How is my new job going? Well…

Last week was hellish. I got thrown an awful lot of work to do in a very short amount of time, and managed to nearly get fired. Yeah. Called into the boss’s office on week number three of a new job– not cool. You see, I’d been given all this extremely boring and poorly documented work for a major credit card company– essentially doing copy editing for outrageously dry pages about “corporate brand standards”. I was handed over fifty pages of this stuff on Wednesday and told I’d need it to be finished and ready to show to the client on Monday afternoon. Well, after some technical glitches set me back most of Thursday, my project manager (bless her heart) checks in Friday morning, informs me that they actually need the shit done by Monday morning, and drops the wonderful words everyone loves to hear: “Looks like you’ll be working through the weekend.”

And that pretty much killed my enthusiasm for my job, the advertising business, and life in general. I mean, fuck: I’d just gotten over a 10-day head cold / allergy slugfest, hadn’t had a complete night of sleep in a week or more, and on top of everything else, it was my birthday weekend.

Now while I may not be an outgoing, positive, bubbly guy most of the time, I care about my work. I take pride in doing even boring, repetitive crap well. But all this overtime crap (for which, by the way, I wouldn’t be getting paid) put me in such a funk that I was ready to walk out. And I guess my contempt was pretty apparent.

Shortly after working through lunch, I was called into my boss’s office. He asks me to close the door and says: “I’m worried that we haven’t seen much progress from you. You seem like you’re not really interested in the kind of work we do here.” And I oh-so-badly wanted to say “YES! You’ve read my mind!” You see, I’ve felt uncomfortable there all along. I’m in a department full of programmers– java, C#, DotNet, etc– and I’m the guy who knows what? HTML? And while “Web Developer” sounds like a cool job for people that like, um, programming things, I know full well that I don’t care for the “back end” of the internet.

I mean, shit: did I go to school for CS? Fuck, no. And I’m pretty sure it’d take a loaded gun to my head to get me to actually learn a language. I know a lot of people would kill to get in on the entry level of web-based programming and really dig the opportunity to advance, develop skills, etc– but that’s not me. I couldn’t see myself working there in five years, and the way it was going that Friday, I didn’t expect to find myself sitting at that desk come Monday.

But the idea of quitting hurt. All these “great” things about my job: the commute, the casual dress, the paychecks– should I really throw all that away and start from scratch? I sure as fuck didn’t like being broke and jobless. So I told my boss I needed help on the project. And I apologized for seeming negative towards everything.

That defused the situation and also got one of the programmers to take on half the load, thankfully. I worked late Friday. I came in on Saturday– and finished my half at least well enough to turn in Monday morning. I hit the bars to celebrate my birthday on Saturday night.

Monday came around too soon. I tried to put a happy, enthusiastic face on as we sat there making minor corrections and quality testing for thirteen-and-a-half hours. Really: I got to work at 8:15am and left at 9:45pm. Uggh. But it was done, and I was ready to scream.

Since then, the pace of work has slowed to a crawl– so I haven’t quit. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen every time a client demands an impossible deadline (some advocacy from my Project Manager would help a lot). I can do the boring, tedious stuff, and even do a good job at it. But as soon as it encroaches on the rest of my life, I feel obligated to do anything but just sit back and take the abuse. It’d be different, of course, if it were my own business… or I was interested in the work… or the prospect of career advancement lay in front of me. But I need this job, and I guess that priority won out. Blecch.