I met my brother and his fiancee for dinner earlier in the week to celebrate turning 23(!!), and my brother waxed philosophical throughout the dinner. This isn't all that unusual, but he usually doesn't lay it on quite as thick as he did Monday night. Now, I know that since I live by myself, I tend to err on the side of over-introspection, but his philosophical attitude was a bit contagious. I've been thinking lately of the kind of person I'm becoming as an adult, and whether I like it or not.


There was a table of high school students on Tuesday night who were being extremely disrespectful to me. They impatiently demanded their food to be brought out now, they snapped their fingers at me, they harassed one of the other servers when they couldn't find me, and one even sent her food back because 5-minute-old wings weren't to her satisfaction. When facing situations like this in the past, I've ignored them, smiled, and taken the abuse in stride while grumbling to one of the other servers about it later. But this past Tuesday I got this obnoxious table and it was like a switch had flipped in my mind. One of the kids was banging his cup on the table to get my attention because he wanted more to drink, and without even thinking I turned to him and said, "Banging your glass on the table is not going to make me move faster, it's just going to piss me off, and then I'm not going to want to get you anything to drink. Try asking me politely." Another of the kids complained to another server that they'd been waiting for their food for an hour, and when she came to me and told me what they were saying, I walked over to the table. "You've been waiting for your food for twenty minutes, not an hour. There's 16 of you, and they have to make all the food for the entire table before they can bring it out, and that's a lot of food. So you're just going to have to be patient."

Yes, this doesn't sound like sass, but in a service environment, you have to be so careful not to say anything that might be misconstrued as disrespectful, because even though I knew this table wasn't going to tip me anything (the kind of people who treat a server like that aren't the kind who leave a tip, you know?) in the back of my mind there's always a glimmer of self-hope, a little voice that says, "Don't give up, you can still win this table back!"


Am I really the kind of person who sticks up for herself in these kinds of situations? Was this a fluke, or were the past incidents indicative of me just not feeling self-confident enough in the environment?


One of my coworkers is really really obnoxious, and he tries so hard to be liked, but I find that he mostly wastes my time and tells me things I don't really want to hear and don't care about. He tries to joke around, but his jokes just aren't funny, and he constantly asks stupid questions and it drives me nuts. The more I work with him, the meaner I seem to get towards him because I just get fed up. It's like a virus, one exasperated reply and the second one's easier, and the third and fourth...


Am I the kind of person who says mean things to someone just because they're over-earnest and annoying, and not quite as quick with things?


These questions led to more...

Am I the kind of person little kids could look up to? (not literally, of course...)

Do I focus too much on the petty and inane?

Am I capable of inspiring others?

Do I take my friends for granted?

Do I have the potential to achieve what I'm working for?

If I'm driving at 3am and I'm the only car on the road, do I wait for the red light?


A part of me knows that you never know the kind of person you are until you're in a situation where that's tested... but I wish it didn't have to be that way-- in the same sense that I wish I could learn from my mistakes without making them... because most of the mistakes that I make are really stupid. I learn all right, but I act like a 'tard in the process. And it really sucks.



Another part of me says, "Ok God, I'm done with working where I am, I'm ready to move on. It sucks, but I've been a trooper about it, I've handled it with minimal complaints, now what's next? You've had your fun, I've learned stuff, yadda, yadda, enough with the philosophy, can I get on with things?" Now, how character-defining is *that* statement?


-k

So, this is my first post since I first became unemployed. I've gone through a lot over the past few months. It's been a rollercoaster, although it seemed to go more down than up a lot of the time. Here's a brief overview:

Quit my job, dealt with the ramifications of the abuse to my confidence and independence.
After a week or two I started to feel myself again, I gained my confidence back and I went at the job-hunt full-force. It's amazing what a difference it makes when you're not in an environment where you're constantly being told how wrong you are.
After a month or two, I began to become discouraged with the idiotic process of job-hunting.
Two months later, which would be about 2 weeks ago, I was finally able to secure *a* job, as a server at Buffalo Wild Wings.


I've been struggling lately with how to search for another "real" job, one that's going to actually pay the rent, because Lord knows BWW's isn't going to cut it. My dilemma with the situation is this: what kind of job do I look for?

If you graduate with an engineering degree, you look for a job as an engineer. If you graduate with a medical degree, you look for a job as a doctor. I graduated with a degree in Music and Marketing Communications. And I don't really like the music business world or the marketing world. When I graduated, my significant training was in college admissions and in event management. And I don't love either of those fields enough to go for a job in either field with the zeal that I'd need to land the position. To be honest, I don't have zeal for any particular job right now. So, where exactly do I start?


Well, I have an idea of the kind of place I want to work for.
One of the big lessons I learned in my first "real" job is that it's very difficult for me to work someplace if I don't believe in it. If my job involves telling someone the company that I work for is the best, then it'd better be the best, or I simply can't do my job. My last job involved telling impressionable young students that the school I worked for was the one they should go to. I believed what I was saying for about 5 months. After that, my conscience started keeping me up at night. I started to wonder if I was even in the right field, if I was having such problems with what I had to say. The thing is, recruiting is something I'm good at... and that was a big part of the problem.

And then there's the whole issue of how the program used to be really awesome, but now it pretty much sucks. It was a great program when I started recruiting, and over the 9 months that I worked there, change after change was made by His Deanship that started eating away at the quality of the school. Over time I found myself speaking with prospective students and feeling like I was flat-out lying to their faces. I couldn't help but ask myself, "What's going to be left of this formerly awesome program by the time this student actually gets here? What if I'm talking to this18-yr-old kid who doesn't really like our program that much, but I talk with him and I convince him to come here, which makes my numbers look good, but then he gets here and he totally hates it and the program totally sucks, and I've basically used my powers of persuasion to destroy his life? What if?"


I also know, to some extent, how I handle work stresses.
When I started to get more involved in my last job, traveling and using my creativity more, I didn't necessarily bring work home, but it was constantly on my mind. I dreamed about work for probably 5 or 6 months straight. At the time, I thought at first it was that I didn't know how to separate work from personal life and I didn't have much going on outside of work anyways, and I think that might still be part of it. I also thought it might just be me, that I had a natural tendency to become absorbed in my job. As the months passed, I began to believe it was just because of the negative situation I was in, but now I'm not so sure about that last one. I've worked at BWW's for 2 weeks now, and I've already been dreaming about work, about taking orders and serving customers and about interactions with coworkers. Thinking back, I recall similar situations with many of my previous jobs, including working at starbucks and my college internship. Obsessive? Probably. Unhealthy? Maybe. But then again, maybe that's just me.


So it seems that as I look for a job, I need to be aware of the following:


1. If I'm good at what I do (and I often am), my actions will have ramifications. And I need to be okay with those ramifications. The jobs I seem to be best suited for are jobs with high volumes of interactions with other people. I enjoy those kinds of jobs. However, I need to be sure that the consequences of my actions are positive, or I won't be able to do said job. My question now is this: why doesn't this seem to bother so many other people? Am I naive? (Well, yeah. but about this in particular?) Am I being ridiculous and idealistic? (Aren't I always? And even so, could I survive with my ridiculousness and my idealism? I'm not sure I could stand it without them.) Is it obvious that I'm still somewhat fresh out of college, and that I'm still seeing a large part of the world through a cynicism-blocking lense?

2. I need to do something honest. If my job is to tell people that we sell the best wings, they'd better be the best wings that I've ever tasted. This is one of the reasons I haven't gone into marketing-- if my job is to make a commercial that tells people about how awesome Fords are, I need to believe that Fords are totally and completely awesome. Now, I could do the work even if I didn't believe it, but I'd eventually start to feel depressed and hollow inside. I know this because that's how I started to feel at my last job.

3. My work, regardless of what it is, seems to completely absorb me mentally. And by completely, I mean business and non-business hours, and sleep, too. Is this wrong? Is it something I should work to correct? And what if I'm not sure that I'd want to correct it? What would that mean?


That last one struck me tonight as I was trying to relax in the tub and began to dream about BWW's. It occured to me that if my work is bound to absorb my life regardless of what it is that I'm doing, then I want to chose what I'm doing very carefully. If my mind is going to be devoted to thinking about the workplace as I eat my dinner, if work is going to hijack my dreams, I should consider what kind of work I'm meditating on.



So although I have kindof an idea of where I want to be working, I still have no clue what I'd do once I found the place. But I think this has at least given me an idea of where to start looking.

-k
\