Mmmkay, I got that particular brokenness of my site fixed up so I suppose I should update.
Since graduating from college (January '03), I have not held a single job more than 6 months. The longest job, the six month one, I knew going in, in May, that I would be laid off in October (I was a seasonal park ranger). If that hadn't been the case I probably would have quit that one, too. I remember those last few weeks just being so desperate to get out there. (The fact that I was flying to London a coupole days after the end of the season no doubt contributed to this desperation). Then there was the temp job, before the park, that I left after two months to take the park job, which I didn't feel too bad about because even though they were planning to keep me on indefinately and perhaps buy me out from the temp agency, it was still at that point a temp job. Then the office manager thing back in Chicago, which I stayed at for three months and was getting ready to quit, my boss knew I was getting ready to quit because I couldn't handle the corporate-ness of it all and the fact that he asked me to "move some numbers around, why don't you" every week before the conference call. And then, about ten days before the day I'd decided to be my last day (I gave well over two weeks notice) he put his hand on my boob. So I left ten days early.
Then I pretty much took six months off. I played, and ate up my savings, and "wrote". Occasionally I walked dogs, I was a "substitute dog walker"--there's not much call for substitute dog walkers, so when I decided to sell my car in the middle of the summer (not because I needed the money, but because I was sick of having a car in the city--so I sold my '97 4-door Geo Metro and turned around and bought an '04 one-seater Yamaha Vino (scooter) for, actually, a couple hundred bucks more), I managed to keep on with them for another month or two without them even knowing (one of the rules for being a dogwalker is that you have a car--reasons a scooter is not an adequate car substitute involve not being able to take one dog to another dog's house so you can walk them together, but I preffered one-dog walks anyway, even if it made my day longer--what else was I doing with my day?-- and, you know, what if it rains? but the only really compelling reason, and thank goodness this didn't happen to me, would be if something awful happened and you had to rush to the vet). Anyway, so I finally got around to telling them that I didn't have a car anymore, mentioned something about I can /sometimes/ borrow my mom's car (a note: I do NOT live with my mother. Just in case that wasn't clear. But she works about five blocks from my house, so I have this funny habit of walking over and borrowing her car whuile she's at work. I usually tell her first) and then all of a sudden one person was on vacation and another had broken her finger and could I work for the next two weeks, which would have been okay-ish except...
...I had just finished bartending school the week before, because I'd decided I needed a vocation, and around the time that all this vacationing and finger-breaking was taking place, I had actually found a job, which required me to start at 4pm, and which could, potentially, have worked with the dogwalking but really by that time I'd had enough, and it was getting colder, so I just stopped calling back.
So now since October I've had this bar job, at an Italian restaurant in Evanston, and it's, you know, a job. In truth I've been plotting my departure from day one. For one thing there's this one guy who works there, this bitter old queen who, if he has control over his temper does not exercise it. So he's been making my life miserable from the start. And my boss is cold and impenetrable and unnaproachable and it's only in the last month that I've started having actual conversations with him. I think he's actually a good guy...but...I don't know, is /anyone/ a good boss. And I started realizing, after a couple of months, that because business was slow and I would end up getting cut way early that I was barely working 20 hours a week and not making ends meet at all...so I looked around for a new bar job but didn't really get called back anywhere. And then there was the thing with the fact that I only had two nights free every week, and if I chose to spend those with M, which I usually did, it meant that I never saw my friends. So I decided to go back to temping.
What the point of all this was, I'm not sure. To announce that I'm starting a new (temp) job on Monday? To draw attention to the fact that when it comes down to it, it's probably not that I'm looking around for the perfect job but really that I just don't like to work, and that this will continue throughout my life an I will never advance or achieve anything and then I will die and it will be sad? Meh. I don't know.
Since graduating from college (January '03), I have not held a single job more than 6 months. The longest job, the six month one, I knew going in, in May, that I would be laid off in October (I was a seasonal park ranger). If that hadn't been the case I probably would have quit that one, too. I remember those last few weeks just being so desperate to get out there. (The fact that I was flying to London a coupole days after the end of the season no doubt contributed to this desperation). Then there was the temp job, before the park, that I left after two months to take the park job, which I didn't feel too bad about because even though they were planning to keep me on indefinately and perhaps buy me out from the temp agency, it was still at that point a temp job. Then the office manager thing back in Chicago, which I stayed at for three months and was getting ready to quit, my boss knew I was getting ready to quit because I couldn't handle the corporate-ness of it all and the fact that he asked me to "move some numbers around, why don't you" every week before the conference call. And then, about ten days before the day I'd decided to be my last day (I gave well over two weeks notice) he put his hand on my boob. So I left ten days early.
Then I pretty much took six months off. I played, and ate up my savings, and "wrote". Occasionally I walked dogs, I was a "substitute dog walker"--there's not much call for substitute dog walkers, so when I decided to sell my car in the middle of the summer (not because I needed the money, but because I was sick of having a car in the city--so I sold my '97 4-door Geo Metro and turned around and bought an '04 one-seater Yamaha Vino (scooter) for, actually, a couple hundred bucks more), I managed to keep on with them for another month or two without them even knowing (one of the rules for being a dogwalker is that you have a car--reasons a scooter is not an adequate car substitute involve not being able to take one dog to another dog's house so you can walk them together, but I preffered one-dog walks anyway, even if it made my day longer--what else was I doing with my day?-- and, you know, what if it rains? but the only really compelling reason, and thank goodness this didn't happen to me, would be if something awful happened and you had to rush to the vet). Anyway, so I finally got around to telling them that I didn't have a car anymore, mentioned something about I can /sometimes/ borrow my mom's car (a note: I do NOT live with my mother. Just in case that wasn't clear. But she works about five blocks from my house, so I have this funny habit of walking over and borrowing her car whuile she's at work. I usually tell her first) and then all of a sudden one person was on vacation and another had broken her finger and could I work for the next two weeks, which would have been okay-ish except...
...I had just finished bartending school the week before, because I'd decided I needed a vocation, and around the time that all this vacationing and finger-breaking was taking place, I had actually found a job, which required me to start at 4pm, and which could, potentially, have worked with the dogwalking but really by that time I'd had enough, and it was getting colder, so I just stopped calling back.
So now since October I've had this bar job, at an Italian restaurant in Evanston, and it's, you know, a job. In truth I've been plotting my departure from day one. For one thing there's this one guy who works there, this bitter old queen who, if he has control over his temper does not exercise it. So he's been making my life miserable from the start. And my boss is cold and impenetrable and unnaproachable and it's only in the last month that I've started having actual conversations with him. I think he's actually a good guy...but...I don't know, is /anyone/ a good boss. And I started realizing, after a couple of months, that because business was slow and I would end up getting cut way early that I was barely working 20 hours a week and not making ends meet at all...so I looked around for a new bar job but didn't really get called back anywhere. And then there was the thing with the fact that I only had two nights free every week, and if I chose to spend those with M, which I usually did, it meant that I never saw my friends. So I decided to go back to temping.
What the point of all this was, I'm not sure. To announce that I'm starting a new (temp) job on Monday? To draw attention to the fact that when it comes down to it, it's probably not that I'm looking around for the perfect job but really that I just don't like to work, and that this will continue throughout my life an I will never advance or achieve anything and then I will die and it will be sad? Meh. I don't know.
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Congrats (?) about the new job. My last temp job was fantastic, I hope yours works out that well too