I volunteered to work 20 hours of overtime this week and I don't even know why. On the surface it's for the extra bread, but I don't know what I expect to do with it. I just keep throwing myself into this life style that has never stopped being a stranger to me. I am trapped by money in a mode of living that I find insufferable. I can't quit, at least that's what I tell myself, because where else would I make as much money? I don't want to replace this job with another job. But then, how do I survive? And not just survive, but thrive? It's not that I feel as though I deserve not to have to work, quite the contrary, I simply feel that no one deserves to have to sacrifice a third of their life to anyone (I use the term generously since now, apparently, corporations are "people" too).
I'd like to spend my days in cafes drinking and eating and chatting up beautiful women and philosophizing with other patrons. I don't want to write anything down. I don't need to inspire future generations. I need the means to live like I do when I'm not at work, and the time away to visit other places that no functioning institution would ever provide me with. Perhaps that's what bothers me the most. No matter how much money I make, I will never have the time to do what I want to with it because I always have to come back, if I don't I'll starve to death, homeless, sleeping on a sidewalk. That's a reality here in this first world, freedom loving nation that let's people rot in the name of liberty instead of helping them in the name of humanity.
I have 20 days of vacation time left, but of course they won't just let me take a month off of work. Even though it's my time to do with as I please, I have to chop it up in a way they feel they have the right to approve of, and in a way that is amicable to the wishes of other people in my department, and of course if I try to do otherwise they will try to make a moral argument, that if I take time off when another person does, this burdens the department and so one of us will need to give up our ambitions, and if it isn't me who does it then I'm the bad guy who didn't cater to the whim of someone else I work with. Of course, the whole time no one wants to bring up the elephant in the room, that this entire moral conundrum really has nothing to do with either me or my competing coworker, rather it was created by the company, as is every situation in my work environment.
If they hired more people, vacation time wouldn't be such a nightmare. Of course, they did hire more people, but they haven't started yet. Instead of waiting until these people have started and have been properly trained to implement huge changes in the work flow of my department, the smart thing to do when management is clearly aware of the situation, they have gone ahead and made all of our jobs more tedious and bureaucracy-filled which is why I'm able to work so much over time in the first place. And all of this is negating the fact that when these new people start, it's not going to make a difference. They were hired under the mindset that it would make the work load more bearable and conducive to special projects, instead, now the status quo will be achieved at best and we'll be right back where we started a few months ago with not enough time to work on special projects, and still too stiflingly busy to take vacation time whenever there are other people who also want that time.
None of this makes sense if your goal is to heighten people's quality of life, but it all makes perfect sense if you have a kindergartner's understanding of economics and what motivates people under the assumption that this will provide you with greater profit and savings to the department. Of course, I will never voice these opinions in real life, not to anyone who matters at least. All of the sudden I had the most surreal feeling when I typed, "not to anyone who matters", haha. You know you've been working in a corporation for too long when you start talking about people as if some of them matter or have value... and most of them don't.
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