I'm chronically unemployed (long story), but for some reason, everyone likes to bitch to me about their sucky jobs. Last week, they were in Florida for a con and the company's vendors wined and dined you. Now you're back home and you're upset that you're not saving dolphins from your cubicle for the six figures you're making. Boo-fucking-hoo. (Note: this is *not* meant to describe any one of my friends, and I don't know how much they make). So, here's my standard advice to people lucky enough to have jobs:
Don't switch jobs because of your ego or because you demand entertainment from your employer. Sitting in Starbucks (r), you overhear a lot of business meetings. One of the most common scenarios is this: someone is interviewing for a sales job that involves travel and no garunteed pay, they're hoping to leave a professional office job to for this sales job, and they use the justification of they're just not doing what they love. Bull. People leave jobs because their pride was injured -- usually recklessly and by someone with no real authority to do so, or, alternatively, the same supervisior didn't spread enough good vibes. Or people considering a job switch want to make a positive difference in the world, in which case they're doomed because you aren't paid to do good deeds -- only to make money for other people that already have a lot. If you want to make a difference in the world, then fucking do it -- don't want for someone to pay you to do it.So, just pretend your corporate desk job is a glorified McDonalds job, be grateful you're not on your feet, do fun and charible things in your time, and don't expect more from your job than a paycheck and the same level of civility you'd get from complete strangers.
If you're not underemployed, you're overworked. If you're not sitting in a chair 8 hours a day, you're traveling. If you're not doing banal office work, you're subject to constant lay-offs and insane competition as you write video games that usually suck anyway. If your job is cool, everyone will try to get it, and your employer will lower the pay and increase his demands. If you're doing something helpful to humanity, the company will get eaten alive by it's less humanitarian competition, and you'll be out of a job.
There's nothing wrong with accepting a job offer or even flirting with recruiters and the competition -- but there's no point whining about it all the frickin' time and letting your high paying cush office job in front of a computer ruin your happiness. Oh, woe is me... life just isn't worth living unless I'm promoted one salary level. Argh!
-scott
P.S.: don't comment just to demonstrate how utterly you've missed the point, even if you think you're utterly missing the point in a clever way. Trust me -- it's passe now. Everyone's doing it. Seriously, getting old. Anyone who posts only to publicly demonstrate their lack of reading comprehension will be berated.
The only thing that annoys me about your posts is how you rant about comments at the end of almost every single one of them. Either it’s about why you haven’t enabled comments, or it’s about pissing at people to warn them for leaving stupid comments.
Anyone who could leave a comment also has a journal here anyway, so if your comments are closed they can use that to reply to your post if they feel compelled enough. And you can choose to ignore their posts at leisure, so either way noone’s losing anything.
If you can’t stand comments, then for pete’s sake, close comments. But shut up about it and stop ruining all your posts with that bullshit diatribe.
Yes, I’m telling you how to run your own journal. You are free to tell me to sod off.
Re:
scrottie on 2005-08-30T21:11:22
Hi Aristotle,
Thank you for reading my blog. Thank you for saying that only one thing annoys you about them. That they are otherwise perfect certainly gives me incentive to address the single outstanding issue.
In light of this feedback, I think I'll blog *once* about how I'd really like constructive feedback on my writing and my ideas rather than off-topic demonstrations of dis-comprension... and then leave it at that.
By the way, you haven't demonstrated any lack of comprension, so I won't tell you to sod off;)
Regards,
-scottRe:
Aristotle on 2005-08-31T05:25:46
Heh, sorry about the tone of that comment. I had just read the post and was quite irritated, because your warnings so far are written as though you expect that, to put it strongly, everyone who’d even consider opening their trap is by definition going to drivel worthlessly.
I do understand the aggravation about comments which miss the point, and I don’t believe suffixing your posts with a note to the effect that people should excercise their reading comprehension before commenting is inherently bad.
It would be polite, though, if that was maybe as much as a stern reminder, but not quite an a priori insult.
