Office Space

My job is not my life.

My job exists to finance the rest of my life.

My job is not the sphere of my life in which my ambitions reside.

Therefore, it does not matter that my boss, who has been ignoring my increasingly frequent pleas for feedback so that mondo, giganto, expensive project could start moving forward and possibly meet deadline without creating the need to warp the space-time continuum, has now taken it upon himself to not only expand said project [scope creep alert!] but has also decided that he, with no experience in the field, can write a better project specification than I with my nearly dozen years’ experience can write.

I just need to remind myself that I chose this job because I wanted to have the checks clear, be able to leave it all at the office, and not be responsible for anything.  I wanted to be a code monkey.  That my boss is treating me as such is the desired outcome.

Breathing out.

The key now is to make sure that I live up to my potential in other areas of my life.

We have a heating problem at my office. For some reason known only to the idiot architect who designed this building only the offices with windows have vents. Interior offices, such as the one I’m in, get all of our ventilation through secondary systems that, it has become apparent as the temperature drops outside, aren’t temperature regulated at all. As a consequence my office, the two down the hall, and the two up the hall, have been hovering at some where around 60 degF for the past week.

Now, 60 degF is a great temperature for a spring day after a long winter. It feels positively balmy and certainly makes me smile but it’s not something you want to sit in all day while you try to work. It’s particularly not something you want to sit in all day when the people with the primo offices are nice and toasty warm and you work in a dark hole in the ground with no access to outside light (no, I’m not bitter or anything).

Yesterday I couldn’t get warm and my job being what it is I decided to go home and work. My coworkers, who also have the choice to go home and work, chose to stay and suffer in the cold. This morning it was apparent that the heating problem was 1) not going to get solved by building management (the sum of their response to our questions about whether or not they could do anything about the cold was a two syllable grunt), and 2) wasn’t going to get solved by the organization’s management (yes, I can go home to work but I shouldn’t be required to and if I am I shouldn’t be required to ever come back to the office again).

How does this relate to the difference between politically liberal vs. politically conservative? Simple: the liberal will sit around in the cold whining about how cold it is and complaining that “management” isn’t living up to its social responsibility whereas the conservative will tell you that you should feel damn lucky to have a job at all.

Me, I went out and bought a space heater.

Went on a job interview today for a position for which I am utterly qualified at an organization that I would have no problems with supporting its mission for quite some time to come. But they asked the question: how do you see this job fitting in with your career ambitions?

Now how the hell do you answer that question when you don’t have any career ambitions?

It was very hard not to say flat out, “Look, I want a job where I get to do stuff that I like to do, which is where I’ve developed my professional skills, working for people who aren’t complete assholes. My ambitions are not professional; they’re personal and they don’t really have any impact on my ability to do a good job for you in this position.”

But I didn’t. And maybe they’ll invite me back for a second interview. Or maybe they won’t and if they don’t, they don’t know what they’ll be missing.

* I already own a lot of orange and blue clothing was the sum of my friend Kathy’s essay on why she wanted to go to the University of Virginia. Needless to say, she was rejected and got to go to the school she wanted to go to not the one her parents would have preferred.