Work Traumas

I hate my job. No, I don't hate my job, I hate ALL jobs. They all suck. I was clearly intended by the gods to be independently wealthy and something went horribly, horribly wrong. I am no good at earning a living (this is obvious, of course, to anyone who knows me, including my brother who makes mean cracks about "that vow of poverty you apparently took sometime in the 80s") and I just hate and resent the entire going to work thing. I also deeply hate the fact that each job I get is incrementally worse. The sequence goes like this: I get a job, I hate it, I work there long enough (years of my life!) so that I stop hating it and start accepting it as just somewhere I have to go every day and be annoyed. Then, for one reason or another, I snap and the annoyance gets to be too much: I can't stand it anymore and so I get another job. I have a few brief moments of starry eyed idealism in which I think that it was so clever of me to get another job, and these people will truly appreciate me, I will shed my slacker habits, become a dedicated, career-minded professional and become rich and successful and HAPPY and then. . . I discover that not only do I hate the new job, but it is WORSE, as in the benefits are worse, the hours are worse, the actual work is worse. It's a hideous cycle, and it has happened again.

My new boss calls me 24/7 and seems to think that's okay. That is, actually, okay, since I don't fear him like I feared my old boss The Evil Queen, and I have no qualms about saying "Boss, I have been drinking for four straight hours now, so you had better factor that into any answers I give you." I consider this part of my natural charm and it doesn't seem to faze him one iota. So getting these random phone calls on Sunday mornings and late at night is kind of a good thing: they make me feel like a wonderful, all-American workaholic. Unfortunately, he also expects me to be here in the office 24/7 and that is not so good. I don't want to be here, and when I get here, I don't know what to do, so I end up doing nothing and hope nobody notices. I recognize this for the dysfunctional behavior that it is, but if I ask him for something to do he comes up with incomprehensible ideas about labeling all the lightbulbs in the place and it's just too awful.