Last week I watched “Groundhog Day” for the very first time. Not my fault I didn’t grow up in the US, okay?!
It occurred to me that the past four months have been very much like living my own groundhog day. Get into work half an hour late, walk past boss’s office oh-so-nonchalantly, pretend to do work when I’m actually watching last night’s Colbert Report and/or playing Spider Solitaire, look for something to do to no avail, get assigned some ridiculous assignment that can be solved in five minutes, wait until boss leaves the office, drive home, sleep, repeat.
Fuck, that is fucking depressing.
Or not. I bet some people would kill to have my job: insanely boring, not enough work, still gets paid, and there’s no pink slip in the horizon.
But, seriously even when I’m assigned something that is somewhat interesting (read: designing marketing brochure), I still want to shoot myself in the head. Why? Because everyone here hates innovation. I (and some of my other younger colleagues) try suggesting ways that we can improve our quality of work, but almost always get bulwarked by the bosses – who like things the way they are. Take for example the task I’m assigned right now. I pitched a couple of ideas to my boss on how to make our marketing brochure more appealing to people. Besides making the brochure more accessible (by using non-technical language), I suggested that we can try keeping it short and sweet. The boss nodded and then told me to insert more examples of our past work and “throw in some pictures of our boats”. Essentially, he wants the brochure to stay long.
Someone pass me the shotgun, please.
Do you know why I cringe everytime I proofread the final reports that are about to be sent to clients? Because they’re pockmarked with grammatical errors, non-sensical sentences, typos, disorganization of contents and every other crimes in information design that you can think of. I’m no genius and my English sucks, and still I can clearly see what’s wrong with their work. But, no matter how many times I show to them that these information can be rewritten in a more sane way, they still write the reports in the same boring, dry, super-technical engineering style. It’s as if they’re determined to stick to the stereotype that scientists and engineers can’t write.
The longer I stay in this job, the less worthwhile I feel my life is. Not that I know what I want to do with my life anyway…
