This woman, a friend of a friend who worked for a recruiting agency, used to write me these email messages, saying "How's Your Career Today?" The use of caps alone would send me into a tailspin of bitterness and hatred. Along the same line, a friend of mine recently received an email from a recruiter with the subject line of: "Are you Setting the World on Fire?" Pardon me while I load my gun.

so I work for this "Internet" company.. it will remain nameless to protect the reputations of both the good and evil souls associated with it. I'm the default piss girl at this company--you name the unsavory task, it's mine by default. But, they let me work from home and they don't challenge my more than slightly snarky attitude. On the other hand, I'm being way under paid for the shit I put up with. Do I stay or quit? Are we just doomed to spend 90 percent of our waking hours dealing with jobs we hate?

-- cfg (cfgatlin@hotmail.com), June 01, 2000

Answers

I'll have to get back to you on that one. I also worked for an internet company and now I'm negotiating a part time gig at a place with more class and I could potentially have freetime to devote to sarahjane- um, i mean to high-paying freelance clients and studying jazz.

For you though, I think the answer depends on whereabouts you live. I live in the dc area and the geek work is low-hanging fruit. So if you're staying for the work-from-home perk alone, find that and more elsewhere. But if it's the only game in town then maybe stick it out until you're an independant contractor or something.

Alternately, you could just get snarkier and snarkier (thank you for that word, by the way) at your current gig until they fire your ass! I've found that getting fired is without exception a good thing in our field- it never ceased to result in more pay and better working conditions.

-- boze (boze@boze.net), June 01, 2000.

I live in San Francisco, so there's no dearth of dot coms around. But I breeze through the job announcements, and none of them seem particularly interesting. It's all, "hot new pre-IPO B to B" stuff. So I guess what's keeping me at the current company is the depressing thought that it's going to be crappy everywhere.

Another person at my company quit yesterday. It's daily entertainment, seeing who will leave next. We had 18 people in early May. Now we have 6 people. It's the Incredible Shrinking Internet Company!

-- cfg (cfgatlin@hotmail.com), June 01, 2000.

Boy, Buckaroos, you better buck up! Life is waaaay too much fun to be slaving away bitterly hating your work. (I may be a Pollyanna, but I'm happy, dammmit!) I was FIRED six months ago from an advertising agency and I've been THRILLED to wake up late (ummm, meaning after 5:45 a.m...more like 7:30 now) and work for myself since then. Workin' for the man just doesn't work for me anymore. Once it got way past personal pride in my work and corporations got their own culture and rules of conduct, I completely lost interest. (Wait, I think that prolly happened before I was born...ah well, I didn't notice until recently because I was enjoying the work too much)...I don't know what I'm blathering about. I just know I'm happy to be finding my own work and able to run around and do errands during the day instead of being chained to my desk. And I'm free to post to dellazine in the middle of my workday, hence satisfying my need to please sarahjane who's been sounding so despondent about the lack of postings in this here forum. Now let's just hope I didn't jinx myself by writing that.

-- Amy Q (bailiwick@fuse.net), June 01, 2000.

Getting fired sounds like a lot of fun.. um, just out of curiosity, what do you have to do exactly to get fired?

-- cfg (cfgatlin@hotmail.com), June 01, 2000.

I've come to the conclusion recently that my total dream job is handling dellazine full-time. Not that there wouldn't be shitty days or frustrating people to deal with (that just comes with the territory of living on this planet, I think), but overall, I'd care a whole lot more about my job. See, that's my problem: I don't want to just pay the bills and afford a nice yearly vacation and get through the day without somebody making me raise my voice or cry. I want a job that matters to me, and maybe matters to some other people. I'm also in San Francisco and also working at a dot-com (cfg, you feel my pain), and my work is not exactly adding to the good of humankind, it's not even amusing. So until I find a ridiculously generous patron, I work to live, I don't live to work.

-- sarahjane (sarahjane@dellazine.com), June 01, 2000.

so after I posted this thread last night, (I was drunk by the way, coming home from dinner with my coworkers who had quit) I sent an email to my boss telling her that I was thinking of quitting. This is why I shouldn't turn on my computer when I'm drunk. You know how some people call ex-boyfriends? I email my boss. So I went into this long exposition about why I was unhappy, but then I ended it with a "let's make this work. let's turn these cons into pros" kind of thing. So now I have a 12 o'clock meeting with her to go over why I'm unhappy. Obviously I don't need a new job. I need a therapist.

-- cfg (cfgatlin@hotmail.com), June 01, 2000.