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The View From My Cubicle The View From My CubicleI graduated in 2000 with a degree in Environmental and Conservation Sciences. I also have a diploma in Renewable Resources and the beginnings of Massage Therapist training. I had a great job through University and for 6 months after I graduated. I loved the summer fieldwork, especially identifying plants, and I enjoyed having part-time data entry and analysis work through the winter. The catastrophes at work gave me tons of great stories. Unfortunately funding fell through and the project ended. Since then, I have been working at various secretarial jobs to pay the bills and am now in a permanent position with benefits and pay that I can live on. The problem is that I'm bored. I live in a small cubefarm at work. My walls are papered with Dilbert comic strips. If I had wanted to be a secretary I wouldn't have paid and studied my butt off through 7 years of post-secondary education. I want to have a job that I enjoy and be able to pay my rent with it. I'm getting tired of coasting and saying "I'm just a secretary". I'm tired of staying at a job just because it's comfortable. I don't want this to be a career but how long is a job "temporary"�I've been here for over 2 years. I know that I need a steady job, year round with a regular paycheck. Whenever I'm changing jobs or looking for work, I start having my "McDonald's nightmares" again. I worked at McDonalds for 5 years to pay for University and I'm certain that it has scarred my soul. I dream that I'm at McDonald's and my co-workers are all monkeys and there are bombs going off so every few minutes we have to crawl under the counter while the lights flicker and the walls shake and pieces of the roof fall around us and then quick! get up and take the next order oh no there's no food ready and I've forgotten all of my orders and the customers are converging into a giant grease hungry mob that screams "the monkeys are better at your job than you are!" and throw food at me and the grease is burning my face and my arms and searing down to my bones and still I run to give them the burgers dripping with sauce and "here's a free pie sir, please don't run over my foot as you drive away" but he does and I'm chasing the car with a soggy bag of food and my broken foot is screaming and all the cars are honking and the timers are beeping and another bomb goes off quick! under the counter and someone has stolen all of the money from my till and I search and search but I only find a trail of pennies on the floor and when I follow it I find the owner who is pointing at me and yelling "why can't you do your job right?" and everyone stares at me and my clothes are shrinking and another bomb goes off and I crawl back under the counter and cower and hide with my clothes too small and I realize that the trail of pennies was actually a trail of my blood and the monkeys are still working even though the bombs are still coming and I can't keep up so I run but I can't find my way out of the building� Like I said, scarred. I know that I don't need regular hours. I love jobs with flexibility. I loved that my field job was "pick your own schedule" as long as the work got done. I don't mind working overtime as long as I get paid for it or get time off in lieu. I know that if I'm doing the same thing day in day out I'll get bored out of my tree. I need variety, but slightly scheduled variety. I need to know what I'll be doing tomorrow, and roughly what my schedule needs to be for the rest of the week. I like working outdoors, I like working indoors, but I have allergies and chemical sensitivities so I can't work with paint or pesticides or perfumes or other strong chemicals. I can walk, stand, sit, crouch, kneel and lie down to work, but not any one of these for the entire time (and no I don't desire a career as a prostitute). I work best by myself, but I work well with others, I prefer work away from the general public however, I'm good at it but it causes me stress (I'm shy by nature). If supervised, I prefer to be told "This is what you need to have done by this time" and then I can just go and do it. After 3 years I've finally done something about this stagnation. To start with, I went to a lunch time session about career testing and got information. I'm registered for a career decision-making workshop and plan on following up by visiting a career counsellor. I'm taking a step towards doing what I want. I did a short interest survey (list 12 things that you like and group them, try to find a career that uses some of these things). Here they are in no particular order: 1. singing/dancing 2. learning 3. camping/canoeing 4. reading/writing/editing 5. planning/organizing/scheduling 6. photography Singing/Dancing: I am nowhere near good enough to do these things for money, they are for my enjoyment only Learning: if I could afford to be a full time student I would be one. End of story. You can't get paid to go to school for the rest of your life. I know that I would be learning in any new job and in my hobbies, that's enough for me. Camping/Canoeing: This is where I was headed with my previous career. I apparently can't make a living at it. There are so many workers and so few jobs. I could work in the summers and sit on EI in the winters but that just isn't in my character (see McDonald's dream above) If I was a stronger canoeist I would work as a canoe guide in the summers but I'm just not that good. Plus this is not year round work in Canada. I'm considering doing a Master's in Renewable Resources. I have the grades and I'm definitely interested in both research and teaching. I just don't want to invest another 2 years of time, effort and money for a questionable payoff. I want to have a job at the end of my studies and there are no guarantees in this field. Reading/Writing: A career reading? Riiiiiiiiiight. I only wish. A career writing? I don't think I'm good enough. A career in editing, perhaps? I'm great at finding errors, I worked as a quality assurance technician and I'm forever finding errors in books that I read now. However, my grammar is probably not good enough. Is editing another oversaturated market? Probably. Planning/Organizing/Scheduling: These are useful skills in any job. If my entire job was scheduling and organizing I would be perfectly happy, finding a job that fits this is a little more difficult. Professional Organizer is something to look in to. Photography: I'm a photo addict. I love taking photos, looking at photos, editing and altering photos. I love trying to capture the feeling of an image. I love showing things with pictures and Bear and I make slide shows (good ones too). I'm lacking in money and in technical skills. Photography, especially nature photography, is difficult to do as other than a hobby. However, it's something I could combine with my 5 years of renewable resources education. I would love to be a photographer for field guides. Love it. Another thing to keep looking in to. At any rate, I know where to start, I've given myself a time limit and I will leave this comfortable but boring job. This year I will force myself to move on. Hopefully putting it in writing will somehow force me to actually step out of this job and into a fresh career, instead of watching the world pass me by from inside the walls of my cubicle.
2003-10-06 || 2:43 p.m. |
