fuck this job.com

Before I launch into my tirade, I wanted to note how grateful I am for this site. Lately, every email I've been sending my friends has been littered with complaints about work. These are justified, I suppose, but I feel bad to unload my ever on-going struggles with work onto my loved ones, over and over. So, whenever I'm tempted to email a friend and talk about how miserable my day from 8am - 5pm is, I'm going to come here. No one who reads or writes here expects anything different - a safe haven, if you will. So, to whoever started this and all of you who use it, thanks, I really need it.

That said...things are awful at work, just wretched. I'm sitting in my office with the door closed weeping as I write this (again, hormones are a contributing factor). It’s been busy, extremely busy and I made a mistake yesterday. It was cleared up, but I feel awful, especially considering I’ve been working my ass off. I feel like everything I do/have done is wrong and I’m terrible at this job. Maybe I’m just fated to fail, though I'm will to say that some of it must be my own fault. Maybe I’m overworked, maybe I don’t work hard enough, maybe both. The point is, I hate this job, I hate the work, I have everything about it and feel trapped here.

"When you feel like giving up, remember why you held on for so long in the first place."

So, I found the quote above, trolling the internet for some encouragement (pathetic, I know, but you do what you can to survive), seeing as I have nowhere else to turn for a kind word on this. And I definitely feel like giving up. I wish I could just get up and walk out; just walk down the road and never look back, disappearing into the horizon. Or else maybe I could just wander outside, lay down and die.

So, why HAVE I held on for so long?

I don’t know. I need a job. My husband doesn’t have one at this moment (he's been looking for 3 months) and everything seems to be resting on me and my job. No pressure or anything. This the only thing that keeps me at this job – our survival. I don’t enjoy the work or get any personal feeling of pride or fulfillment from it, absolutely none.

A friend of mine who works in the same department came into my office an hour ago. She's a wonderful woman who's very new to her job - she had maybe a week of training and then had to deal with one of the busiest times of the year. She has one direct co-worker who works slightly under her and she's new, as well. This woman, I'll caller her Emily, is one of the hardest working, most efficient and thorough employees I know - she's also very sweet and cares very much about her job. Well, apparently someone has been complaining about Emily and her co-worker's response times. This knocked the wind out of me! If someone can complain her performance, what chance do any of us have at succeeding? And I wish this were an isolated incident, but it isn't. The people above us, our "them," are demanding and utterly incapable of understanding. They want what they want when they want it - too fucking bad if you're swamped with work and needed some time in order to not do a half-assed job. It seems like her manager didn't stick up for her, either - I don't know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me if she didn't, not one bit. We're support staff, which apparently translates to "you live to serve us," which translates to "MY needs are the most important." Who are we supposed to treat as the most important if 20 people feel this way? Or 50? Every time anything goes wrong, we're blamed. Sometimes we are to blame, but often times, we are not. Oftentimes we're doing what we've always done and suddenly it's wrong. How do you apologize for that? I'd love to know because I'm due for spanking in 2 hours and have to do just that. What more can one do than fix the mistake as efficiently as possible? And why does the punishment never fit the crime?

*Sigh* I could go on for hours. I have no answers, nothing positive to say about anything, right now, other than maybe I'll mercifully be hit by a bus.

So, again, why have I held on for so long? I have no fucking idea.