I don't want to have an offive job for the rest of my life!

It's either a) office b)lift things c)talk to people.

I still haven't found a good solution to this.

kind of lame (also funny) everyone was joking with you because i agree

GBX, I've actually done that. I went and quit my dayjob to go live life as a full time musician/writer/artist and the problem with that was, it turned the thing I *loved* into a dayjob, and made me start to hate music/writing/art. Which made *me* a kind of unhappy I'd never known existed and never want to experience again.

Like I said, your mileage may vary.

I'm also not prescribing/proscribing (no idea if either of those is the right word?) *what* it is that will validate a person. That is totally individual, and most people spend a lifetime working it out.

(Another caveat which was so freaking obvious I typed it out before and deleted it as sounding obvious to the point of patronising, but maybe it needs to be said - it's one of those tricks of mental health that if you're not happy with *yourself* then no job (and you can substitute that with relationship, partner, house, religion - whatever) in the world is going to make you happy. Though, unfairly enough, bad ones can make you *uh*happy)

Anyway, enough out of me. I don't have anything to add, since I'm clearly happy enough working in an office most of the time.

You have a knack for throwing in a caveat to excuse what is otherwise a "I know what's better for you" post and expect people to excuse it. Just say what you mean and stand behind it.

I didn't pick up that tone from K's posts on the subject at hand.

i like the idea of sustainable/subsidized hobbies. like, being in a band and getting paid for gigs but not having that be a primary source of income. pays *enough* to not be a money-pit and to validate the amount of time you spend doing it. may not actually pay for itself, but it doesn't seem like a total loss.

when we went on tour this summer we basically were able to cover gas, mostly. the rest (food, etc) came out of pocket, but it was still a cheap "vacation" with bros.

really, my only beef with office work, as should be unbearably obvious by now, is that i hate sitting in one spot and would prefer to be outside at pretty much any time, regardless of the weather.

xp yeah, i didn't get that either

Well reading people putting "you" where "I" could more easily go puts me on the defense.

my only beef with office work, as should be unbearably obvious by now, is that i hate sitting in one spot and would prefer to be outside at pretty much any time,

Mine is similar except substitute "moving around, interacting with people" for going outside. I know people who do find Web development as a calling and do/would love to have the type of job I have. I very much want to find a career that's better for me and let them take my place. I get very tired of interacting with nothing but pixels and lines of coe.

i like the idea of sustainable/subsidized hobbies. like, being in a band and getting paid for gigs but not having that be a primary source of income. pays *enough* to not be a money-pit and to validate the amount of time you spend doing it. may not actually pay for itself, but it doesn't seem like a total loss.

That *would* be really great. I'd love to get to that kind of point WRT my artwork. (which is already pretty low-cost as far as hobbies go, especially compared to music!)

But the problem is time! hence why I'd love to cut the hours and go part time - that'd be the best compromise for me.

xpost

or code even.

Or just computer screens period. I really feel like I'm going blind and the constant sitting makes me feel achy and exhausted.

pixels and lines of coKe heh

I'm sure everyone would like a job they love instead of "just a dayjob," but I think it's good to have realistic expectations and recognize the benefits of what you're doing even if it's not a dream, which is what Kate's post implied to me. And having a life outside of work does allow you to not define your life by your work alone, which seems healthy whether it's a job you love or not.

Right now I'm also having the problem that jobs I want do exist, in the city I live in, but I'm either not qualified for them (so current plan is to work more and get some more degrees to qualify), or they're for volunteers because the organizations can't afford to pay people. It would be nice to be able to do that sort of work as a subsidized hobby, but I also have the time issue because I don't have useful enough skills to support myself working only part-time.

I don't have an office job anymore but sometimes I yearn for the office routine of arriving in the morning and doing nothing but drinking coffee and reading the paper online.

― Virginia Plain, Monday, November 3, 2008 11:14 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Been doing this for a year and a half now, and it hasn't gotten old yet.

i like the idea of sustainable/subsidized hobbies. like, being in a band and getting paid for gigs but not having that be a primary source of income. pays *enough* to not be a money-pit and to validate the amount of time you spend doing it. may not actually pay for itself, but it doesn't seem like a total loss.

when we went on tour this summer we basically were able to cover gas, mostly. the rest (food, etc) came out of pocket, but it was still a cheap "vacation" with bros.

hell yeah this is otm

the internet is stupid and boring and every time I do anything to contribute to it's growth I feel more worthless as a human being.

like, just now, as I post this message, a bit of my self-worth has evaporated

if i was in a band and doing well i'd still probably end up sitting at a computer 10+ hours most days with minimal human contact

if you're in an electronic band you can even do that while performing, recording, and mixing

something we can all aspire to.

Although this type of job seems to have become the standard of modern life, the fact that there are people who make good livings not sitting in a chair in front of a computer gives me hope that I can find a way to feel more fulfilled and satisfied during the majority of my waking hours.

Wasting time on-line (like this) is equally exhausting and depressing to me. Right now I'm just trying to avoid the hell of CSS-sleuthing and trying to wrangle students into building sites the way I need them too.

In general, spending your life doing something you don't care about is just hell. And yes, having a life outside of work is important but is hard to pull off when, as mentioned above, you have a job that takes so much out of you you get home with only 4 or 5 hours to enjoy that life.

Work has some odd effects beyond the hours you're in it.

Having worked such long hours to get money, I'd have thought it easy to have indulgent weekends spending it and living it up. But something about work can make me hold back at weekends, unable to enjoy myself fully. Doesn't happen every weekend - but maybe one in three.

My job invades my life way too much. I dream about it and constantly find it popping into my mind outside of the office. I do my best to partition it out and leave it at the office but the stress and demands are sneaky that way. . . Also I'm usually so exhausted at the weekend all I can manage is housecleaning and collapsing.

Haha, and my boyfriend just wrote to tell me that the head of their very large and known-worldwide computer company blogged that people would be offered packaged severance deals this week and those that weren't needed to make arrangements to take unpaid time off.

This is greatly contributing to my current job stress/unhappiness. I can't think of moving on for awhile until the economy is more stable. We've been waiting for him to lose his job for quite awhile now and if/when he does it will be important that I have mine.

Feeling stuck starts to make you feel like a caged animal.

Dude libs, how was being a math teacher?

I worked in an office setting once and I almost got fired for staring out the window too much. I didn't even realize I was doing it. Watching traffic is just hypnotizing. It was at a busy intersection, too.

staring out of windows eats into enough of my free time. traffic can be involving. you had a sweet deal if you used to get paid for it. i remember spending meetings at work trying to start mexican-wave-style chains of empathetic yawn responses. or how someone would drop their pen and like ten people would look around to see what was going on. that these things are even memorable is testament to the cold, factory-like awfulness of the office environment.

there's a bit in middlesex by jeffrey eugenides that talks about the salad days of car manufacturing in detroit, and how no-one was prepared for it; humans simply weren't equipped to mindlessly perform repetitive menial labour for hours on end. offices still like they haven't been fully integrated. they inspire a really dull kind of manic behaviour.

I was paid $6.50 an hour for it, and the occasional Papa John's pizza coupon. Please evaluate the quality of this arrangement.

you have windows? *sniff*

I also stole a lot, lot, lot of office supplies.

i call that "compenstationary"

you have office supplies?

I would use acquired rather than stole.

I am only diplomatic in describing the behavior of others.

you have office supplies?

Haha. Teaching was horrible in this aspect. I had to have friends bring me packages of copy paper stolen from their offices so I could run things off for class.

actually after my little pity party upthread I feel much better. My job is secure (funding-wise) for two years and hopefully G's will be by then. And I will have figured out what I want to do next. I can cowboy up until then. Two years, sadly, goes by quickly.

Y'all would be positively SHOCKED to learn the kind of acquiring that takes place in silicon valley.

I bet I have beat them all. I "acquired" my G4 tower and a 21" monitor when I worked at FedEx Kinko's. (They got rid of all the Macs and they were just chilling in the backroom and I reckoned no one would notice. NB: I was in a manic phase. NB 2: I am not very proud of this. NB 3: But since I didn't get fired I don't especially regret it.)

I also "acquired" a completely useless external Jaz drive.

Wow.

I've never acquired anything of any value from a job other than bootlegged software.

A friend of mine walked off with one of SGI's bigger computers when he worked at SGI in the mid 90s. I can't remember exactly which one it is now, but I recall it listing for $200,000.

Ok yr friend wins. And I feel less guilty.

The Jaz drive isn't entirely useless, FYI. They make excellent "upgrade" components to an MPC2000XL.

It is useless for my day-to-day computing purposes, as well as my lack of Jaz discs, and the additional lack of any other computers that I use (ie at work) with Jaz drives.

You do have a point, though.

Just FYI, my pal managed to get it out w/o noticing by removing it in as small parts as he could manage.

Now he's a lawyer.

was it long and black?

uh that looks suggestive. reference to the johnny cash tune.

this is my friend's job: http://www.livingfisheries.blogspot.com/

awesome!

what is the difference between Jaz drives and normal external hard drives?

a wag I know once worked somewhere where people were always sending around e-mails asking if anyone had a Jaz drive they could borrow for a few minutes, so my friend once mailed asking if anyone had a jazz-mag he could borrow? Predictable hilarity ensured.

Jaz is magnetic-optical. A good technology that wasn't crappy enough to survive long.

Common Jaz carts were 1G, 2G, and I believe, 4G. I have 5 or so and a Jaz drive in my MPC2000XL.

I thought Jaz was MO. I'm not so sure now.

your friend's job looks awesome! i would love a job with The Sea. (the best job i can imagine would be doing educational programs on a sail training/history/environmental education type ship.)

yah, someone gave him a BAG OF MONEY to travel the world and work as a fisherman in small communities. if you scroll to the bottom of the page you can see his itinerary and it is O_O

Jaz is just magnetic platters, not magneto-optical. (Jaz was kind of a shitty medium; magneto-optical is slower, but inherently way more reliable. I was pissed off when my college dumped MO for Zip and Jaz.)

sounds amazing, does he need a wife? (xpost)