I have to confess: I really don’t care for my job all that much.

Surely, not liking my job puts me into a tiny little minority of American workers. After all, doesn’t 99.9% of the American workforce love their jobs? Well, no. Some studies have shown that something like 70% of Americans just don’t like their job, and that a significant majority of that 70% — something like 85%, I think — feel that they are simply stuck in their job with no hope for advancement or improvement.

That I don’t like my job that much is nothing unusual. But why don’t I like it? After all, I have great co-workers that I like and that I have a lot of fun with. My girlfriend can even attest to that. I also believe that the work I do is important work, since it helps keep the University running (even if I do occasionally feel that the whole point of labor unions in California is to deliberately waste my time). The money I earn is somewhat decent, though I won’t be buying a house or a car or anything like that anytime soon — especially when I’m still paying off some large debts and putting away 20% of my income each month to save for my trip to Europe. And the benefits — medical, dental, etc. — of working at the University just can’t be beat. Free medical coverage with no deductible and a small-ish co-pay, free dental (with no co-pay), free vision, legal insurance, a nice retirement package, and so on.

So what’s wrong with my job? Simply that it’s dull. It was a challenge when I came on board almost three years ago, when I found University personnel policies and labor relations fascinating. But once I figured out the rules of the labor relations game — that for every stupid manager there is at least one psychotic employee, but that people in the work force are, surprisingly, mostly stable — I realized that I didn’t find it at all interesting anymore. I do believe it’s important — after all, in large organizations, the Labor Relations unit (if it’s run properly and the people there know what they’re doing) can keep the workplace stable and healthy. And it’s gratifying that I work with people who do care about this stuff, and honestly do their best to keep the University functioning well. But I’m not one of those people, and it’s beginning to wear me down.

On the other hand, though, I am starting to delve into areas that I do find fascinating. Web development, for example, and database design. Last week I started learning how to program in Cold Fusion to create websites that are dynamic and which pull information from a local Access database — my first application was well-received in my department and I’m trying to get the go-ahead to build more. And just last night I wrote my first Java applet (it’s not exciting, to be sure, and does nothing more than print a silly phrase on the screen), and I found that Java is surprisingly easy to grasp. Object-oriented programming is going to take a little getting used to, but I don’t think that my brain will melt when trying to figure it out. So, needless to say, I’m very excited about the possibilities of building dynamic web pages for inter- and intranet use, with Java, Javascript, Cold Fusion, and MS-Access, or whatever. I’ve even coded XML, and find that fascinating as well.

But at the same time, this is all very daunting. I have all of these books on Java, JavaScript, HTML, XML, Perl, Cold Fusion, and Access, and they all fill up at least two feet of bookshelf space. It’s exciting stuff, but the amount that I still have to learn seems overwhelming at times.

And, of course, there’s the question of employment. I could probably find a stable job with the knowledge that I already have under my belt, but probably not anything that would match what I’m earning now. I haven’t got nearly the skillset I need to find a job that pays what I need to earn to keep myself afloat, let alone buy the house and the car and the Palm Pilot and so on and so on and so on. Until I can get paid to learn what I want to learn while still contributing to something which I feel is valuable, I am stuck doing this on my spare time and writing up small useful applications here and there to impress the socks off of my co-workers.

While it’s easy to get depressed over this, I find that I’m not. Sure, I’m a long way from the exciting high-paying job where I travel to dangerous parts of the world and solve tough database/web development problems, Indiana Jones style, and it’ll probably be a couple of years, at least, before I can seriously think about getting there. But, on the other hand, I’ve managed to get places before that seemed daunting and impossible. When I first graduated from college, it seemed downright impossible that I would ever find a good job at all, let alone one that would give me decent benefits and where I might have a boss who does, in fact, support my efforts (as much as she can, at least, without sacrificing the needs of the unit). I once thought that I would never own a car of my own. And even less than a year ago, I was nearly convinced that it would be completely impossible for me to ever be involved in a healthy relationship with a wonderful, stable woman. But all of these things happened, so, in all likelihood, I can probably improve my job situation as well.

Until then, though, I’ll keep fobbing off less interesting responsibilities of my current jobs onto other administrative assistants who find the idea of using the University’s centralized accounting software really, really exciting (while I myself find it tedious and mind-numbing), or who live for setting up meetings. And in the meantime, any ideas you might have for helping me develop my web development/database design career would be more than welcome.

P.S.: Shortly after posting this journal entry for the first time this morning, I received a telephone call from a recruiter who had seen my resume, and who was recruiting for a web development design position in Sacramento, which would use some of the very skills that I’ve been developing recently. The Universe excels at irony, and this is just one more example. Please keep your fingers — and whatever other digits you find helpful — for me. -RC

P.P.S.: And very shortly after posting my P.S., above, I received another call from another recruiter. This is simply too weird: two recruiters calling on the same day that I post my whiney job-hunt-related journal entry. I turned the second one down, though, because it is a Unix-heavy position down in Menlo Park; and I am certainly not any kind of a Unix guru (I’ve used "vi" and "chmod" and that’s it), and right now I have a vested interested in staying in the Sacramento area…