You know how someone makes a cheesy remake of a childhood show or cartoon (I’m thinking the Grinch movie here), and someone says “they’re raping my childhood”?
Well, now, through the miracle of modern technology, your childhood memories can be pre-ruined for your convenience.
The players:
Boss Not Boss (BNB): Not my boss, but plays one on TV. My actual boss does something or another, but I rarely ever see him these days, so my co-worker got a kinda implicit, non-pay-increase promotion to tell us what to do. He’s a nice enough guy, but he frequently has a disconnect between what he is thinking and what he thinks he’s explaining, which makes information transfer a tricky and unreliable process. This extra sucks when it comes from the guy who’s telling you what needs to be done.
The UK guys: our company is owned by a company in the UK, and despite the fact that we are their largest, most profitable company, they tend to forget we exist. A year or two ago, we took their treatment of us and turned it into paranoia: most of the people in my group were convinced that the UK was taking on all our work in preparation for calling our jobs redundant. After two years of not being laid off, though, we’ve settled into a sort of dull acceptance that they just don’t care about us a whole lot, and we pick up the dregs of whatever mind-numbing work they don’t feel like dealing with.
Each of those items is worth a story in itself, but nevermind for now. That’s the setup for last week:
Exhibit A: I’m telling you this.
Work is “teh sukc”, as the kids say. The whole week’s been a reminder of how little they regard me and how little they need me. There were times in my job here where I said “if I left, it’d be a real problem for them,” but not now. I’m pretty sure they’d barely notice, as far as work scheduling goes. I’m a problem solver by nature, and work’s just giving me nothing. And even my fallback position, “invent projects for myself and improve things on my own,” is getting nowhere, because each time I try to get something done I get resistance from other people, and I have no authority to actually tell people to do things. So I’m feeling pretty goddamn useless right about now.
So, blah, I’m now in a position where I’m wholly working for the money, which I used to say I wouldn’t do, but here I am. And the way I feel now, I have no interest or ability to try to explain to someone else (e.g., interviewer) why I’m worth hiring, so I’m pretty much stuck. And it’s dragging me down something awful.
But, aside from wallowing, I wanted to post about this because I’ve learned something over the years that may help others who got depression. When I mentioned it to my therapist, she took a note to pass it on to other people, so I figure maybe I thought up something good.
Anyway, it’s this: don’t let depression depress you. I used to feel bad about being depressed, or I’d figure there’s more going on that’s making me depressed that I don’t even know about and go looking for other things that could be wrong (and usually make things worse), or feel generally inferior for being depressed. Or I’d realize I wasn’t doing anything to improve my situation, and “if you’re so depressed, why don’t you do something to fix it?” but I’m just in no state to do so, but given I’m generally a troubleshooter I’d feel like a failure for not fixing my problem. Which would be additionally depressing.
But now, I mean—I really feel like shit. My limbs are weak, I don’t even feel like sitting up, I honestly wanna find a dark corner and curl up on the floor. But at the same time, I’m like, so the fuck what. It’s just a mood, it’ll pass. No, I’m not being productive about myself right now, but screw it, I’m just not in a mood to do it. Eventually, my core goofiness will kick back in and I’ll work something out and be fine, but for now, I just gotta accept it and ride it out.
At that point, depression gets relegated to the level of, say, you wake up and your knee really hurts. You limp around for the whole day, and it’s painful and annoying and makes everything you do more difficult, but eventually it’ll pass and you’ll be fine. That’s kind of how I approach my depression these days: I woke up with a hurt in my brain, but I know that in a couple days it’ll smooth out. Even when I’m in the depths of my grandest mope, coming to understand this has provided me some real perspective and comfort.
Years ago, I worked in tech support for a large government facility. Joe, one of my co-workers–college age, libertarian, unhappy with the way things were run–had reached his breaking point with HR not letting him work at home. Pregnant women/recent mothers were allowed to work from home, though not officially. He spent a lot of time trying to convince them that it was unfair, but got nowhere. His tolerance gone, he decided to make a point about it.
He made this point by sending e-mail to the facility’s “Everyone” mailing list. These days, if you’re a corporate employee, you already see the problem. But this was, oh, maybe 1994 or 1995, the early days of modern corporate e-mail, so it wasn’t understood that this was an easy way to make a mess of the e-mail system. But that’s fine, pass that part over, because here’s the kicker: he started the mail with something like, “there’s something bothering me, and I have to get it off my chest or I’m going to go postal.”
That certainly got everyone’s attention. In tech support, we all got the mail, read it, and said to ourselves, “ah geez Joe, what are you doing now.” We knew him; we knew he wasn’t seriously contemplating picking up a gun and shooting random employees; in fact the phrase “go postal” did not even register with any of us as a problem. We had a sorta “ah, crud, people on the network are going to complain about this useless email” reaction. Joe wasn’t in our building at the time, so we couldn’t go to his desk and tell him not to be an idiot with the mailing lists, but for my part, I read it and processed it and forgot about it.
So we were sort of surprised to learn later that Joe had been escorted off the facility in handcuffs while people determined what kind of threat he presented. I couldn’t imagine why, until I heard from people in other buildings that the “going postal” references actually scared a lot of people, to the point they were too anxious to leave their offices until the threat was resolved. They had no idea who this Joe guy was or what the hell he was talking about, but they sure saw that he was thinking about going postal.
I mention all this because I’m trying to use my first “eh, so what” reaction to Joe’s e-mail, and the pointless panic that ensued, as a guide to understanding how Boston could’ve gone so apeshit insane over a couple cartoon Lite Brites.
Today I am waging battle with my pride. It’s putting up a hell of a fight.
I’d give you details, but I’m not the kind of idiot who gives specifics about his job in a blog. Just mentally put “dear diary” at the front of this and some frowny face dots over some I’s and that’d probably make the context more appropriate.
I’m getting used to the indignities of my job. Mostly. I used to be worse on this point, but I’m getting around to convincing myself it’s just a required and natural part of corporate employment.
