Looking back over the long and incoherent rant about my job which I wrote two days ago, I suddenly remembered that two years back, I had said I loved my job. So how, exactly, did my opinion take such an about-face?
Some essayists compare a job to a marriage, and cite the imagery of the seven-year-itch as one of the similarities between the two. A study I read some years ago, however, mentioned that the allegorical itch will develop not after seven years but after just two – in other words, the relationship is stable by the seventh year and an itch is highly unlikely at that point in time.
What applies to a marriage applies to a job in certain senses. And so out of boredom, I compiled a list of the things that contributed to making my feelings change, in no particular order of importance – just in the order I thought of them.
1) Lack of exposure, development or advancement. The work became brainless for me midway through the second year (this is my third) and management’s idea of giving me more exposure is to have me take up cross-departmental duties without any increase in salary, support or benefits. I’ve learned barely anything, except how to skimp on the budget. There are no promotion prospects. There is no career path. There’s nothing to learn.
2) Poor salary and benefits – more like no benefits, in fact. Even the freshest of graduates with the weakest of grades is only just beginning to consider the kind of pay I’m drawing right now, and that only because of the recession. I work a freelance job on evenings and weekends, and I earn more just during those few snatched hours than I do in an entire month of working days.
3) Lack of social company and role models. In a tiny office and tinier department, there’s no one of my age or intellect that I can discuss anything at all with – I hesitated to mention intellect, but the fact is that my colleagues talk about things like church, soap operas and magazines – in Chinese. I don’t go to church, I don’t watch TV and I don’t read pop magazines. I don’t object to small talk, but to me, this kind of small talk has always had the effect of stupidification rather than edification. I’m willing to believe that my IQ has dropped by a good 40 points since I took this job. And there is no one at all in this office that I want for a role model in any sense.
4) Overuse of goodwill. A certain amount of goodwill is expected to exist between employer and employee. My supply of it has run out, and nothing in the working environment is replenishing it. I have teamwork rammed down my throat daily as the reason why I should work outside my job scope and beyond my working hours for no compensation – as compared to the fact that I can earn a quarter of a month’s salary in those outside-work hours that the company claims.
5) Uncomfortable working environment. As I type this, the image on my monitor is occupying about half the screen – a 12″ screen. It’s jiggling and expanding and contracting, and giving me a headache as well as worsening my vision. If I wasn’t good at touch typing, I wouldn’t even be able to keep track of the text I’m setting down. It’s 33 degrees Celsius or so outside, and the cubicle I’m sitting in is so stuffy that heat is tangibly building up in the air around me. The monitor won’t be changed because the company can’t afford it. The air conditioning won’t be upgraded for the same reason. I can’t even bring my own monitor in because the computer is so old that it’s not compatible with contemporary hardware.
6) Excessive fluidity – financially and planning-wise. Flexibility in a job is one thing, but I will always remember a time when pay cheques were issued and everyone was told not to cash them until the next week because the company was waiting for a payment from a retailer. The same reason explains why my malfunctioning monitor hasn’t been replaced and why it won’t be. And planning-wise, this company’s product release schedule is constantly being changed according to the preferences of the management. Half-completed projects are pulled, shelving all the work that went into them. New projects, sometimes clearly impractical ones, are forced through because the boss took a shine to them for reasons that have nothing to do with business and everything to do with personal preference. The specifics of projects already underway are suddenly changed to fit said personal preferences in ways that will only end up alienating the target customers.
7) Lip-service appreciation. I’m supposed to like being praised, but, unfortunately, the praise I receive is invariably showered upon work that I did not enjoy doing and took no pride in. And it is just as invariably paired with an assignment of more of the same type, justified by the so-called good job I did. I sincerely dislike compliments being heaped upon my work when I KNOW that work was substandard. It says volumes about the reason behind the compliment and the judgement of the person doing the complimenting. And…yes, it’s always the manager giving that praise. From my “team members” – not a word.
Coming to the smaller, pettier reasons: the daily commute is revolting. I spend at least one hour and as long as one and a half hours on every trip – that’s up to three hours just travelling back and forth on a bad day, and it’s not even a direct trip where I could sleep or read. I change from bus to train to train and spend as much time waiting as I do in actual transit. And then, people complain to the manager that I get to work late – not a word to my face.
9) Presenteeism culture. I do all the work assigned to me, I do it promptly and I do it well. But it is more important to management and colleagues that I am sitting at my desk promptly at nine in the morning every day and that I stay there until at least six in the evening, regardless of whether I am actually working, surfing the Internet, blogging (like now) or just drooling at the screen. Flexi-time, telecommuting and working from outside the office exist only in verbal claims.
10) The title of the post suggests ten reasons, but I’m tired of whining. I’ve got the letter ready, anyway. Looking at the eight listed above, I did put up with them for a year or so, while there were still things to learn and still a little excitement to the position. My patience, however, has run out and nothing is replenishing it.
In a year or so, I expect to look back at this list, compare it with my new job, and laugh. The reason for laughing won’t be known until then.
