| | operative network | writing archive: columns - reviews - interviews - features
11/27/02 6:45 PM: Fewer things weird you out more than discovering your boss' boss is avidly poring over your own personal digital rantings. Especially when you're very vocal about how much you loathe your job.
I've actually done what I consider a scary amount of work today, and the managing editor (a laughably inaccurate title for what the position requires, but that's not important right now) wanders over today (I sit in a corner, desperately trying to avoid human contact) and says, "I love your site!"
Ack!
Immediately I begin to think about all the recent rambling I've been doing about my hatred for carbon based life and my general disdain for my working environment. Not the sounds of a happy employee. I immediately started mentally packing my things, as I could completely understand firing a nutsoid employee. Hell, I would.
Yet, no hammer has fallen. It helps that my work has been closer to what I consider good, I suppose, given I normally hovered just above the level of competence required to keep the job at all.
"Hannibal, why work there then?" Well, children, dealing with my mortgage is like a huge steel cage match. Against, oh, Andre the Giant. With him taking it seriously.
The actual work is not so arduous, but the corporate overlords find every little way to piss in your face and remind you that they consider you nothing more than a sad cog in their terrible engines of commerce. Oh, now you have to pay for parking. No, no, you can't access the code here, we don't trust you. You'll have to take a test to prove you can edit, we don't care about the resume. We're also gonna keep piling more and more work on everybody there, bosses too, and never change your compensation, yes. Did we mention you'll be taking on extra duties, ones we specifically said you wouldn't have to do, since you hate them? Oh, don't get too attached to your seat, we can have somebody else sitting there and make you mill about. By the way, you can get holiday pay after you've worked ten months, but two months later you have to leave, maybe you can come back three months later, and either way we'll treat you like a stranger. Have a great day!
That kind of stuff has actually made me hate AOL worse than Disney, a company I have a familial loathing for ever since my mom worked at Disneyland, a company so vile that it would take a beast of AOL's stature to out-eww them.
Sorry, ranting again. The point is that the job is a big drain on my spiritual energy, since I was already pretty bitter from going down more than $35k in salary. Still, fortune passes everywhere, and I make it work because I'm a survivor. It doesn't make me happy about it.
|
