Work Daze

I have “officially” been off the phones for about two months at work, but this was the first week that I really felt the difference in volume. Of course, part of the reason may be the fact that I have been in all sorts of meetings for the last two weeks, but when I am at my desk, the volume is down. Yay!

At this point, I don’t really have enough to do to keep me busy all day. This is expecially true this week, as 95% of what I do is dependent upon the one system that is currently out of commission (yes, the system that was supposed to be up yesterday morning looks like it won’t be up until Monday…if then).

I am training on a process that is supposed to be highly intense and time consuming. Interestingly, I already have two processes that everyone hates, and that “take forever,” yet I seem to handle it all just fine, within my allotted forty hour weeks. My supervisor is worried that this new process will be “too much” for me. I think that Company seriously underestimates my capacity for Getting Shit Done.

I hate to be bored (that’s most of the reason that this post was written longhand during a training session which seems to be the same stuff as was covered in the last four that I went to). I have so many other interests and things that I want to do that spending time at work not actually spent working drives me nuts. If I can do my job in six hours a day instead of eight, why should I waste two hours of my time and my employer’s resources?

This is something that – in my opinion – is wrong with the entire American view of the workforce. To begin with, work is not correctly distributed. I can think of lots of people that legitimately have too much assigned to them (not the ones that are too busy fucking around to actually do work), and lots of other people, (like me) that are completing their jobs in less time than they are allotted for them. This is the case all over my organization. Wouldn’t it be a better use of resources to shift the distribution of labor?

In my organization, the management is also in love with the forty hour work week. While they are generally willing to pay out overtime (and none of us are underpaid for the ass monkey work we do), there is no such thing as being part time. Either you are full time, or you just don’t work here. Again, if I can do the same amount of work (thanks to my super ninja office skillz) in less time, why should I be paid for more time?

I’m going in circles here. I started out wanting to talk about how much less stabby I’ve been feeling since I’m on the phones less, and here I am, lambasting the American employment scheme.

I don’t hate my job as much as I used to, because I am dealing with a much smaller population of assholes. I do still find it boring and pointless, but at least I don’t want to stick my head in the oven every morning, nor do I spend my commutes sobbing. That’s a nice improvement. I think I can live with this (for a while).

(I’m sorry to say that writing this – longhand, on the back of training materials – only took me about 35 minutes. I have another 40 to go…If you are reading this online, at leat I didn’t die of boredom.)