jrsmith.net

I’m so fucking frustrated lately.

Work has been increasingly unsatisfying for me. I’m completely and totally swamped by work that I find hopelessly boring. Every day is the same as the last. Endless projects, endless uncertainty. No one knows what they want, they just want it now. I’m left with a big vague project that WILL NEVER END, and more of the same lined up behind it. Every single day my brain becomes more and more comatose. It’s gotten to the point that I actually look forward to the occasional change to the website, since it rouses my brain a little for a few minutes. That’s really sad.

So then, a bright flicker of hope shone down upon me. “Let’s move to a new platform,” they said. Awesome. “Let’s hire someone to take some of the burden off of you,” they said. Even better, since there’s no possible way I could ever even begin learning something new while laboring under this mountain of work. Unfortunately, my opinion here counts for exactly zero now. I say I want to move to a decent web framework, something like django or web.py or even ruby on rails. They decide to use .net. They decide to hire a contractor to start working on converting existing apps to .net instead of hiring a perl developer to take some of my current workload.

Neither of these things help me. If anything, they make things worse, because I now have to spend time answering some holier-than-thou consultant’s asinine questions.

For the first time since I’ve worked here, not counting my years at that other place, I look forward to leaving every day. I do not check my email after hours or in the mornings. I do not work weekends. I do not feel proud or enthusiastic about my work. It oppresses me. I get headaches when I think about it.

Maybe I’m not meant for this. Maybe I should have stuck with art. I’m kidding myself when I say that, though. I was never nearly good enough to make a living from that. On top of that, I’m horrible when selling myself or fruits of my labor. Any of you who have insisted on paying me for anything, like fixing your computer or drawing a tattoo or something, know that first-hand. I have no self-esteem, which makes it pretty much impossible to put a value on my efforts or time. This would have been a major hindrance.

I feel like I’ve stagnated. I don’t feel like I’m living up to my abilities. I see all the things being done on the internet today, things that I could easily be part of, and I feel like a monumental waste of space for spending an entire day updating calculations to fit today’s theories on how things should work, knowing I’ll have to change them again next week. I feel bad about myself for spending 30 minutes posting pictures of a Christmas party to an internal news page.

I am more than this.

If only I really believed that, I might be in a position to do something about it.