Ungratefully Employed
Sometimes, it's just better to go hungry.
story by Dickey Dee, illustration by Shaun Doniger

It’s hard for me not to feel like a complete asshole when I’m complaining to my unemployed friends about how much I hate my job. Yes, in this day and age I should be eternally grateful even for the opportunity to dig a ditch for a few bucks in cash, let alone hold a cushy cubicle gig replete with fab benefits, frequent raises and a full-service cafeteria. As such, I suspect that my not so economically viable companions have a difficult time empathizing with my situation. I don’t blame them. Nobody likes an ingrate.

I try to take to heart in this paraphrased quote (allegedly) from John Rockefeller that my high school social studies teacher imparted to me; “Anybody that gives you a job is doing you a favor.” Having known a fair cross-section of people that I wouldn’t trust to watch a bicycle, let alone hand them the keys to a store, I can attest to the truth of this. And yet, those same people have had to find jobs just like the rest of us.

Especially when times are tough, if you are lucky enough to be earning a wage at a time when the whole financial world is crashing and burning you had better be goddamned grateful. It’s that same Great Depression-era mentality that causes people to save every scrap of wrapping paper and gift bag they get their hands on, or keep a garbage bag full of ant-infested aluminum soda cans on their patios for eventual recycling. Here today, gone tomorrow – you just never know how long your luck will hold out, so you’ve got to make the most of every opportunity you get.

And while this appreciative frugality is certainly an admirable attitude to apply to daily living, there is a thick layer of Pollyanna-bullshit gloss that attempts to hide the fact that some things just simply suck. I miss the days when the economy was good and it was okay to say you have a shitty job. Now you have to be grateful for your shitty job – you ought to be damn happy to have that shitty job when so many people are on the skids.

I’m happy to acknowledge the simple statistic that in a time of increasing unemployment, to have a job is better (on paper) than not having a job. But I want to be able to say – without rebuke – that the job I’m so grateful to have is a hateful, monotonous drain on my physical and spiritual well-being.

Do not for a moment, dear reader, think that I am unaware of exactly what sort of spoiled, arrogant prick I am making myself out to be in this tirade. You may judge me harshly for my words, but it will be no worse than I already feel for having written them.

I have failed on all fronts to fully explain to friends and family all the reasons why I detest the work that I do, largely because the work that I do is nearly beyond my own comprehension. I started out with the company doing phone sales, absurd and draining in its own right. When my numbers began to reflect my attitude, I was put on a temporary “project” (you might read “punishment”), which I will now work on until the end of the year.

The “project”, which I am working on with a small collection of other doubtlessly dismal underperformers from the sales department, involves scanning through a list of thousands of files earmarked with error messages and resolving the errors.

That’s it. I know, it doesn’t sound bad at all, does it? I was giddy when they handed down the news that I had been “selected” (you might read “drafted” or “temporarily gotten rid of”) for this exciting opportunity that was really going to help the company out. For one, it was going to get me off the phones. At this point, though, I would have taken a job changing out pee-pucks in the urinals rather than one more day of making a begging, contemptuous fool of myself all day as a reluctant, angry salesman. Also, the project offered a concrete daily routine of steady work, rather than the potential hours of waiting between phone calls punctuated with the random chance the call was even remotely sellable.

As it turned out, I was out of the intangible frying pan, and heading into the abstract fire.

If I thought I felt like a small, unimportant gear in the larger machine before, now I feel like a screw that rolled off the table and ended up under a milk crate full of oily rags.

Because I could do the job with half of my brain removed, the bulk of my waking time each day is spent in a half-conscious trance, draining me of any spark or creativity that I may have had in the daylight hours. And despite the fact that I spend my entire work day doing something very closely resembling nothing, I come home nearly exhausted and in the mood to do little else besides sleeping, eating or maybe playing a video game.

My God – I’m turning into one of them; the flat-faced blockheads at work that roam the aisles between the endless labyrinth of cubicles with a vacant stare, a vague open-mouthed smile, and a look of ignorant contentedness on their faces. Just like the other cast-off from the sales department, two cubicles away from me, who didn’t mind the fact that the overhead lights had not been turned on in our far-flung side of the building. It gave me migraines staring at a computer all day in these dim surroundings, but when asked if he, too, thought it was ridiculous that something as simple as turning on the lights required several work orders and no less than three to four days of processing time, he responded that he didn’t care if the lights were on or off.

Maybe my lack of unquestioning complacency is a character flaw, I don’t know. It is certainly not befitting of the corporate cubicle lifestyle I’ve gotten myself into, that’s for sure. I could get a new job – or maybe not. I have no real marketable credentials, other than my tendency to stay at jobs for far too and that I can appear capable and charming in interview situations. This is simply not the right climate for quitting a job for no other reason than you don’t like it.

Besides, I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s not even this job that I hate – it just might be working. Since this trait is neither unique, nor particularly interesting, I’ll keep my rotten job for now, so long as I can avoid getting fired, and attempt to suck it up, grin, bear it, and quit my bellyaching.

After all, it’s a living.