Letters to the Editor
-
Believe it
I've been at my job for seven years, gotten promotion after promotion, and I still only work about eight hours a week. I got the promotions because I would come up with projects on my own to have something to do. The woman who had my job before me only worked about forty-five minutes out of the week. The rest of the time she instant-messaged her friends, shopped online, and planned her wedding.
I used to work as a temp, and it was amazing to me how many jobs consisted of just sitting there. As long as you were manning the phone, or giving an executive the appearance of importance by sitting outside his office, no one cared if you didn't do anything else all day. Admittedly, sometimes the regular person did work that the temp couldn't cover, but most administrative jobs have a lot of downtime. A LOT of downtime. I once served as a temporary replacement for a woman who assisted two executives, one of whom was on leave for a year, the other was in China and just kept a NY office for when he was in town. Literally, I filled in for this woman for a week and did not have to do a single piece of work. Not one thing.
I've realized that the disadvantage of my job is that I am bored, restless and feel that my work has little or no meaning most of the time. The upside is that I actually can do other things at work without, at this point, any guilt. I have a website I run that I am quite proud of, and I do most of the wiritng and layout at work. I've educated myself in the field I'm interested in by reading everything available online on a daily basis. I've got resumes out, and someday I'll find the right job and leave. But in the meantime, my "only working sometimes" job is hard to beat.