Coming home too damn tired to do anything else, even including chores, is top for me.
I have dishes lying around, laundry needing to be done at somepoint, some extra small tasks to do. But, trying to go ‘above and beyond’ for a shitty job just leaves you with nothing left to do them, having to waste time off to finally do them.
I’m in a building that’s not my home, for 8 hours (used to have some days where it was 10 hours), a night. Where my company tries to tell me to treat their building that I work in, as a second home. Dealing with all of these tasks that ultimately mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Dealing with people who conveniently forget a lot of the time, as to how to be a normal human being and they being at your expense.
And in addition to coming home too damn tired to do anything else, I’m sometimes worrying if what I’m making now for however many hours, is enough to cover everything I need to have or want to have.
All of it.
I would love nothing more than to never work another day in my life.
I hate playing the diplomacy game. I’m an engineer. I should be able to present the data and have it speak for itself. Sure there’s some skill in data presentation, but I shouldn’t have to kiss up to get my project approved.
- the dreadful commute
- the corporate policies that are profoundly arbitrary
- the business processes that add needless amounts of overhead, all to justify people’s jobs
- the needless meetings and back and forth for things that should be solvable in five minutes
- spineless leadership
- entitled clients
5/6 go hand in hand. For my current project, because we have leadership unwilling to push back on the client, the client feels entitled to demand things above the contract terms. This of course trickles down to everyone else to accommodate.
Overall my work is fine but these things stick out. I am incredibly indifferent to the success of any given project. My investment beyond my daily contributions is low to nonexistent. At the end of the day, if they’re going to pay me to be inefficient what do I really care.
Companies that tell you to treat the building as your “second home”, but then frown when you want to bring your laundry to work, do yoga or workouts at your desk, or bring your kids or Grandma into the office so you can keep a eye on them.
There’s an argument to be made here in/around the area of cleanliness (I agree on the other points). I once worked somewhere that someone left toe-nail clippings in the nursing room, and the restroom floor under the urinals was an perpetual and inexhaustible puddle of piss. It’s hard to say if the responsible parties did this because they felt at home, or felt very much the opposite.
It’s things like this that make managers sanitize their speech and say naive “treat this place like you live here” mandates, as though they’ve never met someone that lives like a feral raccoon, nor understand that such edicts can elicit a rebellious response.
At my main job: politics. performative bullshit. Doing things because the big boss says so even if they have negative effects on productivity as well as the final product.
At my own company (farm): farm stuff be expensive. Working in 35+ degrees at 80%+ humidity in the summer sucks.
The coercion and the exploitation without proportionate compensation
The notion that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, we are productive.
I do real work for a few hours each day and I still get told I work too much or am “the fastest” on the computer.
Daily commute. Fuck cars and fuck city planning around cars. I stay in a box for 1 hour so I can work in a box, so I can stay in a box for another hour until I can finally get back to my box
I honestly hate work itself, I’m not doing what I want if I’m working. There is no job I want.
I tell this to people and they simply do not understand. “What if you found something you like doing, then it’s not really work!” It’s still working. I will not enjoy it. I would rather have the freedom to choose what I’m doing at any particular time. People just cannot grasp that idea. But I also may not be explaining myself well, such is life.
What is your hobby? I turned my hobby (web design) into a business in 2004 while in college because I had the same mentality you posted.
depending on it for survival
Productivity goes up, all tools are used to achieve it, but pay and hours stay the same.
I really struggle with work that doesn’t feel meaningful. It’d be nice to feel like I was contributing something meaningful to my community. My favorite jobs were working for school districts. Not teaching, but just being a part of that overall system felt so satisfying.
Same, worked for a nonprofit for 7 of my 12 adult years that rented space to 2 schools (small high school and a daycare/preschool) within their buildings and we had our own services after session. Wasn’t directly involved with the teaching for the schools but did maintain all the computers for students and teachers while having a small program training a couple of the teens to manage a repair shop fixing those computers. That provided more satisfaction than any other job since, even though I will still hate Roblox with a passion on how much like a virus it acts to whatever it gets installed to, I’d do it again if the opportunity was open, but it was a unique deal between the three.
I’ve had countless shitty jobs and shitty bosses. Now I’m in charge of a team and, as a product of who I am and my own lived experiences, I treat them fairly and with a degree of kindness and sympathy that I’ve never really had from my former bosses.
I overlook a lot of the petty paperwork and have various on-going deals with staff whereby I’m extremely flexible and they reciprocate by often going the extra mile for me. Our team mostly runs well and my own manager is pleased.
However, I occasionally feel unappreciated by 1 or 2 staff who have been there so long that they’ve forgotten how things could be if I was inflexible, stuck strictly to the rules and came down on them a lot harder - which an other boss could easily do.
I suspect that some mistake my kindness for weakness, even though I’ve always spoken with authority and plainly, albeit in private to those that have needed it.
Truth is we’re local gov, the perks are good, as is the job security, but there’s an element of complacency and an awareness that you have to do a lot wrong to get fired - and it’s a long process.
So yeah, I mostly don’t mind my job, but I resent staff who haven’t had it as bad as I have in the past and don’t seem to understand that their decent conditions are because of who I am, and are not really the norm in other departments.
People who have neither worked direct patient care in over two decades nor ever worked in my specialty—trying to tell me what’s best for my patients. I work night shift so that my interactions with such people are minimal, but they do still happen occasionally.
When management/HR treats the employees like children in kindergarten with condescening words and tone of voice, playing stupid games to force getting to know co-workers, and generally having an “I am better than all of you” attitude.
Being forced to stand on jobs where you’re just doing a repetitive task that doesn’t require moving around. Guarding a single door, cashier in a shop, QA inspector on a assembly line, etc. No god damn reason these should require being on your feet 8-12+ hours.
Physical labor in general. Shit hurts.
