Letters to the Editor
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That was me once. FIND A PURPOSE!
I had a similar job once. Towards the end of my time there, I had a task list, but nobody seemed to care if anything on it ever got done, so I only did those sorts of tasks that popped up from day to day, when someone called me about something. On days when there were no such tasks, I pretty much just emailed and web surfed. Nobody else had to pick up my slack, but I knew I was stealing from my employer. It made me feel like slime, so I distracted myself from thinking about it with more Internet.
The problem was that I love helping people, and so the tasks that actually helped people I was happy to do. But the rest of it, I knew nobody really cared and the system I was working on was being phased out for a new system. And the job was at a company that wasn't actively evil, but also was purely corporate, and so I felt like there was no point to working there but to make somebody else some money. Simultaneously, my skills were getting out of date and I didn't see much call for them anywhere in the market.
The solution? Well, eventually I got laid off because they finally phased out my system, and I looked around for a job (kind of halfheartedly yet kind of panicked) for a few months and finally, with an astounding stroke of luck, found a job at a nonprofit. This job was a perfect fit for my skills, and the new workplace gives me a sense of purpose!
Dear LW, you're just burnt out. Don't dwell for another minute on how bad your current situation makes you feel, because that will distract you from what you need to do. You need to get out of there.
Don't worry about leaving again after having begged to come back, because this time you are leaving for good and it is what you need to do. The friends you have there will understand; people leave jobs all the time. Find someplace that gives you a sense of purpose and that actually needs you. This is the clear course of action Cary didn't give you: start looking, and do it today! Yes, job hunting is difficult and painful, but you are currently sitting in a hell I've escaped, and I want to tell you that life outside that hell is exhilarating and wonderful.
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Christ.
I get both angry at and jealous of people who have jobs like this. I know more than one response in this thread has indicated that these types of jobs are worse than the busy ones, but it sure looks idyllic from where I stand. I work my ass off, non-stop, through the entirety of my shift. Even if I was so inclined, we have internet firewalls in place that would prevent me from surfing -- as if I'd have the time anyway.
I have a friend who has worked for a high-ranking government agency in Washington, DC for close to 15 years now. His work week consists of about one hour in 40 actually spent doing his job. The other 39 hours are composed almost entirely of extended lunches, numerous smoke breaks, internet surfing, and early departures for home. I am not making this up. This is not something he has only recently been able to get away with. This has been happening at LEAST as long as I've known him now, which is going on seven years. And no, this is not an assumption based on my envy or anger over this: he has openly admitted to and detailed his lack of work on the job to me.
Oh yeah, and he also makes way more money than I do and does about 1/100th as much as I do at my own job in a given week. Tell me how that's not something to envy. Many days I would gladly do what he does and get paid handsomely for it. Yes, I feel somewhat accomplished at the end of the day, but I still can't help feeling that this is incredibly unfair. I can only dream of such a cushy job!
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I'm not idealistic! I AM cynical, lol
I'm not surprise at LW because I have a romantic view of pride and the work ethic, I'm just surprised that in today's cut-throat world, people like that aren't fired! That's what I see, pride notwithstanding, if most organizations I'm familiar with document someone slacking like that, they fire them. That's what surprises, me. NOt that a person would slack and take advantage of the situation, but that the company doesn't can their butt. How do they get away with it in todays cut-throuat corporate world where a cold uncaring company will cut you loose for anything? just sayin'
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You'll get fired....
At some point some ever earnest and industrious manager will realize that LW is a waste of space, resources and money and he/she will be fired.
If LW can't describe his/her job now, think how hard it will be to do when he/she tries to explain it to the next potential employer. In addition, the references will be crap.
Good luck on being lazy. ADD my booty. More like ASS.
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Oh boy, have I been there
I feel complete empathy and sympathy with and for you. For whatever the reason--depression, ADD, job dissatisfaction, or a general malaise about work in our culture--I too stopped working for almost an entire year. I wasn't caught, but I was sick with stress for the work I wasn't doing.
So I quit and went to work for myself. Problem sovled. If I don't work, I don't get paid. I'm much happier now, get to set my own hours, do work that I love and can turn down work that I don't. That's not to say working for myself doesn't have it's own special detractors, but for me, it was a great solution.
I don't know what industry you're in, but if you can strike out on your own, you might try it.
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Re: Cosmic Mojo
You wrote:
I'm not idealistic! I AM cynical, lol... I'm not surprise at LW because I have a romantic view of pride and the work ethic, I'm just surprised that in today's cut-throat world, people like that aren't fired! ...How do they get away with it in todays cut-throuat corporate world where a cold uncaring company will cut you loose for anything?
I'm sorry if I misunderstood. To answer your question, they get away with it because the company as a whole, and the people who run it, care far more about power than money, and in the process have steadily weeded out anyone with actual business knowledge and acumen, and successfully resisted change to a very dangerous point. Because it's about power, and not about money, they relish *having* their problems far more than fixing them. I would never have believed that any privately-run company could so openly engage in such self-destructive nonsense. But they can, and do. And yes, financially it costs them a great deal.
For instance, just recently, a major insurer has cut the hospital I wrote about because this hospital refused to pay them what they were paying other insurers for the same services. After a year's negotiation or so, this major insurer dropped them. Last I heard, other insurers were thinking of following suit. But if you ask anyone internally, it's "an isolated incident" based on "misunderstanding".
Another example: this hospital has now reached the point in their excruciatingly slow death spiral where they are not only unable to keep talent, but to attract talent. A surgical tech I know who works in *another state* some 450 miles from here called me about how one of their surgical interns visited this hospital and was so weirded out by it that he completely turned down their offer on that basis alone. What he told my friend: "There was something very wrong with that place." Surgeries are very profitable, but not when you can't keep surgeons on staff to do them.
And it's not just medical talent, but even upper level managers are rejects from other healthcare systems, brought in via the good ol' boy network. The CIO, for instance, had been fired from a hospital in another part of the state, and was on the verge of being fired from yet another job, when the CEO picked him to come to this hospital. The CEO himself is desperately trying to maneuver into position for a shot at being state governor, so he concentrates on getting on every state board or committee he possibly can just for the exposure. The director of employee relations in HR left for another job, and came back a year later: she couldn't hack it in the real world. A manager I knew in IT was instructed to do a Six-Sigma like report on a specific project, and he did: it was one page, and it read very much like a "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" school report. His manager, the CIO I mentioned above, found this not only acceptable, but laudable. In the last 3 years, they have gone from approximately 15 VPs to 24. What hospital needs 24 vice presidents, many who literally have no special qualifications for the job?
A regular, normal American corporation would have already been alarmed at the signs of downward spiral (loss of revenue in key specialties, inability to attract or keep talent in a major metropolitan area, thriving competition, unusual turnover, etc.) not to mention reviewed best industry practices to see how/where the business could be grown and improved. But this one doesn't. Because it's not what they care about. It's not about money. It's about power, and that on a laughably small scale.
They are losing money dramatically, but are shielded from much of their financial impropriety by their non-profit status and the fact that they used to be county-run. So it's business as usual, combined with the fact that NOBODY, and I do mean NOBODY, wants to know that their locally revered hospital is full of accidents waiting to happen on every level. (In a hospital, every department is interrelated. Think that bad management in engineering, or bullying in IT, has nothing to do with surgery, or oncology, or sewing up your injuries in the ER? Think again.) But there is nothing that cannot, in the end, be successfully denied or paid off, so why change?
The point is that there are companies who do not give a shit about even MONEY. It's about power on a personal level, and running one's own little fiefdom, and blaming / scapegoating as necessary to account for one's failures and inability to move forward, personally or corporately. In the end, the people forced out are the lucky ones. The ones who stay and play along have no reason to keep their skills sharp or to make themselves valuable to the workforce in any way, because it's that precise behavior that is so harshly punished, so they themselves end up colluding in their own marginalization.
Where the corporate culture is about money, that alone must place certain limits on behavior, even where grossly immoral or dishonest practices abound, simply because the most extreme behavior costs money. Money is tangible: you can touch it, feel it, count it, see what it buys, and for that reason constitutes a somewhat objective and self-regulating bottom line.
Where the bottom line is something intangible -- the personal lust for power and control, for instance -- there literally are no limits. Normal business practices become a pretense to the point of self-nullification. So what is overtly self-destructive to that organization, even if tangibly so, is regarded as nothing but the imagination of the onlooker: everything is just fine. And it is! They are INDEED meeting and raising their bottom line. It's just not the bottom line you might think it is, and that it is inherently self-destructive is not an important consideration to them.
Again, my apologies if I misunderstood. :)