Your Job. Love it or hate it?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I fucking hate my job. This job is like the worst part of every job I ever had all rolled into one job. I cannot concieve of a worst job for me if I majored in it in college and dedicated my life to pursuing a career in it.

-100% travel by myself, usually to some lame office park in the suburbs - check
-Smug, spineless, manager who thinks that it doesn’t matter what he tells the client he can do because I have to do the work anyway - check
-Geeky coworkers with the maturity of college freshmen and the business acumen of a college freshman - check
-Questionable management practices that keep the company on the cutting edge of geting de-listed from the NASDAQ) - check
-Co-dependent relationship with our main partner that ensures that we will never grow any bigger than we are now.
-Boring, tedious work - yes, that is why I got a degree in engineering and an MBA, so I can sit in front of a computer all day and sort 100,000 rows of purchasing data into their categories. That is what I aspired to when I was studying designing skyscrapers and developing a business. I
-Did I mention I fucking hate programming? Every programmer in the country is having his job outsourced to India and I can’t find a freakin job that doesn’t require I learn javascript. knew I should have gone to freakin’ law school. You never see lawyers having to program SQL.
-Bold move merging with a failed Dot-com. I think these stock options are really going to take off 5 years ago.
-Don’t be frightened by me because I’m the oldest person in the company (I’m 31 by the way). I’m just like those hip older people you see on Friends or Sex in the City. Think of my kind of like Chef from Southpark - despensing wisdom and advice to the “childr’n”.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to look into the extridition laws of this country as they pertain to tossing your boss off a building.

42

Hate it. I work in a 24/7/365 call center, and the scheduling is so screwed up that you essentially have to be open to work any hours, any days of the week. Scheduling is done by seniority, and right now, I generally work, say, 1:30 p.m. to 10. Not great, but I can deal with it, right? At least I can put my kid on the school bus every morning. Well…no. Sometimes, they throw in a split shift just for fun…say, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and then come back for 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. I’ve been getting more and more of these. I never see my family anymore and I’m tired of it.

Even worse is how they handle your days off. Sure, you get two days off per week, but these days appear in almost random order throughout the week. (I do generally get every other Sunday off, but no guarantees.) For example, I get Tuesday and Wednesday off this week. Last week, it was Sunday and Monday, so I had to work seven days in a row before that point. I’ve had to work 10 days in a row, and it about drove me crazy. Forget, say, asking for Tuesdays off so that you can take a class or volunteer for your kid’s Scout troop or something. Nope, the company “can’t” do that for you. All you can do is try to trade among your fellow employees, who may work radically different schedules (they may not want my sucky split shift. I may not want to work overnight or be there by 6 a.m. They may already have plans for Tuesday. Etc., etc.) Weekends are the worst, since we get so few. Why should I trade Saturday, when I might not get another one for six weeks?

Oh, and I’ve had to work every holiday since July 4 last year. Seniority and all. Yeah, you get paid more, but working every holiday sucks.

The job itself is not great, a bit tedious, but it’s not too bad, and I seem to have a knack for it. Coworkers are generally nice, too–I think that customer service work does have a way of weeding out jerks. I really clicked with my old manager, and she suggested that I try for a supervisory position when one came up…of course, now one has come up, and I don’t have enough “time in position” to apply for it (I have 10 months, I need a year. As with the scheduling, “nothing we can do”. :rolleyes: )

I’m on the lookout for something better. This job is keeping me from doing things I want to do. I’ve never found a job that truly appealed to me, so I just wanted a job to help pay the bills so that I could pursue my “real” life, but, in this case, that’s not working out so well at all. I just don’t think that, for $11/hour, the company should be able to own my entire life.

43

I’m a software developer. I like it quite a bit, though “love” would be a bit strong. If I only had to work six month a year, I’d love it. Anyway, the busier I am, the better I like it, until it gets to the hyper-stress level; then my enjoyment drops sharply. I work with a good group of people which has been moderately stable for several years. My boss isn’t too bad; I’ve had better, I’ve had worse. Unfortunately, this job will probably go to India before too long, and I’ll never get another like it. Fortunately, I have some other plans.