainly because I had come from a newspaper, and many of my friends worked at one).* They kept getting more and more severe about it, and then all paranoid that there was a “mole” in the company (!!!). I came under a bit of suspicion because of my previous media connections and, in fact, I did talk to one of my friends who worked at that newspaper, but I didn’t really tell him anything. Well, maybe I did. He wasn’t the one who broke the story, but the day after the story broke, the shredding bins, which were normally about one-eighth full, were suddenly OVERFLOWING, and I called my friend and conveyed this and added “pass it on.” A couple of days after that I got fired for not signing the gag order. And I was happy!

Being fired did not exactly purify me, but it helped.

That was the worst kind of soul-crushing job. Sucked me right in, and I didn’t even realize. Reading Hannah Arendt in college apparently did me no good at all.

*At one point, one of the media guys was going point-by-point over each of the allegations. “They said we did such and such! We never did such-and-such!” They fucking DID. Point by point, every one of them.

33

A lot of it has to do with your immediate boss. You can do the job of your dreams and it can be challenging, fulfilling and gives you all sort of high, but if you have anal manager, it sucks.

There was once I got a ‘project manager’ who don’t get source control (he doesn’t want to use SVN - he can’t understand it), who give vague expectations and then go ballistic on your ass when you don’t perform, like to shout at you across the room and stand behind you while you code. He does caught some valid issues, but his reaction is way overblown.

I almost quit, but one day the boss told him to get lost.

34

A friend of mine in college (who I’d known since high school, we played sax together) started a job at Walmart. One day in her first week of work, her grandfather got very ill very fast. She asked her manager for the day off to go visit him on his deathbed. They said no, and that she’d be fired on the spot if she left (it was mandatory training, so the shift couldn’t be traded). So she worked the shift, then drove up like a demon to our hometown (an hour and a half north). He died while she was on her way up there. She quit the job and swore to never shop at Walmart again. We’ve since lost touch; but as long as I knew her, she never did.

That was a soul-crushing event. I imagine working as a Walmart cashier is pretty soul-crushing overall, as well.

I also work in an inbound call center, and I find the monotony and insignificance of my job soul-crushing (which is much worse at present because my awesome manager is out on maternity leave, and I’m stuck with my old doucheboss until she gets back). I feel like an eminently-expendable cog. The monthly meetings about how they haven’t stopped considering outsourcing our department, and/or how we barely evaded involuntary job reductions because attrition was *just *sufficient, don’t help. And a trained fuckin’ *monkey *could do this job. Just this week, we had a meeting to inform everyone that the VP in charge of our department had her position “eliminated.” If it can happen to her, it can damn well happen to us. They enjoy lording that shit over our heads.

My call center job is still better than some of the other call center workers posting in this thread, so I feel kinda guilty for hating my life so much. Still, it’s terrible–mostly because the job was NOT like this when I started. I theorize that the changes in CEO and my department’s head honcho are responsible for the gray cloud hanging over everybody’s heads. We sold off a significant chunk of our business almost a year ago, and our department is still coping with the transition. So. much. bullshit!

Now, I fantasize daily about some horrible car accident happening during my commute that would render me unable to do the job (dual hand amputation, quadriplegia, decapitation). Alternately, I’m slightly comforted (but mostly horrified at my terribleness) by fantasizing about similarly horrible things happening to the douches I work for. For example, one who contracted a fungal infection during a vitrectomy that left him blind in one eye. In my darker moments, I wish it had happened to both.

Plus, I work for an *insurance company. *There’s nothing to brighten my (and my caller’s) day like telling a crying injured worker in constant pain that their claim has been *denied. *Because I can see that we won’t pay it, but I can’t see why. So I feel like an asshole delivering asshole news who will never have absolution.

:frowning:

35

I just want to thank you all for making my own work seem a lot better in comparison. The job itself isn’t all that great, but our management actually treats us as human beings which goes a long way. :slight_smile:

36

This. I had one where the only good thing (and not that good) was the paycheck. I disliked the location, the reactions the name of my employer triggered in people, the company’s marketing policies were disgusting… if that company had been a person, it would have been the kind of guy who spends so much time and effort avoiding the rules, it would be less work to just follow them. Emergency procedures were followed more often than normal ones; we were required to do in less than 24h tasks which could not, because of other company procedures, be done in less than 3 working days; my hours blew; most days I had to spend 2.5-3h on the road; I didn’t speak one of the local languages and butchered the other one, but any attempts to improve my skills in that first language ran into a wall of befuddlement… “but you’re only required to know English for your job, why do you want to learn [the language people speak in stores]? You don’t need it!”

That place made me understand why some people cut. At least hurting from a cut is logical!

37

If I ever say that I can’t say what I do, it isn’t that its some top-secret mumbo jumbo. Its because where I work pays people to troll social media & message boards just looking for employees that they can ID & target for retribution.
That said, PapSett, you nailed it in one.

38

This one is my hubby’s.

He is supposed to improve his skills in his job through education, etc. He is written up as “needs improvement” and denied raises for not doing this. Note: he is required to pay for this himself and has not gotten a raise in 5 years. We barely make our house payment and utilities every month yet he is required to take further education, on his own dime, and his own time (without pay), or he’s written up every year.

My most soul crushing job was a boss that was a workaholic and expected everyone under her to also be one. If she put something in my inbox at 5:25 p.m. she was annoyed when I walked out the door at 5:30 without doing it. She also kept notes on every time I was late, sick, and the coup de grace was discovering she was actually interviewing people for my position.