fuck this job.com

How should I describe my job. I guess I begin with the New York State fiscal budget. It starts with the Governor, in this case Elliot Spitzer, who at the end of each fiscal year is charged with drafting an Executive budget to be approved or amended by the state Senate and Assembly and signed. From the hallowed halls of the Legislature, it is walked upstairs to the Governor's Chambers and sent back to his desk for for approval. Next year, the budget will be more than $120 billion dollars, among the highest in American history and certainly the most expensive New York State has ever had. Two years ago it was $107 billion dollars. Last year, our bandits in state government raised it to $113 billion dollars. Among the appropriations for highway repairs, subsidized nursing home care and rubber gloves for the Department of Correctional Services guys to examine anuses with, outgoing Governor George E. Pataki approved a line in the spending, probably somewhere around $30,000, to employ a temporary office assistant to work in the Office of Mental Health. Like a growing zygote in the womb of its mother, that line took form, breathed life and became me; a temporary office assistant assigned to one of the myriad bureaus contained within one of the biggest departments in one of the biggest and certainly most spendthrift states in America. The politicians should have gone to the clinic and had me aborted.

I have just two weeks left in my five-month assignment. I'm not sure if the head of our bureau, a woman I've never met nor care to meet, will approve additional contingency spending for my position. Although it pays $14.35 an hour I'm not quite sure I want it. I'm pretty sure I'd rather sell dope or sit around in my apartment, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a hockey jersey, watching satellite television (we've got 500 channels including Club Jenna and Ten Extasy).

My workplace is a psychiatric center, deep within the bowels of our mental health system. My job is hardly one as glamorous as restraining the occasional errant schizophrenic or coaxing the guy with the ill-fitting three piece suit and dirty dreadlocks away from the cafeteria condiment station so others can get their ketchup cups.

If charged with writing a description of what I do each day by my boss I'd report the following:

Memo
To: Connie Doe
From: Tiger Morning Wood
Re: Job assignment

Basically, when I'm not working on some vague or senseless task you have assigned me to and will surely forget about
I sit here like an asshole for eight hours reading the updates from the previous night's National Hockey league action.
Oh, Connie, I forgot. There's this great Web site called Yahoo Answers. You know, run by Yahoo. Anyway, I answer people's
questions, which are usually about whether or not to break up with a cheating girlfriend or how to replace the gas hatch
on a 2001 Sentra. I get two points for answering a question, 10 more for being chosen as a best answer and I spend five
points whenever I ask a question. You should read the one I asked this morning. It was good. I wondered asked people if
they thought the actor Ray Romano ever got hard laying next to Patricia Heaton during the bedroom scenes on Everybody
Loves Raymond . As soon as I'm done writing this memo I'm going to go back and check and see what answers I got. I
hope I didn't offend to many fans because my question was a little risque, but that show sucked dick anyway. Oh, did you
Say you were a fan last week. When I'm not answering questions or finding out how the Islanders are doing, I read from
the BBC or NPR or click from one Wikipedia entry to the next. Did you know that in some weird six degrees of Kevin Bacon
way you can go from a stub on Czech independence leader Vaclav Havel to another on Stan Mikita and onward to an entry
written about that comedian who was never funny but used to do that annoying George H.W. Bush impression on SNL? I don't
remember his name, but I can show you how you can do it.
Oh, just in case you're curious, I like to leave files up on my computer while I'm burning music on my personal laptop with
CDs I brought (they look a little like the ones this agency carries actually). That way when you walk in--and I can hear your
shoes scraping against the carpet from fifteen feet outside of my office door--I simply have to click maximize on the document
and by the time you've made the left turn into my office to fill me in on something no one in the world could possibly give
a shit about, it looks as if I was working (although God knows what I could be working on because I nearly never have assignments
besides busy work which isn't really work at all).
Anyway, you normally talk to me for a while about something that you think needs to be done. I offer you some assistance in doing
it and offer to do it, but you don't listen and simply moan about bureaucratic nonsense that only you could believe or care about
for that matter. I stare into your fifty something eyes and wonder if it's ever occurred to you that your job is as much of
a drain on taxpayer resources as mine is, but I don't want to ruin your day. You seem so happy sitting behind your desk reading
email.
I've noticed you peruse the things that I write. You hang over it, your glasses suspended at the end of your nose, head jerking
around as if you are some anthropology professor examining an artifact. I wouldn't mind that of course if you'd bother to understand
what it is that you have us working on and didn't ask me really ignorant questions about the projects and curriculum we put out.
I'm tired of writing this memo already, but if you must know, I make money sitting here staring out my window mostly. One of the
few good sides of this job is the fact that I can now appreciate that birds can fly...I know, I know, it fucking blew my mind.
Two weeks ago, I was down in the dumps. We'd just had that asinine staff meeting where you called the field offices from throughout
the state and talked over the speaker phone for three yawning, dragging and torturous hours about nothing. None of us were listening
by the way, so you may want to try to make things more interesting next time. I've never heard someone talk and talk and talk like
you do and into a black piece plastic. I mean you're really talking to a machine, because the robots seated around you aren't
listening. One's thinking about her date with a guy from Match.com, another is thinking about her vacation, the other about shoveling
her walkway and another about whether to make macaroni with velvetta or actual slices of American cheese melted over the pasta.
Me, I'm thinking about sex. Dirty sex. Fulfilling sex. Good sex. Then I get depressed because I'm single and there's no one
in this bureau who is attractive, willing or premenapausal for that matter. But two weeks ago, I got out of the meeting (I'd scribbled
notes, pretending to be rapt in attention and then dumped them in the trash) and I went to my window for some solace.
I stared out at the grounds of the psychiatric center and thought that I was going to cry. What's happened to me. I'm still a young
man, I thought. Why was I there? It was cold and rainy and I thought my tears would compliment the weather, but they didn't come.
They refused to, for a part of my soul is dead now from this and other miserable things in life and the other took notice of something
on the ground. It was a robin and it was the prettiest creature I'd seen all winter. He took off from the ground and within seconds was
soaring through the air. I watched him disappear and I was filled with awe at him and his whole species and entire kingdom.
You weren't there, though. I heard you outside of the office, yapping and laughing. It's a laugh we all hate, peppered as it is with
sarcasm and insincerity. I hate that laugh. I'd rather hear the crows skwalk as they did in late November as they struggled to find
food. Then I realized, you are a crow, and so I went on Yahoo Answers and I asked a question about crows. Then I asked if anyone else
out there was ever as moved as I was with something we take for granted, the beautiful flapping motion that propels a bird through the
air.
Anyway, I've gotta answer a question on Yahoo right now. Someone's asking who the greatest closing pitcher of the 1990's was. I'm gonna
have to say Trevor Hoffman, but others will disagree. Now will you leave me alone.

My job is misery. I feel it's a part of a disease that I have and don't know about. I was put on Earth to be creative, but somehow can't harness it the way I used to. I don't want my youth wasted in this garbage. Life should be better.