Why must I be so ethical?

[textualdeviance]

Job is driving me so far up a wall I'm starting to think I'm Spiderman.

Dilemma:

-What I'm doing is boring and a total waste of my skills and education.
-It also only takes me 3-4 hours/day to do--on a busy day.
-Leaving me stuck at work, trying to look busy, and feeling guilty for stealing the company's money to fuck off on the intarweebs.

What I'd like to do:

-Ask boss if there's something I'm missing about my duties and/or whether I can be useful helping out elsewhere to keep me busy, or whether I can just go part time, work from home, blah blah. Or ...
-Quit entirely, because this isn't what I signed on for.

Why I can't:

-Teammate's job is more or less the same as mine, just on a different section. And unless I'm unaware of something else she's doing, she actually has less to do every day than I do.
-Which means Teammate is ALSO being paid to fuck off all day. Or she's a total idiot who actually needs the time to do something so simple.
-Therefore, speaking up about not having enough to do would call out that she's been fucking off and/or an idiot for the last 6 months.
-Which would likely put her job in jeopardy. Ack.
-I could quit entirely without giving that reason, but then they'd just hire someone else in my place who'd ALSO get paid to fuck off all day. Which wouldn't be fair to them.
-Quitting without a Damned Good Reason would fuck my reputation with this team and my agency.

So ... there it is. My options are to suck it up and drown in boredom and guilt every day, or speak up, and risk fucking someone else out of a job she needs. Meh. Double meh.

Comments

[van.livejournal.com]

Solution is to find another job that does what you want, and leave for advancement reasons... easier said than done, I know.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wish. Part of the problem, of course, is that I can't (shouldn't) commit to anything permanent or long-term because I may have to take parental leave on a moment's notice, depending on when we get The Call about the adoption.

Of course, that itself would make a great "gotta go!" thing, but I also don't think it'll happen soon enough to keep me from going completely bonkers.

[grail76.livejournal.com]

You could just say that you have some extra time on occasion and you're interested in learning more about the company.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Nah. I already know pretty much everything there is to know about the company (what with M having worked there for 16 years) plus I've worked on this same team on and off for almost five years. I probably know it better than my boss does, actually. Which is part of the reason I'm frustrated. I shouldn't still be doing the same boring shit I did when I got my first contract there in 2007.

[flippet.livejournal.com]

Maybe your teammate is going nucking futz with boredom too, and wouldn't mind a little more to do, if it were asked for? Maybe you could talk to her about it?


I hear you - I have two jobs, and I sit around online for most of the day. To be fair, in the first job, I do the work that's there to be done, and then I'm expected to do reception-y duties, whenever a client comes in. Which isn't often. So I *can* play online or read or whatever, to a point...but I sometimes feel weird doing that, because I feel like my boss might feel that I 'ought' to be doing something...except there's literally nothing to do, unless I want to sweep the floor again, which I should probably do more often. My boss isn't really in charge of my job in that he can't give me more to do (we do the work that comes in and can't generate more), and he's not in charge of budgets or anything, so it ought to be no skin off his nose *what* I do, as long as the work gets done (and it does), but he's an ace at missing the plot, so I'm nervous that he might mention it to the next level up, who might decide that it's not cost-effective to keep me there half-time.

Now, that doesn't worry me much, except at my other job, I seem to have increasingly little to do. I used to have three student workers. I honestly can't imagine what I used to have them do, because the workload wasn't that much more. I didn't have any student help for a number of years, and there really was too much work for just me, so a bunch of stuff didn't get done...but I always felt like I had something I should be doing, even if I wasn't doing it. Now, I have a student again, and - she's the fastest student I've ever had (and I've had a few who were quite good). I'm running out of things for her to do, and honestly....I'm running out of things for ME to do. This does make me nervous, because if the bosses notice that I don't *have* much to do, I'm not sure what would happen. I don't know if they'd try to reassign other work to me, or if they'd try to make me rustle up more work for my office (ugh - marketing is not my thing, and not exactly what I was hired to do). Or if they'd consider cutting back my hours, or maybe closing my program entirely.

In that light, I have asked to be taught some skills from another area - at the very least, if my area does get cut, hopefully I can make myself valuable in this second area, and there will be people retiring eventually - I can't take their exact jobs (not the right education), but I could probably do a lot of what they do, and fill in in a pinch.

The trick is balancing it so that I don't do so much of this work that it becomes obvious that I'm not doing that much of my own. Ugh.

So - totally feel you. If you figure out a solution, let me know.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Well, I broke down and sent mail to my teammate, asking if I was missing something--if there was something more to our job than what I've been doing. So maybe that'll open the dialogue, and then we can both just go to the boss and say, "Hey, this is a 1-person job, and (Teammate) wants it. Sayonara."

I'm just glad I'm in a position where I don't actually need the work. The paychecks certainly make things easier, but it's not like we're in deep shit if I'm not getting paid. I'm more worried about my future job prospects than anything else; if I ditch this thing and don't get back to work until after the kid's in daycare, I'm looking at a really effed-up job search.

Of course, a miracle could happen and my book could get published, and I wouldn't have to care about this at all ... ;)