When Bosses Attack

When you’re a kid you automatically think that all adults are smart, and respect them as figures of authority simply because they are so much older than you.  Then you grow up and realize that many are dumb as a pile of rocks, or that others are booksmart but lack common sense.  Some of these people are your boss. 

I’ve had my fair share of bosses in my few years in the job market, and by now I can say definitively what I feel makes a boss good or bad.  I’ve had some that were just plain assholes, abusing what little power they even had, treating subordinates like shit, while at the same time not knowing anything about their job.  I’ve had others that are nice people and fairly good at their jobs, but weak and ineffective, running away at the first sign of problems or conflict.  And I’ve had a few that were just plain nuts.  I remember one head teller in particular who used to call all the other tellers ‘crackheads.’  I never really cared but some people found it offensive.  One time I forgot to lock my coin vault and she put peanut butter all over the inside of the handle and taped all my rolled coins together with packaging tape.  That pissed me off.  She would cry at the drop of a hat and one day she threw her keys at me and told me to settle her drawer because she had quit.  About 20 minutes later she “un-quit.”  Then she went on Paxil and started telling everyone how awesome it was.  Not exactly something I would choose to broadcast at work but hey, whatever.  Eventually she decided to quit for real; she put in her two weeks’ notice while I was on my honeymoon.

The funny thing about all this is that I generally don’t mind crazy bosses.  At least they’re interesting.  I can handle crazy and I can handle nice but ineffective.  What really blows my mind are the kind of bosses that simply have no concept of how to relate to their staff.  You know the type: the rich CEOs or VPs who try to act like they’re “one of the guys” but fail miserably.  The more they try to fit in with the regular workers the more they prove that they have no concept of what their workers’ lives are like.

When I was in retail banking, the president of one of the banks I worked for (who incidentally was forced out of his position some time later) used to travel to each branch around Christmastime to meet the staff.  He and his army of evil foot soldiers would spend about five minutes in each branch before moving on to the next one.  The whole event was intensely orchestrated for what was supposed to appear to be a casual ’meet and greet.’  The branch staff was specifically instructed to only speak to him if spoken to, and if he were to ask us how things were going at the company, we were to only say that it was going great.  Branch managers were allowed to ask him one question, and the questions has to be approved in advance.  So much for being a man of the people.

The CEO of the next bank I worked for was at least more approachable, but still had no idea  how to relate to his staff.  During the gas crisis of 2008, at a company-wide meeting he tried to tell us how he understood the hardships we were all facing due to the high price of gas.  I thought it was a commendable gesture until he lamented aloud how it cost him $75 to fill up his car that week.  Excuse me?  He drove a Mercedes, at the time I was driving a ’94 Ford Escort.  And one of my co-workers was a single mom with two kids living in Section 8 housing who was dipping into her vacation time because she couldn’t afford the gas to come to work.  And the man who lives in a mansion with a wine cellar in his basement was complaining about the price of gas.  I lost a lot of respect for him after that meeting.

At my current job the highers-up are no less clueless.  Last year when we were supposed to get a visit from some VIPs, a memo went around instructing us unwashed masses to keep all conversations with them to “a friendly greeting.”  Huh?  What the fuck did my managers think we slovenly peons would even say?  Were we so common and uncouth that if we were to run into the rich, sophisticated bigwigs that we would surely embarrass ourselves and the collective company with the unintelligible drivel that would inevitably come out of our mouths?  Whew, it’s a good thing that we were told to keep out mouths shut and our heads down when they came in, otherwise we’d just make asses of ourselves.  Talk about an ivory tower.

A few months later around the holidays another memo went around from the same manager wishing everyone a happy holiday and thanking us for our work.  It started out very nicely, but once again degenerated into another instance of this guy not knowing when to keep his mouth shut.  He concluded the memo with that quote from Martin Luther King Jr about how everyone should do their jobs with dignity, even if they’re sweeping streets.  So what, are we fucking janitors now?  I get what he was going for, and it just failed.  This is a professional office, and this guy is telling his workers that we should embrace our lowly tasks, like we’re menial laborers?  It’s uplifting when it comes from someone who knows what it’s like to struggle to make ends meet.  It’s condescending when it comes from someone who makes twice my salary.  Nice quote, horrible usage.  Epic fail.

I’m sure these won’t be the last occasions where a boss tries to fit in with his workers and end up looking like an ass.  I guess I can only hope that if I’m ever in charge of something one day that it won’t be me.  I think my humbling experiences over the past few years will help me make sure that never happens.

Damn the Man, Save the Empire!

Corporate culture (and I use the term ‘culture’ loosely) and I do not mix.  We have never gotten along.  It’s not that I was looking for a fight, but my experiences with the companies I have worked for have only confirmed that I will never be satisfied in an environment which discourages individuality and makes it impossible to succeed.

I was actually excited when I got my first “real job.”  I got hired to be a teller at a very large bank, and after agreeing on a salary (yes, they talked me down from my original request of a whopping $10 an hour and I foolishly accepted) I went through training and began working at a semi-busy branch.  I’ll never forget the day when one of our regional managers came to visit the branch and had my branch manager give me a talking-to.  What was my offense?  Being short in my cash drawer?  Being rude to a customer?  Nope.  I didn’t smile during the morning meeting.  A meeting that takes place behind locked doors with people I see every day and during which no customers are present apparently required me to smile at nothing like an idiot.  What.  The.  Fuck.  I could not believe that we were wasting oxygen and precious minutes on this earth talking about this.  And that was the first time I knew that corporate culture was not for me.  But like every wide-eyed youngster fresh out of college and terrified of being fired, I swallowed my pride and agreed to smile at no one during the morning meeting…only if the regional manager was there of course.

That was six years ago.  Every bank I’ve worked for since then has been the same, promising us new hires the world and then throwing roadblocks in our way.  Dangling bonuses in front of us but making the requirements impossible to achieve.  Promising management training but never having any management positions to fill.  Creating performance evaluations on a scale of 1 to 5 but telling us that no one gets a 5.   Arbitrarily setting new account quotas without even evaluating individual branch business volume, then threatening those branch managers with termination if they didn’t meet the quota.  It didn’t take long for me to figure out that no one ever got fired just for not meeting these quotas.  They simply didn’t have the manpower to replace anyone.  I plodded along at these various jobs, doing whatever I could to ensure that I would never be asked to become a manager.  (Gee, doing all the work and getting blamed for everything for no extra pay?  Where do I sign up?)  Naturally, any time I expressed any dissatisfaction at any of the random rules we had to follow that minimized efficiency and maximized tedium, I became Public Enemy #1 in the eyes of the revolving door of managers that I worked for.  I guess they didn’t teach independent thought at any of the correspondence schools from which Corporate selected its managers.

A few years later after I transitioned into banking operations my supervisor suggested to me during my evaluation that I smile more.  Again with the smiling, what the fuck does having a dumb grin on my face have to do with how well I perform my job?  Seriously, I’m asking.  Why is a neutral facial expression ‘verboten’ in the business world?

Even at my current job it seems that controversy just comes looking for me.  Last week a memo went around to my entire division notifying us that some random bigwigs were coming in from out-of-town in a few days and asking that we make sure our cages (sorry, cubes) were clean and that we dressed a little nice.  Fine.  What pissed me off was my boss’ boss, a woman who knows nothing about banking and who I imagine attained her managerial status by collecting a requisite number of bottle caps,  taking it upon herself to forward the same memo, as if we didn’t see it the first time,  to those people who worked under her (about eight of us in total) with a note saying we had to take down all our pictures and personal items for when the bigwigs came.  Again I restate: What.  The.  Fuck.  She said we would be allowed to keep one family photo (thanks, master) but that would be it.  I hope no one needs to ask why I would find this offensive.  And when my actual boss (more knowledgable than his boss but equally as impotent) came around on Friday to say it was time to remove my items, I spoke up.  I pointed out how the original memo from HR said nothing about removing any personal items, and asked what was so offending about my wedding and vacation pictures.  I said I was sorry that the company was embarrassed by its employees’ personal lives, and that I found this whole thing personally offensive.  Of course I got no real answer, nor did I expect to.  If I did I would have died of shock.  And I reluctantly did remove my items and took them home that day.  And they’re not coming back either.  I refuse to play this game of putting my stuff out and then taking it down everytime some self-important idiot comes in from another city to walk around my building and glance at us like we’re animals in a zoo. 

My co-workers all said they agreed with me of course, but none of them would actually go so far as to tell our boss this.  I think they’re still surprised that free thought is an option.  That’s ok.  I’ve resigned myself to being the loudmouth that dares to express these radical ideas.

I acknowledge that I may be cutting off my nose to spite my face just a little, but I despise anything and anyone that needlessly hinders individuality.  This isn’t the military, where there’s an actual point to having everyone look and act the same.  This is an office.  And fucking guess what: we have lives outside of work, and we like to personalize our cubes.  And if I don’t get to put up pictures when I want then I’m not going to put them up at all.  I’m an “all or nothing” kind of girl and that won’t change.  And I say to anyone who’s ever been frustrated by corporate bullshit: speak up.  If you did a bang-up job at work and then get told “no one gets a 5″ on your evaluation, ask why!  If not for an actual answer then for the satisfaction of seeing your manager squirm trying to come up with an answer.  Because you can’t get fired for thinking…not yet, anyway.

Job Ads are the New Porn

I applied for a new job yesterday, which is something I actually haven’t done in about eight months.  I had decided to give up job hunting for awhile, after realizing that I had become obsessed with it.  I used to search online for jobs almost every day, and send in apps to things I wasn’t even sure I wanted.  I figured that anything new would be better than what I already had, even though that was how I got stuck in my rut in the first place.  A job ad was exciting; it had hope and potential.  It teased me with new work that was different from what I was doing, and in my mind that would ultimately lead to a happier life.  It really was like pornography.  I’d read a job description and start to fantasize about a life that didn’t so closely resemble my own.  I’d picture myself doing fun work, going on business trips, meeting interesting people.  It was exciting.  And then I’d realize that I didn’t have the right qualifications or that there would probably be a million other applicants and I’d never get hired, and ultimately end up depressed.  Just like with porn, lol.  But is another job really what I want?  I’m currently on my fourth job in six years, so obviously I’ve been doing something wrong all this time if I’m still not happy.  Thus enrolling in grad school, and trying to break the cycle with a totally new career, not just another office job.

I don’t think my generation was ever taught how to deal with rejection and disappointment.  In this age of instant gratification, I think younger people tend to take rejection extra hard, especially when it comes to finding the right job.  It certainly wasn’t something we talked about in my career center at my college.  It was all about “get the right internship, get good grades, have the right resume, and you’ll get the job.”  I had done all that and still things didn’t work out for me in television/film.  So what was I missing?

The biggest blow for me in terms of job hunting was last year when I interviewed for a job at a very prestigious university.  The job was in one of their libraries, setting up A/V equipment for classes.  It was the closest to working in television or film as I had come in a long time, and I really wanted that job, more than I had wanted a job in a while.  I wore my best suit, put on my best interview performance, and never even received a phone call or e-mail telling me they hired someone else.  A few weeks went by and I left a voicemail asking at least to know if the position had been filled.  Apparently I wasn’t worth the three minutes it would have taken to return my call.  I took that rejection hard, and yet continued to apply to anything and everything I could bullshit my way into believing I was qualified for.  Eventually last summer, when some circumstances led to me actually being able to attend grad school, I decided to give up on job hunting for an extended period of time, and only apply to something I would actually want to do.

I still get job alerts in my e-mail.  Except now I got rid of all the ‘banking’ filters and requested only jobs that had something to do with publishing.  Until now almost everything I saw was secretarial related so I never paid my job alerts much attention.  Focusing on school and just using my current job as a source of funds really was the best thing I’ve done for myself in a while.  Instead of pulling up to my building and thinking what a loser I was because this was the best I could do with my education and my life, I would think that I was here for money and I didn’t care what anybody thought because school was more important.  All that energy that I was wasting on looking for “just any job” I redirected toward doing well in school and starting a new career path after graduation.  It was liberating.

So why did I apply for that job yesterday?  Because it was actually related to publishing, indirectly, but it’s a start.  The job would involve editing proposals and writing press releases for an educational company.  Editing and writing sure beats balancing general ledgers.  That would be something better to do while I work on getting my Masters.  So I guess we’ll see if I get a callback.  And if I don’t, it’s no big deal.  Because I’m still sticking to my new plan, and it feels really good.

This is Brilliant.

Yes this is from a comedy site, but it has so much insight into how people from our generation feel about themselves and about life.  I’ve had many conversations with close friends in which we discuss whether we really feel like true adults and whether we have it all together or not.  I love this article because overall it expresses how we should all just appreciate the life we’ve lived and the life we have now.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-they-never-told-us/

My Trip to Prison

At what point is a parent supposed to tell an adult child to settle for whatever they can get?  People settle for what they don’t really want everyday.  Most times it’s for trivial things like if a restaurant is out of your favorite meal and you get something else, or the shirt you want doesn’t come in black so you get brown.  Sadly many people my age seem to be settling for jobs, relationships, and living situations that they don’t really want because they are too afraid or feel they are unable to do differently.  But what about when the parent actively tells the child to settle?

Naturally I’m referring back to my six month stint in Florida living with my parents after having graduated college.  I was still working at the theme park and not having any success in my job search for something in the TV/video field.  That’s when my dad started telling me things like “the Frito-Lay factory is hiring.”  He was not being facetious.  At this point I wondered why he had even bothered to educate me at all.  Why send me to college, if I could have just started working at the fucking Frito-Lay factory when I turned 18?  What happened to all those talks we had when I was growing up when he told me to try my best and be all I could be?  Just a few months after college it was already hopeless?  I was already past my prime and not suitable for anything other than manual labor?  WTF?

I never applied to Frito-Lay but I did give in to his demands and started applying for government jobs.  These were mostly clerical jobs in local government offices.  It got to the point where just to get him off my back I saved an online profile on the job site and clicked “apply to all” everyday.  I didn’t want any of these jobs, and I was angry at him for trying to force me onto a path I didn’t want.  Civil service helped feed and clothe me, yes, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do.  And wasn’t that the point of going to college and exploring different career choices?  Now I found myself being forced in a direction I knew I didn’t want to be in, and the person who used to be my biggest cheerleader was telling me to stop trying so hard and settle for whatever I could get.

More time went by and I wasn’t getting any callbacks for the government jobs.  Maybe they could sense the seething resentment in my online applications.  Until one day, when I was on an overnight getaway in Daytona with my boyfriend (yes he was still there putting up my with my family’s insanity), my dad called me and told me one of my hooks finally had a fish.  And who was it that wanted me to come in for an interview?  A fucking prison.  A men’s prison.  In the next county in the middle of nowhere.  It was a clerical position in one of the offices in the prison.   Needless to say I was less than thrilled, and told him I didn’t think I wanted to take the interview.  True to form he told me I should go just to see what it was all about, and that I was lucky to get a callback at all.  Yeah I felt really fucking special.

Dad must have really wanted me to get this job because he bought me a new outfit just for the interview.  A person whose cheapness is legendary (he had recently refused to buy me a $4 pack of Kraft cheese that I had written on the grocery list) took me to a department store and bought me new khaki slacks, an Oxford shirt and new shoes.  For about five minutes I felt pretty special.  He even drove me to the interview (probably so I couldn’t skip it and say that I went), and during the drive he said how with a job like this I wouldn’t have any contact with the prisoners, none at all.  I don’t know what planet he was living on because I’ve never heard of a prison job that doesn’t involve contact with prisoners.  When I got out of the car and walked to the administrative building I could see some of the inmates hanging on the fence leering at me.  This is where my dad wanted me to work.

To say the interview didn’t go well is like saying Chernobyl was a little accident.  Not only was I told that yes, I would have to interact with the prisoners on a daily basis but I would be required to wear a panic button in case I was being raped.  The interviewers recommended I not wear white to work, and the paperwork I filled out asked questions like ’Are you comfortable working with people infected with HIV?’  Oh, and the salary was $19,000 per year.  The whole thing went pleasantly enough but by the end they clearly were not going to hire me and I made it pretty obvious that this was not the place for me.  When I got back in the car my dad asked me how it went and I said that it didn’t matter because I was not taking the job.

I didn’t get any more callbacks from the government jobs after that, much to my relief.  Some more time went by and I was just hating Florida and hating my living situation and resenting my family more and more every day.  My dad and I would debate constantly about taking one of “his” jobs versus continuing to find a career I was interested in.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was when he quoted Thoreau and said that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  Meaning I was supposed to just suck it up and learn to like having a shitty life because lots of people have shitty lives.

My boyfriend and I moved back up north shortly after that.  It was in January 2005.  I still ended up in a job I don’t like but at least I’m free to continue my education and improve myself.  I’m still looking for that right job and that American dream, but it sure as hell beats working in fucking prison in Florida.

Why Theme Parks are Ruined For Me

The absolute worst job I have ever had was the six months I worked at Universal Studios in Orlando.  I was an attraction attendant at the Men In Black ride.  I still have flashbacks about it.  Eight hours (or more) on my feet, wearing long black slacks, a button-down shirt and a clip-on tie.  In the summer.  In Orlando.  I really wanted to work at the Jaws ride, because at least then if I squinted really hard I could pretend I was on vacation in New England.  In retrospect I could have worked at a worse attraction.  At least mine was mostly indoors.  Only the entrance greeter and lockers attendant had to stand outside, and everyone rotated positions so no poor bastard would be stuck outside all day.  I’ve had my fair share of demeaning jobs and this was by far the worst.  They pay everyone $6.75 an hour.  Wal-Mart pays more.  The people I knew there who weren’t living with their parents all had like three roommates because they couldn’t afford an apartment on their salary.  And don’t make me laugh and ask about the benefits.  I was told they had some pathetic health plan, but you may as well have purchased private insurance because it supposedly cost an arm and a leg.  One guy who must have been in his 60s used to complain to me daily about how he actually had the health plan and they wouldn’t cover anything.  He used to tell me practically every day to get the hell out of there.  A few years after I had quit I went back to the park incognito just to ride the rides and I saw him still working there.  I still feel bad for him. 

I can’t imagine a worse job.  You’re on your feet all day, arguing with idiots over the validity of a Fastpass, herding people into queues, watching obese guests try to squeeze their bulk into the seats (we actually had a special radio code for obese guests if you had to call a supervisor for assistance) and searching for lost camcorders.  And all the while having to put up with various body odors and children shrieking in random languages.  After awhile you start to see people as cattle.  Supervisors reprimanded you for taking one extra minute on your bathroom break, and you could be written up for the stupidest things.  I used to love it when the ride broke down, because there would be no guests and the soundtrack would shut off and there would finally be quiet. 

The only thing that kept me sane was laughing at people’s stupidity.  My absolute favorites were the pregnant women who used to ask me if I thought it was safe for them to ride.  I wanted to shout “lady does it fucking say ‘M.D.’ on my name tag?”  Almost every ride in the park already had a ‘no pregnant women’ sign but technically if a pregnant woman wanted to ride no one could stop her.  And we were never supposed to outright say it was definitely ok for one to ride.  So anytime a pregnant woman asked me if I thought she could ride I always said it was up to her and what her doctor says.  Most of them took that as my answer and backed off, but some would just keep pelting me with questions, basically cajoling me into validating their decision to take the risk and get on the ride.  I almost wished one would go into labor on the ride so I could say “there, you got to shoot the friggin aliens and hear the Will Smith song, was it worth it?”  If you worked really hard you got promoted to a Lead, which meant that you got twenty-five cents more an hour and the privilege of cleaning up vomit.  

There is a point to this story.  I got that shit job right after college.  I graduated in 2004 with top honors and no job in my field.  All of my job search efforts and networking were fruitless.  So my boyfriend (now husband) and I stupidly thought that we could have better luck at finding TV/video production jobs in Orlando.  We just weren’t ready for LA.  Say what you will but Orlando is actually the fourth or fifth largest TV market in the country.  So we packed our shit and drove to Orlando planning to stay with my parents until we got jobs and an apartment.  On Day One my dad demanded that we get jobs and we get them now because he wanted rent.  That’s where Universal Studios came in.  A means to an end while I searched for that ever-ellusive dream job.  Six months later I had applied for everything and anything remotely related to my field and turned up with nothing.  I thought I had my big break when I got an interview for a company that videotaped people swimming with dolphins at a tourist attraction, but when I showed up the office was locked, the lights were off and no one answered the phone.  That was the first time I ever thought God was fucking with me.

Those six months I spent in Florida were the worst in my life.  I became depressed due to the disparity between my goals and reality.  When I say ‘depressed’ I don’t mean high-school depressed.  I mean I went to Wendy’s and burst into tears because they were out of bacon.  Hadn’t I done everything right up to that point?  Hadn’t I gotten all A’s since Kindergarten, gotten a full scholarship to a private college, gotten the right internship, been involved in activities on campus?  Wasn’t I perfect?  So where was my American dream?  Since birth I was told that if I worked hard I could achieve my goals.  And I was trying so hard and still strapping fatasses into tiny seats for slave wages.  And forget about at least saving up for an apartment because half of my measly paycheck went to my dad’s rent and the other half went to my car.  It would make me sick to my stomach to hear about my college friends who were happy in their jobs.  If they could do it what the fuck was wrong with me?

So what’s the right answer?  Should we still tell our kids that they can be the President one day, or do we tell them to aim low and they will never be disappointed?  Should I have majored in Accounting like my dad wanted, or am I better off for having tried and failed?  What made my problems even worse were the mixed messages I got from my family.  But more on than later.

Bad Advice

I realize now that I’ve received a lot of mixed messages and a lot of fucked-up advice in my young and impressionable years.  I can recall being about six or seven when my great-grandfather asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up, a doctor or a lawyer?”  When you’re that young those do seem to be the only available career choices.  Well not bloody likely!  I was a child of the 80s, hooked on Indiana Jones, so I informed him that I wanted to be an archaeologist.  He scoffed and announced “Archaeology, that pays peanuts!”  His exact words.  I’ll never forget them.  Way to kill a young child’s dream, ass.  Of course my great-grandfather was hardly one to be giving sound advice.  I remember another incident in which he told me, so somberly as to imply that this was indeed the secret to happiness, ”Don’t let the boys know that you’re so smart…they might resent it.”  So which is it?!  Was I supposed to be a doctor or a lawyer (so I wouldn’t make peanuts) or just smile and look pretty so the boys would like me?  Or maybe I was supposed to be a bad doctor or lawyer so I could have the right job and still not let boys know I was too smart.  Maybe he was going senile and forgot the contradicting career advice he had already given me.  Even then, at that young age, I knew what he had said to me was the biggest pile of bullshit I would ever hear in my life.  And I also knew that I would have a lot of challenges set before me in trying to stay true to myself despite the bullshit people tried to tell me about who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to do.  I sometimes wish my great-grandfather could see the kind of relationship I have with my husband, who loves me for my mind and encouraged me to apply to grad school.

As I got older, career advice from my parents, especially my dad, became a bigger part of my life.  For my dad, the purpose of going to school  was not to better myself, it was to get a good job.  And by ’good job’ he meant a well-paying job.  Everything was about money, and how much this job would pay or that job would pay.  Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that food, shelter and clothing all cost money, and I know that poverty is still a problem in this country.  But should we be telling little kids that they need to start thinking about their future career before they’ve even learned cursive?  It all became very uncomfortable.  I could be out at a restaurant with my family having a great time and my dad would feel the need to ruin it by asking me what kind of job I wanted when I got older.  I hated those moments because I knew that if I didn’t tell him I wanted a high-paying job it would be the wrong answer and I would get a lecture.  But if I didn’t lie, I would have to tell the truth, and the truth was I really didn’t know, and that was also the wrong answer.  One time my mom tried to help me out of one of those awkward moments by telling my dad that I was thinking about modelling.  This was before I found out that models weren’t allowed to eat of course.  And I knew that was another wrong answer because it was hard to become a model.  So I said a teacher, just to shut him up. 

You’re probably assuming that my dad was a doctor or lawyer and thus wanted me to follow in his footsteps.  Nope.  He was a postal worker, and before I was born he was a cop.  So the pressure he put on me came from his desire to have me do better than him, and I get that.  But it all made me so uncomfortable at such a young age.  I felt like I wasn’t able to explore any career path whose main function wasn’t sitting on my ass in an office.  I was always a creative kid and loved reading and pretending.  And most of the messages I got as a kid were about getting a ‘good job’ so I could have money and buy stuff.  Maybe it was just a gap between the generations.  Boy was he pissed when I got into college and decided to major in Television/Film.  The months between my high school graduation were so awkward.  He grilled me almost daily about what I would do after graduation, how much money I would make, etc.  He told me I should double major in Business, or change majors altogether to something like Accounting.  Fuck that noise, I was going to try for something I actually wanted for once.  It didn’t turn out the way I hoped; I guess you could say I fell flat on my ass.  And in 2009 when I got my latest horrible job and my dad asked me what it was and I said it was sort of like an accountant, he said “I told you so.”  Never was the phrase ’fuck my life’ more appropriate.  So TV/Film didn’t quite work out for me (more on that later), but I refuse to let that “I told you so” become my destiny.  I’m trying again to do something creative with my life, and that’s where going to grad school comes in.  I can’t live my life staring at spreadsheets all day pretending that I care whether a GL balances or not.  I think that getting into this grad program has given me another chance, and renewed my determination to do something that will make me happy.  I do have to give credit where it’s due, though.  The first person who taught me about perseverance was my dad.

It begins…

I swear I’m not a negative person, really.  Even though I could be classified as ‘cynical’ and ‘sarcastic,’ I started this blog with the best of intentions.  My purpose is two-fold: to gain writing experience and to discuss a variety of issues which affect me and my peers. 

So who the hell am I?  I’m a married grad student studying publishing and working at a job I loathe.  Or rather a series of jobs I’ve loathed.  Four jobs in the past six years, and they’ve all been in the same soulless industry.  Did I really not notice a pattern until now, or did I just have my head so far up my ass from trying to convince myself that staying in this shit job would make me happy?  If I regret anything it’s wasting most of my 20s working for these corporations run by useless suits, trying to force myself into a culture that discourages individuality and prohibits intelligence.  I had always thought about going back to school but only now do I have the time, the means, and the reliable transportation with which to do so.  My Bachelor’s degree is nothing but expensive wallpaper so a Master’s is a wonderful idea, right?  We’ll see.  Maybe I’ll never live my dream but if I don’t get the fuck out of my current industry I’ll explode.  I find myself fantasizing about gas explosions in my office building.  Probably not very healthy.  So here I sit: 13 months away from the big 3-0 and preparing to pull the plug on all my career experience and start over with a clean slate.

Why is my blog called “I Wasn’t Even Supposed To Be Here Today”?  First off all, because I’m a huge movie geek and if you get the reference you deserve a pat on the back.  But I also feel that this lamentation sums up how I feel about my life after college, and how many other people my age feel too.  It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.  I was supposed to have this great job and this exciting life and I was supposed to be fucking happy with it all.  But something got lost on the way between graduation and today, and it seems like I’ve tried and tried and can never get a break.  And everytime I’ve found myself facing disappointment in my career or my life, I’ve thought to myself that it wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.  And like in that great movie I just want to scream “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!”

What am I going to talk about on this blog?  I want to talk about you, us, Generation Y, the children of the 80s.  What social pressures are we facing and why?  How are we finding reality after being fed all that “you can be anything you want” bullshit when we were kids?  Are our college degrees really worthless?  Are we really not as effective at work as some people think we are?  I’m drawing my opinions and observations from my personal experiences and those of my friends.  And if I ever can’t think of anything to write I’ll just bitch about my job.  So sit back and enjoy the ride.

Oh yeah, and I curse alot.