What's your least favorite thing about your job? Your most annoying coworker? Your least favorite task?

On a more positive note: describe your dream job.

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

Answers

OK, before I start on this, I want to talk about why I stay IN this job. I stay in this job because the pay is great, they give me Fridays off during our downtime (6 weeks at a time), I like MOST of my co-workers, and also because I think of it as a time-killer while I save up and learn about opening my own business. Mostly the Fridays off thing, though.

But yeah, OK. I do nothing creative. Ever. I proofread other people's writing, and that's all right, that's what I took the job for. I don't get to do enough of that, though. Mostly I enter other people's corrections from handwritten copy. Or I update the web page. That's about it. There's a LOT of that work to do, so I'm usually busy, but sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm doing there. Likewise, I did not go to college for four years and get myself an edukashon so that I could be a glorified secretary. That's basically what I am, and I still haven't decided whether I'm keeping this job or not, although the getting Fridays off thing is a big deciding factor.

And then there's the new officemate. She talks to herself. Constantly. Talks. To herself. It's not one of those low muttering things that you can just ignore. Oh, no. She's one of these people that's starved for attention, so every so often she'll just have these outbursts that demand attention. Like, "Ooh! Yay! Yay! Yay!" or "Oh no.. oh noooooo." It's either in a little-girl happy voice or in a slow whiny voice. I want to throttle her. And it's not quite loud enough to be the "I'm talking to you" tone of voice, but it's not quiet enough to be the "I'm talking to myself/the computer" tone of voice. It's that in-between "I'm pretending to be talking to myself but I secretly want you to notice and respond" tone of voice. Both my original officemate and I have now spoken to her about this very politely, so we'll see how it goes, but Jesus Christ I want to throw her out the window sometimes.

My dream job would be one where I only have to work three days a week, but those three days are filled with my getting to *really* edit someone else's work. Not just proofread for spelling and grammar. I'm talking about serious editing. That's what I love. That would make me feel like I was actually contributing something useful.

And, to be fair, my current job has been giving me a little of that, and hopefully now that I've proven myself they'll give me more. If THAT happens, my current job will be close enough to my dream job that I'm definitely staying until I open my own business (whenever that is).

Um, OK, now that I've written all this do you think I actually have to write an entry for my own site today, too?

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

OH Man. Let's see...how about the FAKE women. How about the power trippers 'management musn't mingle with minions', HOW ABOUT THE DAMN Smokers? Uncourteous stovepipes. What a joy it is to be eating a Peanut Butter and Smoke Fucking Sandwich. Oh yes, pure bliss.

This job sucks.

My dream job? Beth, are you trying to kill me? I had to quit my dream job 3 months ago. Though the real dream would have been no (certain persons na

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

My dream job would be no job at all.

As for the one I have, my company has been merged with a much bigger one, and people are being laid off all over the place because they are now considered redundant.

I probably won't be one of them, but it's depressing anyway, whether you're one of those who get laid off or one of those who has their work load doubled but not their salary.

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

I would love to bitch about my job!!! My office mate flirts endlessly with her boss who is at least 10 years younger than she is. She talks on the phone all day with friends and still doesn't know how to use the fax machine!!! My boss throws temper tantrums all day and uses me as her verbal punching bag. Shouldn't she be a little more mature seeing as how she owns the company? My dream job would be to stay home with my eight month old son..maybe have a part time job to keep in touch with adults. That dream is what gets me through the bad days. I just focus on my baby's picture and try not to kill anyone.

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

This isn't my dream job, but I'm happy. My boss is nice and most of my co-workers are too. It's interesting and I also get to do picky anal activities like reformatting text.

My dream job would be to not have to work, just get to sleep late and swim and sit in a sauna then read and take a nap. Dolce far niente.

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

Reasons why I like my job: I work 4 ten-hour days, so I have Fridays off too. Boy, is that addictive! In addition, I work 2pm-midnight on Mondays, so my weekends start Friday morning and don't end until Monday afternoon. I feel like I'm in on a scam, even though I'm working the same hours. Also, my new boss is really, really great and supportive and cool.

But he hired me to be a performance test lead, and I had only a little test experience (I came from environment support). Anyway, the point is that I have to do all this long-term planning about the performance of our product and feel completely in over my head.

At least this bad stuff is something I can fix. I can learn, slowly get the experience I need, get help, etc. I'm glad that it's not an annoying co-worker that I can't do anything about. (I've had them in the past, but I'm lucky at the moment, I guess.)

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

Things I hate about my current job: 1) Upper management -- they're not exactly the most with-it crew

2) The relationship we have with the rest of the IT dept.
It shouldn't take 3 days to set up an account for the web designer, another week to get her the ColdFusion CD and another few days on top of that to make sure she can actually log onto the server, when she has projects to turn out against deadline.

3) The dress code. Business dress is so passé

4) Our clients. Bunch of clueless, non-visionary types whose design sense is stuck in 1993.

5)The lack of resources allocated to our dept. We had to fight tooth and nail to get new PCs and 128MB of RAM in order to run ColdFusion Studio, Lotus Domino Designer and a bunch of other thing, like ... Photoshop.

6) The Domino application that we have to work with on our current project. We should have finished this HTML to Domino migration months ago. It's still not finished and I only have 3 days left at this job.

7)Least favorite tasks: calling the Domino Support guy, filling out my time sheet and writing my weekly report.

Dream job: A Web Design company that does only design and development and is on a 6-month development cycle so that projects are rolled out in a timely fashion, learning new skills happens while the skills are still relevant and your co-workers and managers know as much if not more about design and development as you do. Conversely, I'd love to be a Berllitz languages instructor. This would be the perfect part-time job for me when I have kids.

Yes I already sent off for information about this and wouldn't ya know it, there's a whole bunch of Berlitz offices in San Francisco. I think I'll start out by taking lessons though. Gotta learn German for the new job. Which may or may not be close to my dream job ... we'll see:) At least it's Linux-based ... I'm leaving the Windoze world behind. Woo hoo!

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000

My dream job would be exactly what I'm doing now, a show on radio, except that ideally I'd be getting paid for it instead of it being a voluntary activity as it is now. I don't have any real complaints with it beyond an under-equipped newsroom (not enough working computers to go around) and also problems with the turntables in the studio. I do the film show so that doesn't affect me, but the station plays a lot of dance music so there's a lot of vinyl being spun and the turntables in both studios are pretty poor, apparently. I remember a few weeks ago the fellow who does the punk show on Saturday night was playing something off 7-inch vinyl (as he often does) and the left stereo channel from the turntable just dropped out, so that the emergency music system (which automatically takes over if there's dead air for more than 30 seconds) kicked in in that channel while the song was still playing in the other channel. So the technology isn't always on our side. But we're not a commercial enterprise so we have to put up with it

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

Alright Beth! If you've ever introduced a new forum topic at exactly the right time, this has to be it.

I work as a web designer for a company which changes its policy every time the CO blows his nose. For the past 4 months, my colleague and me have created no less than four different versions of the company website, because every time we came up with something, the brass had had another top meeting only to decide that some MAJOR changes had to be made concerning the corporate identity. Honestly, you wouldn't believe the amount of work we've been doing here, only to see it flushed down the drain the moment we were done.

Add to that the completely unreasonable deadlines we have to cope with - how about the brass holding meetings for no less than two months and then giving us two days to create a solid site, incorporating everything they've been discussing - and the fact that these bobos (= Dutch slang for ignorant, overpaid and overbearing executives) wouldn't recognize a good website if it was presented to them on their fucking computer screens, and I think you can guess how fulfilling this job has been lately. A year ago to the day, I could devote myself to providing good content for the previous company site, which was more or less a dream job. These days, I feel like a dancing bear.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

I can relate to what Stijn says. I'm the webmaster at a nonprofit, professional association. I've built the website from the ground up. I still have to have periodic "web review" meetings to go over things, which really isn't a bad idea in theory, but the way we practice it sucks. Every time we have a meeting, we go over the home page design. I can't seem to make the "suits" understand that you don't want to have a novel for a home page. And then we have the department wars about what should be on the home page, and what its position should be, and we lack anyone at the top who can tell the department heads to stop fucking around and cooperate. I am not a department head myself, and I'm very uncomfortable with confronting people who are a level or two above me on the corpporate jungle gym.

I don't know how it is elsewhere, but my company seems, generally, to be very shortsighted. An idea is presented, people jump on the bandwagon, but we rarely seem to follow the idea out to its logical conclusion. Maybe it's just the way my mind works, but I like to have some idea of what the consequences are going to be.

I basically like my job. I have an excellent staff (one person, but staff is staff), and there are many challenges. I just wish I could deal less with people with hidden (or not so hidden) agendas.

My dream job would be writing a highly successful series of mysteries while living in a cabin in Maine.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

I'm currently in an internship at the local newspaper, which is a nearly perfect job (part time, spend all my time writing stories) other than lack of pay, limited net access, and permanence. The most annoying part of the job is that the people here tell me very little about what goes on around here. I wasn't told I had a voice mail box for months, and half the time the new front desk people cannot figure out how to get me messages. The most recently icky one was scheduling a photographer to come to an event on Sunday a lot of my friends were at, and nobody showed. Thing is, no one even mentioned, ever, they don't do any work on Sundays. There was even a page in the photo log for each Sunday, with times blocked off already on it...Argh! At least my coworkers are cool and I don't have any particularly annoying tasks other than having to call doctors on occasion (on average it takes me a month to get ahold of each one).

Dream job: Something writing in the media- newspaper, magazine, or something Web-based. One in which I can sleep in and work late if I so choose, has Internet access, I can work from home if I choose and come into the office if I choose, I make good money... I know, incredibly impossible to find. Sigh. a writing job, yeah, I know,

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

What I love least about my job right now is that there's so little of it. Okay, freelance is usually a bit slow after December, but holy cow- this is getting depressing. I do about four different arty things professionally, and none of 'em are jumping at the moment.

Just this morning I was thinking about what my absolute dream would be. There's two, actually. One would be to get that lucky b*tch Leslie Forbes' gig... she travels the world, meets cool folk, eats great food, and then writes and illustrates gorgeous books about it. My favourite is "Fabulous Feasts". Getting PAID to travel/eat/write/illustrate! Can you imagine?

The other... well, of the things I do now, if I had to choose just one, I'd do nothing but portraits. Of my many heros in this area, nobody beats Gustav Klimt. His work was magical, breathtaking.And he was so well-regarded that he was able to get away with *insisting* that his potential clients have a dress specially designed for their sitting, by a costumer with whom he had some professional arrangement. Sweet!

-- Anonymous, March 31, 2000