I'll be twenty-three in less than two weeks. My college degree is barely six months old. Everybody tells me that I "have my whole life ahead of me." I am about to marry the love of my life in a little over nine months. I had to explain to a loan officer recently that my grown-up life has only just begun in January, that's why I don't have any credit built it.
And yet people are already asking me if I'm "burned out."
I am too young to be this tired, this achy, this weary of body and soul. And yet I fall asleep on the couch at nine o'clock at night and dread getting up to go to work the next morning.
Am I ungrateful? No - I am blessed to have a job where I'm inside out of the rain and the summer heat, and I don't have to pick heads of lettuce or strawberries for my step-above-minimum-wage paycheck. But you know how you get tired of eating Raisin Bran if you eat Raisin Bran for four years straight? It doesn't mean you're not grateful for the breakfast all those boxes of Raisin Bran afforded you, but you're just ready for a change.
Yeah. It's kinda like that.
My problem these days is that I'm starting to care too much about what goes on between time clock punches. For a while I was able to see this as "just a job" - something I could leave at work and not take home ulcers at the end of the day. But I'm starting to care a little too much these days. I spend my shifts cleaning up after people who don't care to do things the right way and who don't mind that I'm following behind them to correct what they just did, and when I leave at the end of the day, all I see is what I could have done. Or, even more depressing, what still needs to be done. And while we focus on the little details and create new departments that are a sure-fire way to gather more business and more money, the basics are going by the wayside and the old departments are falling apart.
Some of our leads are working six and seven days a week because we won't hire new help, but let's go ahead and create another department where the employees sit around for 80% of their shifts.
The name of this game is not to take it too seriously. And that's what I've been told since I first started. I've had fluxes of frustration with this place before, and I've gotten over them because there's always been a light at the end of that tunnel. But not this time. Not as I near the end of the tunnel and the light is bigger and blinding and I still have no idea what to do instead. And the urge to care more and try my best to fix things and do my job 140% because that's how I was trained and I can't help that, is overwhelming my underlying thoughts of "almost done, almost done." My countdown is less than 300 days, and yet I still leave home four out of my five shifts frustrated because I feel like I didn't do anything to help further our department for the past eight hours - I was merely fixing what someone else spent their shift destroying.
I can't stay. My mom asked me why I wouldn't continue to move higher in the company, and I said I couldn't justify doing that. I wouldn't be someone who operated out of pettiness and spite to get ahead, but I've seen how "honest" workers survive.
Or, should I say, don't.
The original game plan was for me to wait until after the wedding to find another job, but dear friends, I don't think I'll make it. I'm on the verge of opening my mouth when I should be biding my time, and I cannot justify going back to the blind following of orders now that I've seen what's wrong. I need something else - anything else. At this point I don't care what it is.
I'm too young to be this tired. And I'm too young to be stuck.
If anyone has leads on anyone who's hiring, please let me know. I would really appreciate it.
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