OK, here's something I totally don't get. Why is it that whenever some people complain about their work conditions, other people immediately jump down their throat with, "At least YOU have a job!" As if, because times are tough, these people aren't allowed to complain about their work environment.
As I've mentioned a few times, I was laid off my job (that on many days,
absolutely sucked) in March, 2002. Even now, when I'm really scratching for money, I would never try to silence someone who complained about their boss, or that a client was being a jerk, or a co-worker was being an idiot. I mean, what, it's only okay to complain about your work environment when we're ALL fat and happy? Sorry, but that's just really fucked up.
I have a very good friend who has a job that pays very well (and they get stock options and profit sharing too, I believe). To hear some of the stories about my friend's workplace (a Very Big Company in Silicon Valley), I have to wonder if they recruit whack-jobs...or
create them. Because it sounds like my friend is one of a very small group of highly-functioning people there, sometimes.
Even talking to former co-workers at my old job...they complain about the same old stupidity and shenanigans that went on when I was still at the company...yet I've never even
thought that these people should just be glad they still have their jobs and should shut up.
I had a job, briefly, at a place which shall not be named at this time. In this economy, it's called a "survival job," but I defy anyone to
survive in the Bay Area on a part time job that pays $8/hr. Or at least survive with anything that resembles "quality of life." And there were days when it was damn hard to be there, but I put on that "Disney" charm, and gutted it out. Sometimes I felt really horrible about myself for selling myself--in terms of my skills and experience--out for an unlivable wage. Sometimes my co-workers were difficult to deal with (and I guarantee you, they felt the same way about me...because that's just the nature of the workplace).
Sometimes the owner bitched me and my co-workers out and got hysterical about things that just didn't require a hysterical reaction. In fact, I ended up quitting because in one of her fits of fire breathing, she accused me of theft (using company computers and work time to work on my own website). It was patently FALSE and I challenged her to provide the proof to support her claim. After all, she had monitoring software in the computer that would catch me out if I really was doing my own personal stuff on it. And she had five or six cameras in that tiny shop, so just about everywhere anyone went, they were on camera. She refused to provide any proof (because she had none...because
I didn't do it, duh!) and she refused to apologise to me for making such a heinous--not to mention
false--accusation. So I quit. And I'm not sorry that I did, because there are certain kinds of abuse I just will not tolerate...and that
no one should ever feel that they must tolerate.
As for the customers at that job, most of them were awesome, but a few of them were real doozies! And if it were my shop, I'd invite those doozies to take their business elsewhere, because they were customers that actually cost the shop money!
And you know what? I had every right to complain about all that now that I had when the dot-com boom was happening and we all had steady work were well-fed on big paychecks (and some on stock options--which I never got, actually) and working 60-80 hour weeks. Just like my friends and co-workers have a right to complain about what's going on at their workplace.
Sometimes, work just sucks whether the economy is booming or bleeding. And if I've stuffed my empathy in the back of the freezer when my friends could use a good kvetch session, then I'm not much of a friend.
