(no subject)

[zen_monk]

 Recently had a great interview with a mediation law firm for an office assistant job. The office does family law, basically being a divorce hotline for the entire state of California with offices in LA, Sacremento, and San Jose (as well as here being the main office). Hopefully that I'll get the job, even if it means talking to a lot of distraught clients of varying emotional states over a phone, but it could put me on track to gaining valuable experience for future law firms I might go into. Or at least to see whether law school would be the right track for me. 

In my current job as a candy peddler on a boardwalk, the lack of responsibilities that doesn't include peddling taffy and fudges is making me feel itchy on my feet. Especially when my last job was being one of the people who took care of an entire cooking facility and makes you do constant work cleaning. Can't help but think that being there felt more meaningful because of the amount of work I put into it, which makes me wonder if the feeling of being restless in a more corporate place is that Marxist feeling of alienation.

.....I must miss being in a theory class more than I thought. 

Comments

[novel_machinist]

Good luck!

[sarasa_cat]

Good to know the interview went very well. Good luck!

Marxist alienation, corporate cogs, and meaningless work: and then there is also the matter of living in a society that puts enormous amounts of importance on defining people (and their identities) by their dayjob.

[lassarina]

Good luck!

I find lack of things to do at work (I'm not sure if that's what you mean by responsibility) incredibly grating. I'm stuck here and I can't do things and I can't leave even though there's nothing for me to do aaaaaaargh.

(This is how, on one summer job, I reduced the KB size of every single page on the web site by 90% or more by hand-deleting the excess tags that Front Page had inserted. This was in 2001. KB size of page mattered.)

[zen_monk]

The definition by dayjob feels like the most frustrating thing to me, since having something like a "sales associate" doesn't mean much when all I do is just sell things and my responsibilities are limited. Which I suppose seems kinda weird, since having more work done might seem like doing overwork, but it's hard to feel attached to a place when I don't feel more of a hands-on activity in it.

[zen_monk]

Maybe if I do some self-starting projects, I'll look on favorably and move up on the ladder where I shall no longer be seasonal/temp; instead, I will be part-time!

Maybe that's the problem; having less people available who are more experienced to the point that they take on leadership/mentor status means having less cohesive workplace where people know what else to do in the store that would justify spending more than four hours at it.

[lassarina]

I think also there's a lot of weird cultural issues around it--we are all told to be leaders and thinkers and improve things, while at the same time in practice the tall poppy gets the scissors, so there's a huge disconnect between practice and preaching. Also, in a traditional managerial hierarchy, some people feel very threatened when those 'beneath' them start showing ambition - it makes people feel territorial and uncertain so they crack down. Good managers don't--good managers know that the happier their people are the harder they'll work to improve everything for everyone--but those are, in my experience, few and far between.

That being said, my generation and younger is much more prone to collaborative structure than hierarchical, which has downsides (it can be time-consuming ot reach a consensus and sometimes decisions just need to be made fast) but also significant upsides (the negotiation of consensus means that people have more buy-in than with edicts handed down from on high.) I'm interested to see how this will work out.

[zen_monk]

I think in my case that when the majority of the staff are people between freshman in high school and some education in college, the managerial staff is more lenient and even take on more mentoring roles since for many folks it's their first job. The fact that I expressed interest in having promotion to something as simple as a shift leader or higher in a job that's more of a seasonal/temp job makes someone like me more desirable since everyone's time is at the whims of school and family as a higher priority (especially the 15 year olds, though I haven't met too many of them in my shifts). I gues it makes the job more of a collaborative thing because there's a higher volume of people who has other objectives in their life that are understood to have more impact on them than the job would be.

What I worry a lot is that unless I do more for the job, I'm seen as another transient worker than someone who might be considered as a valuable worker who might move on in other careers or schedules but still feel their contribution. I feel that if I don't do more than I would be considered less grounded and might be passed over in terms of say further training or to even be memorable enough to refer them.
(not to mention that it would be pretty sweet to have 11 bucks an hour instead of minimum from a promotion and that it'd look way better on a resume OTL. I just wanna pay rent and save money).

[lassarina]

A lot of people just want to do what they can get away with and call it good enough. I'm never satisfied with good enough, and it's pretty apparent you aren't either, but there's a distressing number of people who just want to coast. (And, okay, sometimes I have bad days/weeks and I coast for a while, but usually it's like "I want data set X" "Okay, here's X and I thought Y and Z might also be useful for you since it seems like you're attempting to derive T, and by the way here are data analysis documents A and B from three years ago that might be relevant from a historical perspective.")