Midnight musings..

It’s strange.. having an erratic schedule. My weekend only started a bit under 3 hours ago. I have two types of weekends now, tuesdays and friday and saturdays. It’s actually easier.. when doing phones for 10 hours for two days in a row, there’s a bit of a breather.. before diving in head first for phones yet again.

I sometimes wonder why I do the job I do.. I do not know if it is merely because I am weary of the office politics in professional business, or if it is that I feel in some way, albeit very small, that I make a difference now, more than before. I was always goal-oriented, a team player, and now there is not so much team playing, though when it comes from push to shove, I do the best I can to be one. Most are not, most are looking for the best way to come out on top, but that has never been my main drive.

Other rationales are selfishness or pure laziness. I make so much less than I did before, but with the loss of pay and benefits is the loss of stress. Yes, the job is inordinately stressful, the burn-out rate in technical support is immense. And yet, when I leave work, it stays left. Except for colorful anecdotes, of which there are many.. when I walk out the door, I do not think of work again. I rarely talk to a customer more than once, and if I do, it is usually a long time later. It’s not the easiest thing to pick up where someone else has left off, but if someone only has one phone line and they have a dial-up internet account, it is often the case.

But I know that what I am doing is a dead-end job. There is no hope for advancement, no bonuses or salary increases. Yet, I still plod along, doing the same thing every day. I can wear whatever I wish, be it grungy or dressed up, and no one cares one way or another. It’s very relaxed, there is little in the way of competitiveness, unless you are one who thrives on showing up everyone else, which I am not.

Some calls take so much energy away, the customer is often angry and frustrated, but occasionally, you get to talk to someone who makes it all worth while, one who values the fact that you are there. That is not something that I ever experienced when working in offices. I felt much more job satisfaction when I worked for the OEM, it was much more demanding than working for an ISP.. the calls were so much more stressful, but it kept me on my toes. We were glad when the contract ended, those of us who had been on it for a long time, and yet.. the dreariness of what we do now, causes us to miss it.

I know in the economy it is lucky that I have a job at all, jobs are very scarce here, and I just do not feel it inside me to try to force myself to go back into a sterile, empty office environment again. As much as I would love to have a higher income and better health benefits, what that type of environment drained from me is enormous. The only thing I truly miss is the feeling of accomplishing goals, having projects and seeing them through to the end, seeing a benefit for having done them. There is none of that now, it is all very immediate.

I wish.. I wish I would have had more choices. I wish that when I was young I would have taken different routes, instead of looking to advance in the vocation I began. All those years to have nothing to show for it, as if it never happened.. is rather disheartening. I wish that I had done what I’d promised myself when I was graduating from high school.. to learn interpretation for the deaf, to try to find a vocation in that.. but instead, I foolishly became engaged and then had bills, only to have the engagement broken and obligations I could not turn my back on. School was out of the question at that point.

There are dreams I have but I do not even know what they are.. which is the oddest feeling. Perhaps I have shoved them so far back in my mind that I refuse to allow them to come forward any longer. Ephemereal, knowing they are there, but I cannot touch, cannot see, cannot experience.. cannot take them out and examine them. Perhaps because they are pipe dreams and not practically within reach any longer, to protect me.

Rambling it seems happens when it is late and I sit alone.. and I realize I’ve truly said nothing of value.. ah well.