The Working Man, Part Two

Work sucks. Am I the only one who thinks so? It seems quite absurd to me that, with each second of life being finite, precious, rare moments that will never come again, most of us will spend the overwhelming majority of our lives at work. Many Americans now work for corporations and spend all day every day participating in one small part of bigger processes they have no interest or control in, counting the minutes until they can go home, where they have a bite to eat, relax a few hours, then go to bed and wake up the next day to do it again. And so it continues week after week for years until finally one reaches retirement when finally one can start doing what one wants to do, instead of what one must do. Does it seem silly to anybody else but me that we put off living that long? That we must sacrifice so much of our limited time in order to survive?

It will not come as a surprise, actually, that I’m writing this at work. I’m doing so in order to look busy. Its nearly 2:00, and I only have a little over an hour left before I can go home. I’ve finished everything I have to do today. I’m not particularly interested in making up some kind of project to start so late in the day, and nobody is particularly interested in thinking up things for me to do. I cannot, of course, look like I’m not working, and so I sit and type and pretend to be intensely busy while the people around me do the same. The whole situation reeks of absurdity. You may call me a bad employee, but that’d be unfair and my feelings would really be hurt, and then you’d have to buy me flowers to make it up to me. So save yourself the money and don’t call me a bad employee. Actually, you should see how hard I work most of the day. It’s just that when my work runs out (none of which is vital in the slightest, but which I resolutely take seriously anyway) I think its absolutely ridiculous to have to find something to do. Yes, the last hour of the day is my lazy hour.

I blogged a month ago about how lucky I was to find this job. And I was; it’s been really great for my odd schedule, allowing me to be in both evening plays and still perform Tuesdays with my Hamlet touring group. (Which, by the way, performs at BYU next weekend. Everybody go see!!) It also pays pretty well and, when I get hired on as an official Nestle employee (which should happen any day now) I’ll even get something of a raise. So its absolutely perfect, except for one thing. I really just hate it. Now, not quite enough to make it worth quitting and go through the ordeal of looking for another one, and yet not quite so little that I can just grow numb to it over time. Most of the time I’m pretty good, but every couple of weeks or so all the pent up irritation floods out and I feel that if I spend another minute in this place I’ll literally die. Spontaneously. Poof. I had one of those yesterday, and it was not pretty. I once went through a period of my life where I was forced to be someplace doing something that I did not want to do for a very long period of time, and the parallels between having to work all day and that experience which shall remain nameless were causing me to panic. All the traumatic memories came back, you see. Of course I was just being completely dramatic, and today has been much better but there is still this problem of work. Frankly, I’d rather be doing something else.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t have to contribute to society, or do an honest day’s work to make a living. But so many people hate their jobs. And since people’s lives are largely dominated by work, some of those people hate their lives. There are plenty of people who love their work, and I think that’s very important. When you like what you do, it becomes part of who you are. The time you spend during the day at work isn’t a obstacle to your goals and desires, its part of them. On one of my favorite TV shows in the history of TV, “The West Wing,” the characters spend literally every moment of the day on job. But they like what they do, it consumes them, its what they want to do with their time. Its not just for the money, which is good because working for the White House isn’t the way to go if that’s your only motivation. If I had a job that I loved like that, I guess I wouldn’t complain so much about work. But the question is, what job is there that I would actually like doing? I mean, obviously being actor would fit the bill, that goes without saying. But besides that, so I can have some back-up plans, would you all please suggest a career that you think I would be good at and enjoy? There will be a prize for the best suggestion!