I don’t mean to complain too much about my job. After all, it’ll pay the bills, and it’s certainly better than a kick in the ass.
It actually pays slightly more than AOL did (about $.68 an hour), which means it’s decent money.
Having no benefits also means having less money taken out of each check, though the fact that I will have no pre-tax deductions will mean having more income to be taxed, so I’m not sure how that’ll work out.
My manager seems like a nice enough guy (he sounds kind of like Bill Paxton).
Ultimately, I suppose it’s not really that crappy, it’s just that as I sat there yesterday I soon came to realize that I just don’t want to do that kind of work anymore.
Part of that realization is due to the tantalizing prospect of a much more interesting job that’s been dangling in front of me for a while, but even before the layoff I was growing increasingly discontent with the nature of my job, and it was really only my complacency and my reluctance to give up my three day workweek that was keeping me there, so in one way, so while getting laid off was the aforementioned kick in the ass, in some ways a kick in the ass was what I needed.
Not that the kick did me any good, given where I landed after it sent me hurtling through the air.
Yesterday, as I looked at myself in a mirror, I realized for the first time that my hair is truly and completely gray. There’s not even the barest hint of my original hair color. Just dark gray and pure white.
Despite the fact that the grayness is rather premature, I’m clearly not a young man anymore, yet I still don’t seem to know what I want to be when I grow up.
Even so, the one thing that I am sure of is that I don’t want to work in a NOC. I’m willing to do it, if I have to, but I really, really don’t want to, so I am, perhaps, being unfairly harsh in my evaluation of my new (but not-so new) gig.
One major aspect of what makes it so annoying, though, is one of my fellow new employees, a guy who’s got a good ten years on me and who just grates on my nerves whenever he opens his mouth, which is often.
And by “often” I mean “always.” The inane prattle and pointless questions just keep gushing forth from his mouth like water down Niagara Falls.
But beyond being annoyed by who he is, I’m repulsed by what he is: a middle-aged man who’s bounced from contract job t contract job for most of his career, never developing any firm roots. I suppose that I see in him my own fears about what taking a job like this, at my age, could mean for me. I know that I’ll never become a garrulous, obnoxiously talkative buffoon (not as long as I stay sober, at any rate), but I could become like him in that other regard, and the thought of that is troubling, particularly given that I’ve just recently learned how important things like security and at least some amount of certainty are to me.
Still, the point is that, while I’m not promising anything, I’ll try to curb my desire to bitch and moan about how much I hate my job.
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