Young Bidness

Ever since I started in middle management, coming up on four full years ago now, I've learned a couple of valuable lessons. First: striving is a mistake. I was 33 when I started at the place I'm still at, fresh out of eight-plus years of staying home raising three children. I was loaded down with most-of-a-decades' worth of the solid booster propellant of ambition, lit by the spark of human adult professional interaction. The resulting explosion sent me crashing through the sound barrier and... right into the institutional gray cubicle I still sit in today. Really, I've had three different job titles for two different companies while never leaving the 8x5 holding pen, body nor soul. Jobs exist where maneuvering and cajoling and politicking and liquid-lunching result in a career momentum that can trundle you out of your starting space into increasingly contested pieces of office real estate; ones with real desks or closing doors or, sweet mother of mercy, a window. I do not have one of those jobs. The hierarchical structure simply doesn't exist to accommodate advancement. I've seen Seven Layer Dip with more depth. You know, because we only have like three layers. That's less than seven layers. Seven is more than three.

So I've spent a lot of creative and emotional and physical energy trying to make something of myself. And to an extent I have: I've made myself into basically the same job with marginally better pay, but one where I'm required also to make reports about stuff on Excel spreadsheets. And fire people.

Which brings me to my second lesson: It's not always awful to fire people. Yes, OK, in the moment, it's awkward as fuck. But it my experience, they almost always sooooooo deserve it for being either a) terrible at their job or b) burdened with personalities (or personality-like constructs) fundamentally incapable of engendering the weakest, single heartbeat-worth of human empathy in another person. Luckily I've found that a) and b) tend to go together as often as not. My greatest fear is that one day I'll find the undeniable production savant who only wants to talk about small-batch whiskey or how Florida Georgia Line is really underrated as a band. I'm not sure what my options will be when that day arrives, but I suspect it will have to involve the cleansing purity of actual fire.

Lesson number three, then: don't kill yourself. Not just suicidally, I mean also by accident. Sure, sometimes things seem bleak and maybe you get the urge to drive your car full speed into a gas pump or even just decide to go ahead and eat the carnitas from the place with the B health rating that is so undercooked it's still more pig than pork. Remember, you're an important person and we need you. We can't actually think of anything specifically we might need you for at the moment, but boy, I bet if you just hold out long enough something will come up! Probably!

It occurs to me that this sounds like a lot of complaining, but it's not really. Things could always be worse. I could always have a job that threatened to come between me and the arbitrary rules I've adopted selectively for myself that bind me to my invisible sky-friends, putting what I imagine to be my soul in pretend eternal jeopardy and my actual (deeply stupid) body in jail. None of that is happening! Or if it is and there does exist some kind of god, I'm certain I lack the ability to comprehend him/her/it or his/her/its expectations for me, so if there's a soul-damning violation to commit, I'm certain I've fallen at that hurdle many times over already without even realizing I was running.

What I have instead is a job that sometimes involves frustrations, just like your dumb job does. Or your lack of a dumb job, if you're between gigs. It keeps me away from my home and family more than I would like* and it sure would be nice if I could get paid a bit more and hey, maybe if some of the people over whom I have no control would just agree to do things the way I want, meaning in any fashion that involves me not being involved with their work in any fashion, things would go a bit more smoothly for me.

But I choose to focus on the positives. Not because I'm an optimist, but because the particular positives of my job are so goddamned weird, they demand attention. Like one time I spent a month viewing, understanding and writing about 30+ hours of black-and-white raw World War II film, shot by military filmmakers. Also: I get to hire writers. People with MFAs in poetry or degrees in journalism work for me and have regular paychecks and medical insurance and shit like that. Maybe they're pecking away on their magnum opus in their off hours, I don't know, that's really more on them, but they could be without having to worry about getting pneumonia.

Well, everyone should worry about pneumonia, that's not really something to fuck with, but what I mean is they could get antibiotics for not a lot of money because of what we already deduct from their paychecks to put toward health coverage. That might have been clear already in context. Sorry.

On top of all that, they tend to make interesting people. Sardonic and self-aware, a bit narcissistic but in enough of a tortured kind of way to make them borderline charming. Great people with wide-ranging interests and genuine curiosity about other humans, at least to the extent that contact with people can be transmogrified into material for whatever screenplay they're chiseling away at in a Starbucks of a weekend. Overall, a measured but reliable joy to be around.

But I'm still looking for a different job. Because that one, that will be the one where I never get frustrated or restless. Whomever the last person was who vacated whatever position it is I'd be applying for, I'm sure they left purely out of guilt for having it so good for so long.

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*Roughly 40 hours per week