8/14/07
An open letter to my coworker who sits two spaces away from me:
Dear Madam,
If you do not cease and desist the constant, low-pitched humming along with whatever dumb-ass music that is piped into through those headphones into that empty melon atop your neck, I will be forced to stab you in the face. That is all.
________________________________________________
Sometimes I wake up dreaming that I’ll stumble across the following job posting in the want-ads:
WANTED: Antisocial curmudgeon to write reviews of why things/people suck. Some gourmet cooking involved. Must have extensive knowledge of adult cinema. Pay starts 100K/year.
Speaking of work, I have recently enrolled for online classes in order to acquire my Associate’s Degree, from which point I then plan to attend MSU in order to get a much-belated bachelor’s degree in…something. What that will be, precisely, I’m not sure. The trouble is that there’s really no job I can imagine doing and not at least disliking if not downright hating. I presume this is a common affliction among humans, being as that 99% of us have to work or else risk the new and exciting opportunity to sleep under a urine-stained overpass. I dunno; do you like your job? Surely there must be people out there who at least don’t mind their jobs if not actually like them. Right?
My wife, for instance, teaches 7th grade Communication Arts. She went to school for 6 years and obtained a Master’s Degree to do this. While she hates getting up in the morning and sort of dreads the end of summer vacation, once she’s actually at work and teaching, she likes her job. This baffles me. I have never entertained such a feeling about anything I’ve ever been forced by circumstance to do. I’m terrified that the job I have now is as good as it gets, relatively-speaking. While I make a paltry wage, it’s probably more than I deserve for doing, essentially, what a mildly talented armadillo could accomplish if only it had opposable thumbs and a coffee mug that said something about it not being essential to be crazy to work here, but it helps. However, the work is so terminally easy that I can listen to audiobooks all day while the 3 brain cells it takes to perform my tasks go about their business. Also, if I work diligently at it, I can go an entire day without speaking to a single human being, which is a beautiful thing for a man who is perhaps one team-building-exercise away from going all Howard Hughes on the rest of the world. (Hence, the online college classes.)
Another nice thing about my job is that I’m pretty much left alone by my superiors. And as much as I may think some of my coworkers might have missed a chromosome or two when conceived, my bosses are intelligent, generally decent people. Not only do I get decent benefits, but I have a staggering 4 weeks of paid vacation. Plus, I have zero actual responsibility, not to mention that as soon as the magical little numbers on my computer’s clock hit 4:30 I’m out the door.
So no, my job offers me nothing in the way of fulfillment or intellectual stimulation, the pay is low and I sort of get this slippery, doomed feeling on Sunday evenings, but it’s not all that bad. I’m sort of terrified that I will graduate, get a much higher-paying job with an extra fifteen hours of work a week, plus responsibility, deadlines and the sneaking suspicion that I was happier before. But Hanni and I are planning on buying a house and, eventually, squeezing out a couple of genetic copies of ourselves, and I just don’t think my current paycheck can handle all that. So I look at it this way: I’ve already spent some fifteen years in the workforce, if I can just graduate and find a job I don’t downright loathe, maybe I can grind out another thirty or so years until retirement. Is that how most people look at the world? Am I being Mr. Pouty-Pants here?
Best case scenario? Hanni gets a monumentally better-paying job with a private school and I get to be a househusband and take care of the kids in between writing phenomenally popular novels. Yes…I think I’ll have one of those, please.
An open letter to my coworker who sits two spaces away from me:
Dear Madam,
If you do not cease and desist the constant, low-pitched humming along with whatever dumb-ass music that is piped into through those headphones into that empty melon atop your neck, I will be forced to stab you in the face. That is all.
________________________________________________
Sometimes I wake up dreaming that I’ll stumble across the following job posting in the want-ads:
WANTED: Antisocial curmudgeon to write reviews of why things/people suck. Some gourmet cooking involved. Must have extensive knowledge of adult cinema. Pay starts 100K/year.
Speaking of work, I have recently enrolled for online classes in order to acquire my Associate’s Degree, from which point I then plan to attend MSU in order to get a much-belated bachelor’s degree in…something. What that will be, precisely, I’m not sure. The trouble is that there’s really no job I can imagine doing and not at least disliking if not downright hating. I presume this is a common affliction among humans, being as that 99% of us have to work or else risk the new and exciting opportunity to sleep under a urine-stained overpass. I dunno; do you like your job? Surely there must be people out there who at least don’t mind their jobs if not actually like them. Right?
My wife, for instance, teaches 7th grade Communication Arts. She went to school for 6 years and obtained a Master’s Degree to do this. While she hates getting up in the morning and sort of dreads the end of summer vacation, once she’s actually at work and teaching, she likes her job. This baffles me. I have never entertained such a feeling about anything I’ve ever been forced by circumstance to do. I’m terrified that the job I have now is as good as it gets, relatively-speaking. While I make a paltry wage, it’s probably more than I deserve for doing, essentially, what a mildly talented armadillo could accomplish if only it had opposable thumbs and a coffee mug that said something about it not being essential to be crazy to work here, but it helps. However, the work is so terminally easy that I can listen to audiobooks all day while the 3 brain cells it takes to perform my tasks go about their business. Also, if I work diligently at it, I can go an entire day without speaking to a single human being, which is a beautiful thing for a man who is perhaps one team-building-exercise away from going all Howard Hughes on the rest of the world. (Hence, the online college classes.)Another nice thing about my job is that I’m pretty much left alone by my superiors. And as much as I may think some of my coworkers might have missed a chromosome or two when conceived, my bosses are intelligent, generally decent people. Not only do I get decent benefits, but I have a staggering 4 weeks of paid vacation. Plus, I have zero actual responsibility, not to mention that as soon as the magical little numbers on my computer’s clock hit 4:30 I’m out the door.
So no, my job offers me nothing in the way of fulfillment or intellectual stimulation, the pay is low and I sort of get this slippery, doomed feeling on Sunday evenings, but it’s not all that bad. I’m sort of terrified that I will graduate, get a much higher-paying job with an extra fifteen hours of work a week, plus responsibility, deadlines and the sneaking suspicion that I was happier before. But Hanni and I are planning on buying a house and, eventually, squeezing out a couple of genetic copies of ourselves, and I just don’t think my current paycheck can handle all that. So I look at it this way: I’ve already spent some fifteen years in the workforce, if I can just graduate and find a job I don’t downright loathe, maybe I can grind out another thirty or so years until retirement. Is that how most people look at the world? Am I being Mr. Pouty-Pants here?Best case scenario? Hanni gets a monumentally better-paying job with a private school and I get to be a househusband and take care of the kids in between writing phenomenally popular novels. Yes…I think I’ll have one of those, please.
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