I realized something about myself recently. Actually I realized something about myself that I keep realizing but forget about. It’s that I have never gotten used to the whole “work” thing. I don’t mean this in the way that I’m some sort of a lazy ass and don’t know how to work. What I mean is I’ve never gotten used to the idea of work is work and not fun time. I know I’m probably not being very clear about this but it’s not something that is completely clear to me. Let me give you an example that will hopefully make it somewhat clear.
Back in high school I worked at Baskin Robbins scooping ice cream. At BR31, I spent the day socializing with my co-workers, customers, and scooping the hell out of that ice cream. But to me it didn’t feel like work because the environment was so fun and laid back. Even when there was a bad day, it would only last for a short while and still remain fun. To this day this is my favorite job.
After high school I got a job with IBM in Austin. The job started off great! The pay was awesome, the work was new and challenging, and more important I worked with some entertaining people. This lasted about a year before I really started to dislike my job. They started putting a ton of metrics in place where before there were none. People started to leave for greener($$$) pastures and everyones mood soured. It was really hard for me to get up in the morning to go to work. At this point the calling in sick, slacking off, etc started. I finally get fed up and get a job with Tivoli, a company owned by IBM but they had a very hands off approach to it. Again my spirits were renewed! Working with great people (some from AIX), great laid back environment, and most of all Beer Fridays! My work performance was awesome during this time. I was the “shit” if you will. Then the tech bubble burst and things started to change. Tivoli wasn’t performing so well and IBM took a tighter grip over everything. They again introduced a ton of metrics, people’s attitudes soured, and slowly got rid of the Beer Fridays. On top of that, my manager moved on (forced, I believe). The new manager was someone who was a engineer on our team. Because he was so new his manager made the decisions about raises. I will tell you I seriously got the short end of the stick. I knew this because I knew other peoples starting salary and the raise. This pissed me off so I went to another manager and told them I would love to move over. The following Monday it was done. At this point I was still stewing in my own pissiness but things got better again. The new team was a band aid and things were fine for awhile. I got tired of that team and then went to another team. Rinse and Repeat. As I write this I’m on another team where the environment just sucks. I’ve actually managed to go backwards. I left a great small team with a crappy manager to go to a team with a great manager but filled with the most whiniest ass people I have ever worked with. We are talking 30-40 year old men and women that bitch and moan about everything. EVERYTHING!
I don’t know if you can really call that an “example” but hopefully you get the picture. I know millions of people work in environments they absolutely hate. But for me, as soon as shit starts stinking I completely shut off. This is something I know I need to change but I have not the slightest idea of how. I would love to hear from some other people on how they coup with this because I don’t know how much longer I can change teams every time I start disliking something.
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