Grunt work and high school

I just finished up a rather taxing week at my new job and can’t remember ever being so happy to see Friday come around.  If you’ve followed my blog, you know that I’ve had one hell of a difficult time getting and keeping a job for over two years now.   I went from making the big bucks in 2009 to making dirt now.   However, it is just enough dirt to cover my side of the household expenses and bills, and for that I am truly grateful.

Then there’s the part of which I’m not so grateful.

I am doing grunt work and, at the risk of sounding snotty, it is everything I can do to walk in that place, hold my head up and do my job to the best of my ability.  I am a customer service slave rep who answers phones all day long and gives people information.  I don’t teach them anything.  There is nothing tech-savvy going on in which I could display my nerdish ways and talents.  There is only the phone, headphones, a computer, a very bare desk and chair, and me.  Blah Blah Blah

I am a robot.  An unhappy grunting robot.  An over-qualified, under-paid and pretty much invisible unhappy grunting robot. 

“Thank you for calling. My name is (unhappy grunting robot who only makes enough money to subsist and forget about saving anything including my sanity) Terri.  May I have your name and date of birth please?”

Sorry. I digress.  Yet again.

And.

I have apparently enrolled in high school.  Guys flirting with everything that moves.  Women wearing tight and low-cut fashion, with 5 inch stilettos.  Well, that part’s not so bad.   Some of the men seemed to have mistaken their work stations for a stool at the corner bar, the way they slither around the women like snakes.     Some are in their 40s and older, and still talking that trailer-trash.  And the stupidity?  There’s that.  I truly believe they just took us off the streets and hired us as warm bodies.   There are a few of us with a brain, sprinkled amongst a sea of ‘DUH’ and I really wish I was exaggerating, but I am not.

So it’s Friday night, and I’m home and trying very hard to feel normal again.  My pity party is short-lived and I’ll be fine by tomorrow. Where there’s wine, there’s a will.  Or something like that.

 I am trying to hang on to the positives, like the cool pop dispenser machine in the break room that retrieves my selection with a robot mechanism and short-changes me at every opportunity.  The coffee dispensing machine is another perk of the job  Get it. I made a funny!  It costs 75 cents per cup and sometimes you get coffee and sometimes you don’t.  It’s kind of like Russian Roulette.  I always wanted to live life dangerously.   And if the added amenities above weren’t enough to keep me euphoric, the ladies’ room is way too small for so many women.  It always smells and no one wipes the toilet seat after they piddle.  I don’t piddle as a rule, but I may start due to my need to belong. 

Nah, maybe not.

 My professional life seems to be a bit like a runaway train, only going backwards.  At this time in my life, I should be comfortable, not struggling to pay bills.  It’s not like I goofed off my whole life.  I’ve worked and I’ve served my country and I’ve earned degrees, and raised two sons.  I have experience in many areas.  However, I may as well be invisible.

For instance, in the three weeks I have been working at my new job, my trainer has yet to spell my name right.  I corrected him daily, marking through the incorrect name on the sign-in sheet and providing the correct spelling.  And still, he distributed our certificates of completion yesterday, and some woman named Theresa Sonada passed.  Good for her.

And?  One of the team leaders they hired runs around yelling at everyone and making enemies.     Bitch needs to stay out of my face.  Just sayin…

Solution?   I don’t really have a short-term solution.  I’ll keep the job until I get my Masters (unless something good comes along beforehand) and then I hope to teach or write for a living, or both. 

Thank you for ‘listening’.   Now I can go on to more pleasant things…..like sorting out my sock drawer and tweezing the hairs on my big toes.  Life is truly a party.