Entries in Rambo (1)
The Oddities of Finding and Leaving a Job
I recently got a new job after being on the hunt for a little over a year. Damn you, flaccid economy! It was a long process, all told, spanning eighteen interviews, countless reassessments of the happiness/salary/workplace correlation, and two very brief moments in history where I considered jobs I have historically deemed unsavory: retail and clowning. It was a long exhausting process that has, for now, come to an end.
This process is not a foreign one. Having recently entered my 30s, I have watched several friends in various age brackets wade through the troughs of gainful employment. I myself have held far too many jobs in what most HR professionals would surely deem far too short a time span. There are many reasons for my fickle CV —new opportunities, new locations—but mostly the good old realization that I just don’t like what I do. And I am not alone. The majority of people I know legitimately hate their jobs, resent their schedules and mutter curse-laden voodoo spells under their breath whenever their boss’s names are mentioned. They dream of breaking out, telling people off and fucking people over. Resignation becomes a semi-religious term; two-weeks’ notice the epicenter of the canon of the disgruntled.
We who hate our jobs are not a passive bunch by nature, with our manic dreams of freedom and machete-wielding revenge (metaphorical of course, Rambo), but we become passive and pliant on the surface, usually while silently plotting our escape, and usually after our spirits have been broken.