Friday, June 29, 2007

Friday Leftovers Stew

Your Job Satisfaction Level: 53%

Your job is about average. There are some parts you really enjoy, and some parts that stress you out.
It's possible that you need a small change. Maybe you should switch companies or positions.
It's also possible that you're simply burned out. No job is perfect, even a great one.
Give yourself a personal day to think about your career goals - and if your current job is helping you achieve them.
Courtesy of Cursing Mama.

Sometimes it freaks me out when these cheezy little online quizzes hit the nail on the head. I am deeply ambivalent about my employment at the moment. It is vastly better than it was before they took me out of there in an ambulance, but it's far from what I want to do for the rest of my working life. Sometimes it's very good, when I get to use my smarts, get things done, Explain It All, and fix stuff that is going wrong. But the last one, oy, that happens way too often, and I know I can't keep this up for long. I am a burnout, and a burnout with mild brain damage at that. But I take comfort in the knowledge that my brain damage still left me smarter than 99% of the company. This was a week of "Oh My GAWD they're stupid!" -type fuck-ups and crises, all preventable if people did their jobs. I love the new paralegal, we sat in a meeting the other day, a post-mortem to one of the fuck-ups, and one of the participants actually uttered the classic line: "But, we've always done it this way!" This was in response to my innocent, four-year-old like question: "Why?" I didn't dare glance across the table at S, I knew she was holding her tongue so tightly, she was vibrating with the desire to go off on them. But she's impeccably professional and would not do that, and later I explained to her that one has to cultivate a sense of humor about these things, or one will wake up in intensive care with tubes draining from one's head. I think she will be okay, she described it later - she felt like she was sitting in a meeting with Larry, Darryl and Darryl. Yep. R and I love her. She's one of us.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but ever more appropriate after the Coultergeist apparition the other day: Glenn Greenwald nails it about Chris Matthews. God, Matthews gives me the creeps. He sounds more weird and less professional every week, but nobody around him appears to notice.

But Greenwald identifies a certain "type" among right-wing pundits, a type I am acquainted with in real life among right wing man-boys. To a "man," they never served in the military, but love to read military books and play war games on a computer. They are as "manly" as neutered poodles themselves, but they pop off all the time with snide cracks about Democrats being wimps. It is very difficult to keep a straight face at times. Or to keep from smacking them in their soft, quivering jowls. Not that I would ever do that.

Living with my adult daughter has kept me from sliding into the cultural illiteracy of the middle aged. I had never heard of Fiction Plane until she pointed them out to me. Not bad at all. The vocalist is Sting's son - he sounds like his old man, but also original. Warning, music plays when you open this, so if you're reading blogs at work when you open it, beware. Not that I would ever do that, but I hear that people do.

Actual knitting content on the way. Seriously.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This possibly explains the proliferation of porn and Viagra ads, also.
My job satisfaction is 35%, probably because I love my manager, and everybody covered for me when I went down for two weeks. I'm working on it.