Or, my own most personal torment
Boredom.
No word more laconically conveys anguish. And I suffer it in its most extreme form at work. Every job I've ever had has bored me to tears, and beyond, within a month or two. Except one. But that's another blog for another day.
From my observation of the rest of you, boredom seems, for most people, to be a minor annoyance. Something you take in your stride, with which you cope admirably if not always easily. Not so for me. It's a torment that poisons my life. I leave work feeling as though the space inside my skull is occupied by meat that's been hammered the way steak is to tenderize it. As if that space is occupied by a jelly of nerves screaming for stimulation but so entirely traumatized that no sensation can be borne.
I had a kind of personal epiphany a few days ago. I realized that all the symptoms that currently plague me - all of them - are the consequence of a mind so starved of meaningful occupation that it's taken to tormenting the flesh it inhabits in order to amuse itself. I'm making myself physically sick so that I will have something to occupy my attention while I perform the moronic roboticism required of me by my current employment.
Which, thankfully, ends this coming Wednesday. I have three more days of soul destroying, mind killing, spirit rotting tedium and then I'll be free. It didn't start out like that. It never does. But, having learnt everything I can possibly learn that relates to the specific project I've been hired to work on - and knowing full well that no employer in my field is going to train a contractor beyond the absolute minimum necessary to complete the job - work stops being about learning and starts being about repetition.
Don't mistake me. No matter how tedious the work I always complete the project. Always. A contractor has no more valuable resource than his reputation. Welch on a contract and those who work in the same hothouse little world will soon know it.
The only thing I hate more than work is unemployment. And because, as a contractor, I'm never anything more than my last reference says I am, I have to be able to reply "Because I completed the contract" in response to the question "Why are you looking for work?", because if I can't I might as well give up looking for another job in this field before I even begin.
It doesn't matter what it costs you. Always complete the contract. Always.
Working at T wasn't always this bad. Not at all. But, as ever, I'm plagued by the knowledge that there are better, more efficient, more accurate ways to do what I'm paid to do - while knowing that I won't be allowed to implement them.
Allow me, Dear Reader, to introduce you to Nodes.
A node is a place-holder, a location at which certain specific types of information are held. In my current occupation a node designates either a point at which a line begins or a point at which a line ends. And each node can, logically, be the origin of one line and simultaneously the termination of another.
How many lines can begin and terminate at the same node? An infinite number. In order to act as a place holder for accurate geographic information, a node must be able hold information regarding each line that begins from it and each line that terminates at it. Unless, that is, you are one of the people responsible for the creation of the software with which I work. According to those people, a node can never be more than one point of origin and one terminus.
Every node T uses is simultaneously origin and terminus for multiple lines. Ideally they should be capable of recording these multiple functions. But they can't. So, in my work, I go over and over the same nodes, updating them with different information, each bit of which overwrites the previous record. The same nodes. Over and over and over again. That's not merely tedious. It's stupid. And inaccurate. And inefficient. And utterly unnecessary because there's software available that can do everything required to make a node a full and complete repository of all information related to it.
A week ago I had occasion to read the house magazine of the company that produces the software I use at work. Their flagship article boldly trumpeted a significant advance, a grand new development, in their program. It's called associativity. It means that if you move a node, all the lines linked to it move with it.
I had access to that capability fifteen years ago, in England, when we used software produced by General Electric that was light years ahead of anything else available, that still is light years ahead of anything else in the field. It's called SmallWorld, and it's the Rolls Royce of GIS software. It's also hideously expensive. And learning to use it involves a tremendously steep learning curve in the first instance. That's why there are only 11 other people in the USA who have experience comparable to mine. They all work for one company in California. And that company is not presently hiring.
Imagine working a job where you have to fill bags with sand. The bags appear through a hole in the wall, ride a conveyor belt and as they pass you fill each one with sand. They disappear through another hole in the wall. On the other side of the wall are people employed to empty the sand out of the same bags and make sure they go back through the first hole. Over and over and over again.
That's what I do, but I work both sides of the wall at once, so not only am I utterly bored but I'm also completely aware that what I do is fundamentally useless. I put information in and then erase it with other information and both instances of information are only tangentially related to anything real.
I spend my days torn between the impulse to laugh hysterically and sob uncontrollably, when I'm not amusing myself by imagining hideous deaths for my co-workers. I envy them, because they all seem so content in what they do. As MA says, she's comfortable (in the way cows are comfortable chewing the cud).
But I'm not.
And I can barely wait for 2.00pm next Wednesday.