This is a test life. It doesn't really count
So here I sit at the kitchen table (oh GOD how Margaret Drabble) thinking what can I possibly write that someone else hasn't written.
Well. Today, in my corporate cyberwarren, where only those on over 60k merit their own desk, whereat to pin pictures of their identikit Aryan moppets, I was awarded a desk by the window. So I was not overlooked, or visited, or... well, anything really.
Once upon a time, I dreamt of this. Being uninterrupted. Left to get on with Important Stuff. To draft papers for Important People. Today, I just pissed around on the internet, wrote a few appraisals, kept pressing the refresh button on my email and... went off for lunch with a lovely internet friend.
What's happened to me? I used to be an ideal employee: working hard, working late, doing more than was asked of me. And now, earning A LOT more than I did then, I can barely motivate myself to get out of bed or complete my timesheet. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of what I ought to be doing: sadly, it's often stuff that my employers either don't value or don't understand. For example, I was asked, at the last minute, to come along to a meeting about some fancy new bells-and-whistles tool we are supposed to be using to evaluate everyone in my department. When, after playing with it, I said "But there are no criteria that apply to more junior members of staff... isn't that a bit demotivating?" - well, I might as well have said "Here, chew on this not-quite-dead rat". There was a long silence. Followed by "well, that's a valid point" in a Reaper-like voice from the main man. Oh dear.
And the thing is, I can't decide: am I taking the corporate system for a ride, or is it taking me for a mug? Does the money I get paid make up for the fact that half the time I end up feeling that I am about to be unmasked a la Scooby Doo? And most of the rest of the time, I spend heartily despising at least half of my colleagues.
This is a test post. It doesn't really count. Besides, I think I'm premenstrual. I must be; I've just eaten about a pound of shortbread. And I'm not normally this gloomy. Ask anyone. Anyone who manufactures gin, at least.
posted by Thea @ 10:30 PM
1 Comments:
I never dreamed of becoming me, in fact I haven't dreamed of being anything for a good half a lifetime or so. But life's gradually caught up with me along the way, and the time of writing finds me some way closer to whatever might be considered mainstream than I would ever have thought likely.
All the same, I'm nowhere near as identikit corporate employee as my CV would suggest, and neither are you - that much I know. I'm lucky enough to know that even if unmasked, unless I'm doing something way more nefarious than I ever have yet, I'm still too valuable to the organisation to get presented with a half-full cardboard box.
And as long as that remains the case, and as long as what work I do remains sufficiently challenging, and as long as it can be made to fit around my real life, that'll do for me.
I go to work, I provide decent value for the money I'm paid even if that value is not clinically measurable in units per hour. But I'm a person not a machine, and a hugely flawed person at that. And if they can't take a joke, they should have thought about that before they gave me a job!
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