Work sucks

Have I mentioned how much I utterly hate my job?

I think it's at least arguable that my job contributes to my ongoing, crippling depression. I work a whole hell of a lot, and I almost never get any holidays. I don't get paid very much. My schedule involves weird hours. I don't feel that my superiors care about the work I do or value me at all.

Besides shredding any chance I might have at a social life, it's also probable that my schedule has a negative impact on my health. My circadian rhythms are probably shot all to hell. I'm sorry, but I think that there really is something fundamentally unhealthy and depressing about not getting exposed to enough sunlight. The happiest job I ever had was one summer in college when I worked as a grounds maintenance person on a golf course. It was terrific. I spent hours doing hard, backbreaking work in the hot sun, and I always felt wonderful when I went home every day.

Now I sit in an office all day. It's not even a private office. Thanks to geniuses like this asshole, I work in a cubicle. Only the cubicle I work in has degraded to an even lower level than the "classic" Dilbert cube. I work in a "pod," which is a cubicle designed to hold more than one person and thus provide even less privacy. It's amazing how dehumanizing this is. The only way I can ever manage to escape is to go sit in my car.

Still, it wouldn't be so bad, if I got paid more or got to work a more normal schedule. Due to the nature of my business, a normal schedule really isn't an option, unfortunately. And pay — heh. Over the past several years, I have become progressively more cynical about the American economy. More and more, I see the whole edifice as a gigantic scam. The question is, did the people in charge always know it was a huge scam, or did it really sneak up on them just like it did everybody else?

I know that when I talk like that I sound like a commie or a socialist or something, but I'm really not. I actually am a believer in free enterprise. But — here's what a lot of people don't understand — there's a huge difference between being pro-free-market and pro-business. Because being pro-free-market, being sincerely pro-free-market, means being just a little bit anti-business. Because, here's the thing: No business wants to operate in a truly free market. Businesses actually LIKE socialism. What a lot of businesses call "free enterprise" is actually just socialism geared to benefit BUSINESSES, instead of workers.

Truly free enterprise isn't pro-business, or pro-worker. It's not pro-anything, except fair profits all around — and I would like to stress the "all around" part. As I see it, it's the best possible way to guarantee that every person gets exactly what he or she deserves, neither more nor less. In a way it's almost like the theoretical ideal of communism, except you don't shoot anybody or throw them in gulags, because everything is done on the basis of free association, instead of compulsion.

How the hell did I get sidetracked onto this tangent? Hell if I know. What I do know is that my work screws me over, and I don't really have any choice in the matter. I really resent them for it.

What's worse is that it wasn't always this way. When I first started working at my job, I genuinely liked it. My bosses were nice and accommodating, and they seemed to actually care about my well-being. I used to say that if I won the lottery, I wouldn't stop working, because I enjoyed my job and I needed the structure it gave me.

Not anymore. Today, if I won the lottery, I'd quit in a heartbeat. I no longer feel like a valued employee. I feel like a cog in a wheel, and I feel like if they could, they would squeeze me and squeeze me and squeeze me until I'd given every last drop of my blood, and then they'd throw me on the garbage heap. I don't think they care at all what happens to me. If I had the chance to escape, I would.

I've actually been looking for a new job for — shit, pretty much two years now, if not longer. But the whole damn economy is in the toilet, and doesn't look like it's going to get any better.

It would be easy to blame the political leadership for this state of affairs — Democrats blame it on Bush, Republicans blame it on Obama. Honestly, I think there's more than enough blame to go around. Despite the fact that I lean to the right, I had high hopes for Obama initially. He's disappointed me, though. If you want a succinct reason why, check out this howler from Rachel Maddow:

Fucking seriously, Rachel? Hoover Dam? HOOVER FUCKING DAM?

Yeah, Hoover Dam is awesome. Don't get me wrong. It was a great project that provided terrific jobs to thousands of people during the Depression, when those jobs were really needed. TOO FUCKING BAD YOU COULDN'T BUILD SOMETHING LIKE THAT TODAY.

Seriously? You'd need to spend like 20 years going through five thousand damn environmental reviews to do a project like this today. And then there's the thousands of do-gooder lawsuits the government would have to fight off. It would probably go before the Supreme Court no less than three times. It would cost a billion dollars before you could even lay the first section of concrete.

Of course, a really bold, aggressive chief executive might be able to swiftly overcome these problems. That would take a tough, focused president who's not about to let Ivory Tower liberal crybabies stop the more honest liberals from actually, you know, doing shit to create jobs — because, hell, even massive socialist public-works boondoggles are a hell of a lot better than the unemployment line, for Chrissakes.

But instead of Hoover Dam, our esteemed president seems to think he can do the job with ... fucking windmills and solar panels. Hydroelectric dams were a proven technology in the 1930s, and even today Hoover Dam provides electric power to millions of people. I don't think there is a single windmill or solar panel that is even on the drawing board that will be putting out juice for twisty-bulbs seventy years from now.

I don't care if President Obama is a socialist. I'm just frustrated that he's so damn bad at it.

Sigh. Another tangent. Well, this is a blog, so this stuff is sort of freeform. It's not like I'm composing tight little essays here. It's just my random thoughts. And today all I can think of is how much I hate my job, and how much I want another one...