No One Cares if You Hate Your Job. Just Work.

If I had a dollar for every time I said I hated my job, I could retire. And live in a mansion. On Mars.

My fucking hate current job. I often go to bed with a knot in my stomach Sunday through Thursday night. I sometimes wake up with chest pains, nausea, or both. I don’t sleep well or long enough to feel rested, so each day, I’m working on a growing sleep deficit.

By the time the weekend rolls around, I’m a shambling, drooling mess of a creature. And two days isn’t long enough to recover. So I start the next week with only a partially recharged battery, and the cycle begins anew.

What’s frustrating and depressing is, this has been my experience the majority of my adult life. It’s also a common experience for many people I know.

Everyone needs to work. I get that. It’s how our economy is structured. It’s what we spend the first part of our lives preparing for. It may come as a surprise to some people that schools aren’t government-sponsored baby-sitting facilities — they’re supposed to teach us the skills we’ll need to enter the workplace and make a living.

***

I was lucky enough to grow up in a supportive home with parents who worked hard. I was also lucky enough to have good teachers for most of my primary and high school education. The overarching message from my parents and teachers was, “If you work hard in school, you can do anything you want to do, and be anybody you want to be.”

You know, those variations on Thoreau’s advice to go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

It's a nice thought.

Only, reality has a far different and more forceful message. It goes something along the lines of, “Hey asshole, get a job!”

Oh sure, you can chase your dreams, but do it on your own time. Once you clock in, someone else owns your ass.

***

From the moment I graduated high school, I stopped hearing “you can do and be whatever you want,” and started hearing things like, “you’d better get a job.”

It didn’t matter which job. It didn’t matter if I enjoyed it or not. It only mattered that I had one.

Suddenly, going confidently in the direction of one’s dreams was a fool’s errand, one that usually landed those optimistic, stubborn, or foolhardy enough to pursue them on skid row.

My first job out of high school was working at a gym.

I wanted to work there because 1) I wanted the free gym membership that came with being an employee there, and 2) It was a three-minute drive from my house.

In the four months I worked there, I had three managers, zero training on how to do the job, and had been threatened by at least two dozen roided-out assholes complaining about miniscule things like a trashcan they felt wasn’t being emptied fast enough or weights they felt weren’t stacked in the correct places on the racks.

I broke up fights, I washed endless loads of towels, and I cleaned a locker room in which the toilets seemed like they were a mild suggestions.

When I say it was a shitty job, I mean that in a figurative and literal sense.

But I had a job. And that’s what matters.

Eventually, I quit. But luckily, I had something else lined up.

I began working at a corporately owned pet supply store…which happened to be right next door to the gym from which I’d just quit.

I worked there for three miserable, urine-soaked years of my life I’ll never get back.

You’re probably thinking, “If it was so bad, why’d you work there for three years?”

Two reasons.

The first being, my girlfriend at the time’s dad knew the store manager, and he vouched for me. I didn’t want to let him down, so I stuck with it. Moreover, my girlfriend was afraid that, if I quit the job her dad had basically gotten me, he wouldn’t like me anymore.

The second reason? I made some really good friends working there. In fact, I met one of my best friends there, my friend Shawn. He would later be the person who dragged my unconscious body out of that pool the night of my accident and performed CPR in order to get me breathing again.

Had I not met him, I don’t know if I’d be sitting here typing this right now.

That, and Shawn is one of the best guys I know. And we initially bonded over the shared trauma of working at a corporately-owned pet supply retail establishment which treated its employees like cattle.

Retail is a miserable enough job, but pet retail is whole new circle of Hell.

Why?

People love the shit out of their pets. People will spend their last dollar on their animals. They'll go hungry just so their pet won’t have to. I’m a pet person too, so I get it. And if, as a pet supply retailer, you don’t have all of the exact items someone needs for their animal, may God have mercy on you.

I was once chewed out by an 80-year-old woman because the store was out of her cat’s favorite flavor of Fancy Feast.

I wish like Hell I was making that up.

I also had a guy threaten to kill me in the parking lot because I wouldn’t allow him to return a Hefty Bag full of mystery kibble without a receipt.

Seems an appropriate response.

Once, during a visit, one of the regional managers snapped her fingers at me and pointed at something she thought needed my immediate attention while glaring daggers at me. She didn’t speak to me; that would have been beneath her. For you see, she was higher up in the company, therefore, she was a better person than I was.

This was the attitude of the vast majority of middle and upper management.

At one point, I began having a recurring nightmare in which I was chained around the neck to one of the cash registers with an ever-growing line of angry customers, who eventually began walking out of the store without paying for their items as they ignored my pleas that they needed to pay for their stuff.

But I was employed. And that’s what’s important.

***

Eventually, I left the shit-stained (literally in some places, as animals were allowed in the store and frequently pooped on the floor) pet store job and moved on to the glamorous life of an office supply warehouse stock picker (try to say that five times fast).

I actually liked the office supply warehouse. The management appreciated the staff. I received adequate training on the various duties I’d need to perform. And for the most part, I really got along with everyone I worked with.

However, I was working 55+ hours a week while trying to go to school full time. Moreover, because I was working from 3pm to sometimes 3am, Monday through Friday, and trying to get to class by 7:30am Tuesdays and Thursdays, I was only sleeping 5 nights a week. I sometimes got an hour nap between class and the warehouse, but that meant going to work without having eaten lunch.

I lost 35 pounds in six months.

My body hurt all the time.

Not just from the lack of sleep, but because I’d do stupid things like move a 600 pound safe by myself. Who needs a clamp-truck when you can just muscle it up onto a pallet?

The only reason I could maintain this schedule was because I was 22 and in shape.

However, school quickly began to take a backseat to my work schedule, and I began failing my classes. Not surprisingly, I soon failed out of school.

But I had a job, even though it was something with limited opportunities for advancement, and it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

***

All of this became a moot point, because that summer (2005), I broke my neck and would spend the next two years recovering and learning how to function again.

The upside of my accident was if forced me to reevaluate every aspect of my life. One of the things I thought the most about was the jobs I could have post-injury. I couldn’t stand, let alone load trucks anymore, so a manual labor job like the warehouse was out. But I knew, even being a quadriplegic, eventually I’d need to get a job.

I wanted to write, and at the time, I specifically wanted to be a screenwriter (I watched a lot of movies during recovery because there was little else I could do). But that required going to school, and I’d recently had a terrible academic track record.

Luckily, there was an amazing community college near my house that offered adapted PE classes as well as film studies classes. Without having to balance school with work and getting the opportunity to take classes I enjoyed, I excelled at school. I eventually enrolled full-time and began repairing my dismal college GPA.

This road eventually led me to the University of Arizona, where I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature, and to Mills College where I earned my Master’s in the same field.

Thanks to student loans, I was able to be a full-time student. And when I did work, it was as a student teacher — something that actively moved me in the direction of the career I was pursuing.

Degrees in hand, I finally landed a job I loved.

I became an adjunct English professor at Sacramento City College. It’s a job I looked forward to everyday. It’s a job that was a ton of work, but it was work I enjoyed. It was a job that had a certain degree of flexibility inasmuch as whatever work I had to do outside of the classroom, I could do at a coffee shop or in other comfortable surroundings.

I thought, “Oh, this is it. This is what I worked for. This is the kind of job my parents and teachers were talking about when they said, if I worked hard, I could get the kind of job I wanted. I’ll never have to work a shitty job again!”

I couldn’t have jinxed myself more if I’d tried.

Between COVID and declining enrollment, suddenly, there weren’t enough classes to go around. Being the low man on the totem pole, I found myself without classes to teach. I’m still in the adjunct faculty pool, but the likelihood of my teaching any time soon are smaller than my interest in ever seeing a Twilight movie (that’s really, reaaaaallly small).

In the meantime, I still had bills to pay.

So I did what responsible adults do. I found employment elsewhere.

And it’s another job I hate.

But I have a job, and that’s what matters.

***

My question is, why? Why do I and so many others seem destined to have jobs we can’t stand, jobs we dread going to, jobs which have little to no chance of advancement? Why is it so often a job and not a career?

I realize that I’m lucky to have a job, especially in the current economy. I realize many people have lost their livelihoods due to the pandemic and are struggling or failing to make ends meet.

I also realize that life isn’t fair. That, despite working hard and doing the things I was told would lead me to whichever career I wanted, there are no guarantees, that a fulfilling career isn’t promised even if you do everything you’re supposed to in order to get one.

And I realize my perspective on this matter is likely skewed by the circumstances in which I find myself.

Here’s the thing.

Life is finite. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, especially during something like a global pandemic.

On a personal level, I worry that my accident and the additional heath risks and concerns that come with being a quadriplegic have drastically shorted my life expectancy.

I don’t want to spend my limited time on this Earth doing things I hate.

Yes, I know I need gainful employment, and that sometimes I will have to work jobs I won’t enjoy because that’s what it takes to make ends meet. It’s what responsible adults do. It’s a part of life.

But does it have to be? Can we to strive for more, for something better?

Do we dare to dream?

I’d love to answer those questions…but I’m late for work.

***

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