From the movie Office Space:
"I was sitting in my cubicle today and realized that every single day of my life has worse than the day before it, so every single day that you see me is on the worst day of my life."
It's amazing how many parallels I find between my life and Office Space...
P. 299 begins the book's discussion of burnout. Working in a large corporation, I've experienced bad burnout. Having worked in smaller companies, I always thought that working for a large international corporation was a glamorous endeavor... boy was I wrong.
Working for my first large corporation excited me. I learned about my important role in internal affairs and how I fit into this huge machine. I played my role of a cog very well, diligently doing my job. Unfortunately, this excitement was short-lived. My role became tedious and redundant. I began to notice how little my job was appreciated and how management eschewed feedback. Soon, I was a victim of burnout. I literally dreaded coming to work. I considered taking a year off and being a rice farmer... it sounded more fun than my job.
I eventually got out of this rut by transferring to an external team. Working with individual customers allowed new experiences and new challenges. I was able to see my work making a real difference.
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2 comments:
You're fortunate that your company allowed you to transfer. This isn't always an option for privatized jobs. It's important to remember that work production can be affected by your coworkers and their expectations of you. I'm glad that you had the opportunity to transfer and that working alongside customers gave you a some revitalization. If you have strong interpersonal skills, one-on-one interactions can be the most satisfying.
Office Space is one of my favorite movies - watching it was definitely one of my "laugh so you don't cry" coping mechanisms during particularly bad times in my career. (Oddly enough, I didn't feel the same way about "The Office", either the British or the US version - watching that just made me feel like I had never left work for the evening. But I digress.)
At my last corporate job, I experienced burnout a few months after being promoted to management. I had been on the verge of burnout with my previous position, but I held out a glimmer of hope that things would improve once I got promoted. After some time, however, I realized that my new position was pretty much the same as the old one, except with even more irritating responsibilities added on. The new office didn't help, the new title didn't help, even the new paycheck didn't help. Every 6 AM alarm ring was greeted with a mumbled "oh, God, no... not yet..."
When burnout really set in was when I realized there was no way out in the company I was working in. And so, early one Monday morning while stuck in traffic, something inside me snapped. I started mentally composing a letter to my undergrad adviser asking if I could come back and finish my degree, and typed e-mailed that letter as soon as I got to work.
Within one week of that moment, I had resigned my position, sublet an apartment near Chicago, and made arrangements to attend enough classes that summer to finish my degree. And when I returned to Michigan, it didn't occur to me in the slightest to call my old company back.
Your rice farming dream resonated with me, though. Even though I'm in graduate school to study something I'm passionate about, every once in a while (usually before a deadline) I look to my husband and whimper "Can't we go up into the mountains and raise goats for a while?" One of these days, he may just snap and hold me to that.
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