Reflections on Work

My previous post got me thinking about work. The short version is "It sucks, and I hate every day that I am stuck here doing this."

A somewhat longer version is that I don't think I am really suited to this kind of work. For one thing, I'm not really interested in finishing anything. Ever. Once something is mostly done, I lose all interest in completing it. In my personal life, I have a half-built cabin, an unfinished house, and half-assed landscaping. Work isn't any better. I have half-finished projects laying all over my desk, and not one wit of motivation to complete any of them. I will have to eventually, or face being fired, but basically, once the outline is done, I'd rather get paid $30/hour to write blog posts, which is exactly what I am doing right now.

I try to at least look organized and industrious. I keep things in neat little piles and have drawers full of file folders. I couldn't tell you what is in about 90% of them and many were simply inherited from my predecessor and have never seen the light of day. But damn do they look impressive. Or at least I hope they do. We've had a lot of emphasis lately on tracking our time so our existence can be justified to upper management. I suck at it mainly because tracking my time hour-by-hour makes it obvious that I suck ass as an employee. I can only account for about half my time on a good day, and even then it is just a bunch of random work done on whatever happens to grab my attention at that particular moment. No planning, no priorities; just pick up a random piece of paper from a random pile, do something with it for a few minutes, get bored, screw around on the internet for an hour, rinse and repeat.

So why do I stick with it? Because nothing else around here pays enough to make the mortgage payments on my (actually, the bank's) half-built house. The bank owns me heart and soul, and I work for them. Nearly every penny I make at this job is spent on transportation to and from work and paying the mortgage. I was perfectly content to live the rest of my life in the cabin. I owed nothing to anybody. Building a house was the second-most boneheaded move I have ever made, and I knew it was before the first shovel of dirt. So why did it happen? I was attempting an impossible task: making a woman happy.

Guys, here's a tip. Never get married. It's a bad deal all around. If you're horny, grab yourself a hooker. You can go way upscale and still be miles ahead financially. Staying single means you have the flexibility to pursue jobs that interest you in places you find pleasant to live in and the option to bail out whenever the job or the scenery gets old. Getting married means being a slave. A slave to every irrational want your wife can dream up in exchange for having to beg for sex three times a year. The biggest want will of course be a house. Not just four walls and a roof with a bed and a shitter, but a palace that can be used to awe friends you don't have and family that hate you and wouldn't darken your door on a bet. Just Say No. Pick up easy girls, get your freak on for a few days, then dump them like a bad habit at the first sign of a second toothbrush in your bathroom. Trust me.

I don't think I need to state what my most-boneheaded move was.