Not So Thrilling

I usually like what I do, and as a result of just taking a week off, I'm not immediately nauseated by doing it again, this coming week. I suppose it isn't the greatest feel-good thought in the world, but it occurs to me that what I do would be considered pretty damn nice by people who have to actually work for a living. Not that the people at my office don't work -- they do, with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm -- but they don't work hard, like gardeners and truck drivers. As I heard someone put it once, there are jobs that you shower before, and there are jobs that you shower after. Mine is definitely one of the former. So it's worth doing, even if I have to hold my nose while doing some of it. Offends my technical sensibilities, doncha know.

Some backstory -- when I was hired, I thought it was for a techie job. Turned out it was for a job that a clerk could do. I didn't like that, but since I didn't think I could get a job elsewhere, I settled for whimpering and moaning about it, sayng that I wanted to do other stuff -- techie stuff that I liked and knew how to do. After a while, the fellow who was my group's manager at the time said, well, okay, you can do this other stuff, too. After a while, my group's manager changed, and he asked me if I'd do the primary job for some other accounts, too, and I said that I would. It wasn't strenuous, I liked looking at other places even if the basic task was about as challenging as stirring soup, and it made him happy.

But now the skies darkened. The people at my account, looking to cut costs, said well, hell, we don't actually want to pay for you full time because the stuff you do doesn't take all or even most of your time. Which was true. So, they complained to my group's manager, and he said that he would like to find more for me to do. I pointed out that while I was willing to do more, I would really prefer it to be in the other area -- the one I liked. He said that he understood it, and then came up with several new things. None of them were in the area where I really wanted to work. But okay, they pay me, and all that, so all right. ((grumble, grumble)) Po' me.

Today I found out that while we were on vacation, that same manager had tried to get in touch with me to help them handle a problem. The problem was in the area that I want to work. I felt like that character in one of the Police Acadamy flicks who is found banging his head on a police cruiser. A bystander, asked to explain, says 'There was gun play -- and he missed it.' That's me. Damn, I wanted to do that! But, upon reflection, there was more. It occured to me that while the manager wasn't willing to let me do more work that I liked, he was willing to use those talents if the company needed them. But only then.

At the moment, I'm a bit - - ticked. And I’m finding the prospect of going back to work -- not so thrilling. I will, of course. But for the first time, I'm thinking that an end to my employment here is not five or six years from now (when I was thinking about retiring). It may be sooner than that.

Now, I'm not a person with a lot of initiative, and though my wife says (and means) that I can quit at any time, I'm not ready to do that. Our finances are in pretty good shape, but they do assume that I'll be earning this salary for the next five years. I don't know of any way around that. Though the management articles I used to read suggested that good managers listened to people, and let them (i.e., me) do what they could do well, that doesn't seem to pan out in my local version of Real Life. If I did have initiative and guts, I'd just bail, and do Something Else. Of course, I've noticed that by and large, the only jobs people get when they bail tend to pay a lot less, while demanding more. My golly, some are even 'shower after' jobs.

So.... right now, the job situation is Not So Thrilling. Po' me.