Tag Archives: career

What do you want?

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Six months ago as part of the annual mandatory evaluation process that pretty much everyone who has ever had a job goes through, I got asked a variation of the most common question ever put to an employee – What do you want out of your career / What are your goals? When faced with that question most people give the stock answer about gaining more experience, growing their position, and taking on more responsibility. That’s the answer everyone expects to hear when they ask that question. The call and response of that question are so ingrained in the professional world that they’re practically boilerplate.

I guess sticking to a script was never one of my strong points. When an idea pops into my head, there’s always a good chance it’s going to come flying out of my mouth in the form of words. The ones that came hurtling out of my face in response to what should have been an no-brainer kind of question still make me smile six months later. That’s probably because they formed the most honest answer I’ve ever given to that kind of question. The look on my interlocutor’s face made veering wildly off the party line all the more worthwhile.

So if you’re asking yourself by this point what is it I want out of my career or what my goals are, the answer is surprisingly simple. As best I remember, it went a little something like this:

I want to stash enough cash away to buy up 20 or 30 acres of West Virginia; a little property, maybe with a stream running through it, with lots of trees, seclusion, and a strong gate at the end of the driveway. A little cabin, a wood stove, solar panels, and not much reason to come down out of my own personal Walden. I want to spend the days writing and the long summer evenings sitting with the dogs on the porch with my feet up watching the sun drop behind the mountains. When it snows I want to not care how long it takes to melt or how long it will be until I can leave. I want to not be driven by a relentless morning alarm, six meetings a day, and an inbox that never empties. I want to balance the scale a lot more towards life and way less towards work. Those are my goals, since you asked.

Trust me, that’s not the kind of answer your boss is looking for when they ask the question. It’s not the answer I should have given and it’s certainly not the one I’d recommend anyone else giving. It does however, have the virtue of being the first time in almost two decades of work that I answered that question honestly. I still feel kind of good about that.

So you just graduated?

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The whole world is open before you. Congratulations! I won’t mention that you’ve just been booted into the real world into the teeth of one of the worst job markets in living memory, or the fact that your degree doesn’t actual qualify you to work in your field, or that you’re about to enter a soul crushing, mind numbing grind that will rob you of your youth and keep up its blistering until you’ve dropped dead or saved enough money for retirement – whichever comes first. I won’t bring any of that up because your graduation is a time of celebration. It’s a chance to recognize a milestone achievement before you go off to make your way in the world.

Life after graduation doesn’t have to be doom, gloom, and the choice between living in your parent’s basement or your own studio apartment with an endless parade of ramen for dinner. Sure, you’re going to want you weekends to stretch from Wednesday afternoons until early Monday morning, but a few rounds of sitting through some mindless 8AM staff meeting will most likely break you of that desire. It’s just one of the machine’s many ways of breaking you down so it can building build you back up into a useful and productive cog.

Hope isn’t lost, though. The good news is that countless generations have preceded you. A few of their number were even thoughtful enough to write down a the tips and tricks that will help you navigate the professional world you’re about to enter. Now I could let you in on all these secrets for free, but that really defeats the lesson I’m trying to teach here – that sometimes free advice isn’t worth the electrons it was written with. Sometimes if you want the inside scoop, you’ve got to be willing to pay.

Let’s face it, at the low, low price of $2.99 for the ebook, knowing what you’re in for before it happens would be deal at twice the price. So, my newly graduated friend, I invite you to head on over to iTunes, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon to pull back the curtain and take your first steps into a broader world forewarned and forearmed. Nobody Told Me: The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees is the graduation present to yourself that you didn’t even know you needed.

Stress…

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Stress is a funny thing. Actually, that’s not right at all. Stress is a pain in the ass thing, but what it does to people can certainly be funny. Based on my observations, there are two basic types of people: 1) Those who “externalize” stress and fly off the handle with little or no notice when put under pressure and 2) Those who internalize stress and let it seep into their pores and really fester. I tend largely to fall into the latter category. I’ve learned through hard experience that almost nothing good happens when you fly off the handle. I do my best to respond accordingly. Some people, though, they just let it blow. To each his own, I guess.

Cracking jokes on your way out the door when you’re seething inside is something of an art form. Conveniently, it’s also less detrimental to your career than putting your fist through the nearest available sheet of drywall, so there’s that too. Sure, it helps you better align yourself for he inevitable middle-age heart attack, but it beats all hell out of letting anyone know they’ve gotten under your skin. The cardinal sin in the animal kingdom is showing weakness. Experience tells me that we’re all just about a step up from our primate cousins under the best of circumstances – just a better dressed version of the animal kingdom. Therefore, I try to keep weakness showing to a bare minimum.

I walked away today without twitching, sneering, or picking a fight. I should get a goddamned medal for that, though I won’t dare hold my breath. Just one time it would feel incredible to let myself go off like a rocket. It would be bad on every other level imaginable, but God it would be so cathartic.

A blessing and a curse…

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Government work isn’t exactly bad when you can get it. There are, of course, strings attached. One of the most off-putting strings by which I am tethered to the job is attending a series of monthly meetings that may or may not have any actual relationship to my profession. Since I’m well known as a team player and an undeniable physical presence in any room, I show up, listen attentively, take notes, and regularly report back only that there is nothing significant to report. Sitting through an endless series of meetings doesn’t require a real human-sized brain, but separating the mind from the body is generally frowned upon. Since my General Schedule overlords seem pleased enough with this arrangement, I too will leave well enough alone.

Look, I’m the first one to rock the boat whenever I think rocking it might actually do some good. Fighting city hall over the number of random meetings people get stuck in isn’t one of those occasions. I’ve been a professional bureaucrat long enough to know that the only thing worse than being in too many meetings is not being in them – because that’s always when someone gets the bright idea to make something your responsibility and not actually bother to tell you about it. So in a way, making sure all the meetings are well attended is a warped kind of self defense mechanism.

So baring a Powerball win, my foreseeable future would seem to include spending the hourly equivalent of at least one full week a month doing nothing more than sitting in meetings where my only real responsibility is signing off with “No sir, nothing to add here.”

This is the life I chose… it’s a blessing and a curse.

Annual history…

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It’s that magical time of year where you get to distill the essence of your professional accomplishments down to less than 1000 words and then try not to slit your wrists as you realize how you’ve spent the last 365 days. Whether you’re compiling the annual unit history report or creating a list of accomplishments for your yearly performance appraisal, the one thing they serve to remind you of is how much time you’ve spent working on stuff that you have no actual interest in doing.

I’m the last person on earth to recommend that you need to find personal fulfillment in your profession. As I discovered with my ill-fated sojourn as a history teacher, having a deep and profound love for a subject doesn’t a fulfilling career make. For as much as I love all things historical, I despised most other elements of the job. Still, I’d like to think I’m doing more than writing reports, enduring meetings, and building the world’s most complex PowerPoint briefings.

The beauty part of these brief moments of professional clarity is that they only come on once a year, so for the other 11.5 months I can maintain a blissful level of willful ignorance on the topic. I think in the end, everyone is better served when I’m ignoring just how much time I’m spending on mundane, routine tasks and just keep churning out reams of paperwork on demand… because really, if I were stop and think about it for any sustained length of time, I’d be tempted to run off and join the damned circus.

I’m glad a have a job that keeps me employed (almost) full time… but I’m even more glad I don’t mistakenly identify what I do with who I am.

Embarrassing…

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Well, this is embarrassing. It seems that the American political system is precisely as dysfunctional as I’ve been afraid it was. Remind me to never to use the “world’s oldest operating democratic republic” line again, will you?
Government+Closed
Today’s plan of attack:

1. Drive to work and get handed my official furlough notice. (Yes, for reasons that bugger the imagination, sending that to us in an email and saving everyone an unnecessary trip to and from the office is something that’s apparently too hard to do.)

2. Apply for unemployment benefits from the State of Maryland.

3. Update my resume on Monster and begin applying for jobs.

4. Spend some time writing something that I may be able to sell for profit and bidding on freelance writing jobs.

5. Call Representative Andy Harris, Senator Ben Cardin, and Senator Barbara Mikulski and leave a voice message expressing my absolute disgust with our elected “leaders.” (Since most congressional staffers are also non-essential, the chance of anyone ever getting that message are somewhere between slim and none.)

6. Write a blog post that hides the fact that I am stark raving furious about the disfunction of our political masters under a thin veneer of snark and sarcasm.

So that’s what I’ll be doing instead of the job that Uncle Sam has spent a great deal of time and money training me to do and which I have demonstrated award-winning skill in carrying out. I thought I had a career, but apparently it’s only a job. I’ll adjust my expectations and level of dedication accordingly.

Wrong gear…

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It’s the end of July. The part of me that spent two years checking off classes good for a teaching degree and then spent 28 months actually teaching still rebels this time of year. Some people go into teaching because they have a passion for their field. Some do it because they like kids and want to “touch the future.” That always seemed like a particularly pervy phrase to me, but I digress. The point is, I mostly went into teaching because it seemed like a great way to maximize time not working.

By now the average teacher is probably yelling at me about all the time they spend prepping, planning, grading, collaborating, talking to parents, and taking refreshed training after class, on weekends, and over the summer. My solution to that was to simply not do those things. I was usually in my room 30 minutes before the first bell only because that gave me time to eat whatever breakfast I picked up on my way in from the house and the busses barely cleared the parking lot before I was headed for the doors at the end of the day. As for grading on the weekends, at night, or at some other time when I wasn’t getting paid for it? Yeah. Forget about it. I guess someone people work for love, but I’ve always been more a “work for money” type of guy. Maybe that’s another reason the whole teaching career never took off, but again I digress.

What I seem to have at the moment is a distinct lack of motivation and the deep seated wish that all manner of jobs came with a 45-day chunk of free time right around the middle of summer. Sure, I’m making sure the paper shuffles from here to there, but in my head isn’t even in the same city as the ballpark where the game’s being played. That’s not a good long-term plan. Once the days start getting shorter and the nights cooler, I’ll snap back to reality. Right now I feel like a car running in the wrong gear – still moving forward, but doing it in a monumentally inefficient way… and you just can’t fix that shit with more cowbell.

A face in the crowd (and better off for it)…

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The best part of just being a face in the crowd is that you get to spend a lot of time watching people in power, whether that be the legitimate power of elected office or the almost completely fictitious power that resides in a fancy sounding title. The most common denominator that I’ve observed so far is simple – the more powerful the individual being observed, the less control they have over their own lives. The ones with real power, the ones who are minor princes of the universe, seem to have their days scripted, their movements controlled, and have barely a spare minute to do so much as scratch their own arse.

It’s hard to believe, but a younger, more ambitious version of me once thought that sounded like an ideal way to spend a career… long flights, clamoring between meetings, and generally being indispensible. With a third of my career in the rear view, I can honestly say that the shine is well off that idea. These days, the last place I want to find myself is at the center of the hive. The older I get, the less inclined I am to let other people dictate my schedule or to cede control over any portion of my life. My one concession is the 40-hours a week that I spend working for wages… and that’s only grudgingly because I like eating and having a roof over my head.

I’m sure it’s a fine way to live and all, but for me, having the maximum amount of personal control over who I interact with, what I do, and when I do it is pretty damned important. On balance, short of being named absolute monarch of a small tropical island, I’m not sure that’s something I’d want to give up – especially not for something as temporal as a spiffy sounding title and not much else.

10 years on…

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10-year-anniversaryAround this time a decade ago me and about 30 of my brand new friends were herded into an auditorium that would be our home for the next six months. We were handed about 371 pieces of paper needing our signatures, took our oath of office as government employees, and, as I recall, spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what the hell we had gotten ourselves into after accepting a rather vague sounding job from an obscure sounding Army office.

I’m not going to lie, this career hasn’t been what I expected. It hasn’t been all good, but it hasn’t been all bad either. All things considered, Uncle Sam carved out some amazing opportunities for a guy with a history degree whose only real ambition in the winter of 2003 was to get as far away from teaching as possible. Ultimately, work is work. I’ve had some good days and there have been some spectacular flops too. On balance, it feels like there has been more good than bad, though.

Ten years feels like a pretty impressive milestone for a guy who up until that point had never stayed with an employer for more than three years… of course the pessimist in me can resist pointing out that all a ten year anniversary means is that I’ve got twice that amount of time before I can even think about hanging it up. That sounds like an awfully long time until I remember just how fast the last ten years have seemed to go. I have a disturbing feeling that I’m going to wake up one morning a month from now and see the 20 or 30 year mark coming over the horizon.

Apparently time doesn’t just fly when you’re having fun. Time just flies.