My job requires me to deal with a lot of people's problems. People who I know for all of about ten minutes at a time. I can explain the whole process pretty easily: these people come into my office; they explain their issues; sometimes I help them, but sometimes I don't; and then they leave. And usually they're either pissed off or crying during the whole thing. If we're both lucky, I'll never see them again after that.
This is all well and good. I mean, I've been doing this job for years now and I'm pretty good at it. The best, by most accounts. The problem is, it's getting to me. I used to be able to go through the process and, not only fix the problem most of the time, but also improve the attitude of the person at my desk. The crying chick would leave my office smiling and the pissed off dude would leave my office only slightly irritated. And what's more is I used to actually care about that person. I actually wanted to help them. Now, not so much.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not wishing bodily harm on the people that come to me for help at work. Well, not all the time anyway. But I seem to have lost that desire to help. It's been replaced by a desire to get the damned whining bitch out of my office. OK, maybe I'm not to that point yet, but I'm afraid I will be soon.
Kim, the lady who pretty much trained me from the start, and who has been with the company for something like fourteen years, sometimes seems like she has completely lost all compassion for anyone of the human race. She has the same functions as I do at work and I see people go to her and she's so cold and heartless. So much so that some people have taken to avoiding her and coming to me, which gives me even more people to slowly chip away at my empathy. The funny thing is, Kim's not really cold and heartless; when she's not actually performing the functions of her position, she's a great person. But as soon as someone sits in her chair, she changes into something completely different. And that's what I'm afraid I'm becoming.
Everyone gets tired of their job at some point, I guess. I'll bet even Superman has probably entertained notions of just letting Lois fall to the ground after having been dropped from an extraordinary height by some villain or another. And I'm certainly no exception. I'm not exactly ready to change positions at this point; I still have a lot of things that need to be done before I move on to something else, but I'm afraid if I don't make a change soon, then I'll be altered in some fundamental way. And what if I've already been altered?
3 comments:
Hey! You've become such a bad person, the picture you had posted there (illegally, I assume . . . ) has been taken down.
Get a real job and stop working for the man!
None of my pics have been taken down. If you'd stop using IE and start using a grown-up browser, you'd know that, you chode. And working for the man IS a real job. Any job that requires that you trade your soul for financial stability is a real job.
Thanks for writing this.
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