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For today’s installment of Let’s Compartmentalize Maria’s Head, I’d like to talk about my job.

My job and my happiness have been forever married, no matter how diligently I try to divorce them. “Leave your personal life at the door.” “Leave work at work!” I’d love to do both of those things, but I suck at it. If things aren’t going well at work, it makes me feel like crap everywhere else in life. I think it’s because growing up, work was such a big deal. I started working at 14, and for most of my life, my mom worked two jobs. Everyone around me worked. My dad, who didn’t have much of a work ethic after divorcing my mom, was always broke and not paying child support. He was only good at accruing debt, not money. And because of this, my main fears in life aren’t dying in a horrible crash or World War 3. They’re as follows:

1. Getting knocked up

2. Being unemployed

I’m sure there are worse things in the world, but those are the two most stressful thoughts to me. So for someone so obsessed with work, you’d think I’d have found a job eventually that makes it so I’m not stressed to death and feeling like shit all the time, right?

Nope!

In Part 2, I went over why my last job sucked, in brief. It paid a lot, but going made me absolutely miserable. Plus, I wanted to work in education anyway. So when I made the move to Kansas City, I looked for college admissions jobs! That was the other job offer I got when I graduated from college, so why not? Helping people get into college sounds great. Had it not been for my admissions rep and especially financial aid, navigating college would have been MUCH harder for me. So really, working in admissions would be paying it forward.

After many resumes and emails, I got hired by a proprietary university. Sure I’d never heard of it, being from Iowa, but every metro area seems to have their small technical and proprietary schools. The students who come here were looking for realistic solutions, ways to get an education that they could work around their jobs and kids that were actually credible. My job was to help them through the process, but also search their souls, uncover their problems, and get them motivated. Get them geared up for school, which most of them haven’t been to in years and are scared shitless of. Convince them that no, they don’t have to work at Taco Bell their whole life. It sounded like not only would I be helping people, but it’d be the people who REALLY needed it.

Reality check. I sit at a desk every day dialing “leads” who may or may not be interested in going back to school. Sometimes I get hung up on. Sometimes people tell me they’re not interested, or ask a few questions and hang up. Every once in a while, I get someone to come in and talk to me about school. Most of the time, though, I hear a lot of voicemails. I leave a lot of voicemails that are never returned. I don’t know where a lot of the “leads” are generated from – mostly internet ads, I presume. Those are the ones that don’t turn into much, though.

My dials are counted. My phone calls are recorded. We have meetings that should take five minutes but end up lasting 30. We operate like a sales floor. During my training, I learned that I was entering the “people improvement business” yet we’re graded on how many people we call, how many we talk to, how many we interview, how many we enroll, how many sit in class, how many referrals we get, et cetera. Yes, the place takes money to run. Yes, everyone needs to be measured somehow. But we have the same number of “leads” and a growing number of reps. Shit’s getting thin and numbers are getting hard. I’m probably going to have to start sharing an office soon (one of the reasons I took the job? having my own office after sitting in a low-walled cube farm). This isn’t about education and helping people. It’s about getting people in the door and filling seats, at least with the way we run it right now. I’d already been in sales. I came to education to help people, which is what I want to do as a teacher, and why I want to be a teacher. I want to help, to pass on knowledge. I don’t want to be a telemarketer. I don’t want to feel like I’m swindling people.

In its defense, the school I work for does have very good, accredited programs. I don’t think it’s the schools fault. Just some sub-institutional methods and attitudes getting away from what the point of our job is. At least at my last job, it was sales and it wasn’t pretending to be anything else. Right now I feel like I’m doing sales all dressed up in a better-your-life suit.

It’s not what I signed up for. It’s just my only option for the time being. And it sucks.

Today’s compartment of my angst:  MONEY.

When I was in Iowa, I was making just short of $40k a year, before taxes. I was two years out of college with a degree that doesn’t directly apply to anything, living in an area with a pretty low cost of living. I had a 10-minute drive to work, went home for lunch most of the time, occasionally got bonuses, and paid around $12 a month for awesome health insurance.

So why did I dump that to come to Kansas City for a relationship that no longer exists (I’m not bitching, just throwing it in there for emphasis) and job that isn’t at all what I thought it’d be?

My old job made me miserable. It wasn’t the job itself. I talked to and met a lot of interesting characters. Good folks, bad folks, questionable folks, and everything inbetween; truck drivers are an interesting breed, for lack of a better word. I didn’t mind talking to them. After all, I’m of trucker stock myself – both of my uncles have driven 18 wheelers for a long time, and I’m not exactly from white-collar America.

But my office made me absolutely miserable. It wasn’t even just me – it was probably 80% of us. And I think the remaining 20% loved it. Benefitted from it. Most of that 20% were braindead salespeople who sucked themselves all the way up to lower middle management. But from 7:30am-5pm (usually later) Monday – Friday, I was usually in hell. Exhausted when I came in, pissing away the first two hours, clawing my way to lunch, after which I’d wonder what time we’d be leaving for the day. Around 4:45, I’d learn it’d be closer to 6 than 5. And salary means no overtime.

And you know, I might not have minded spending extra time in the office had the other people I worked with been more fun. But by that time in the afternoon, all of the cool people were feeling pretty beaten down, and that notorious 20% were perched on their high horses, ready to stomp.

During my tenure there I gained roughly 40 pounds, went through at least four antidepressants, got on Xanax, and started therapy. Work wasn’t 100% responsible, but it was a big part. The office bred animosity. So when it came time to think about moving, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Do I miss the money? Yes. Do I miss the benefits? ABSOLUTELY. Do I miss going there every day? Fuck no.

That being said, the pay cut I took to get down here stung. Since moving out on my own, the sting has triggered an embarassing allergic reaction. I now feel like I’m broke all the time. Rarely do I volunteer to go out anywhere because I don’t want people to realize just how broke I am. I’d sell stuff, but I don’t think I really have anything people want. My benefits aren’t half as good as my old ones, and I’m paying about $175 a month more for them. My job itself isn’t what I thought it would be, and now I’m stuck – I had money saved that I used to move down here, and that money’s long gone.

So what now? My Suze Orman book helped a little. Maybe I’ll look for Mr. Dave Ramsey at the library. My boyfriend’s a financial guru, but I don’t want him to see how much I make and how much debt I have lest he choke – I like him and want him around. My embarassing, muddled pile of crap money situation blows ass and I sure don’t need anyone else seeing it. But it still needs to get fixed.

At the end of last week, I’d pretty much hit a panic. My blood was getting hot. When the blood gets hot, it feels like it wants to come out. This, of course, means my “cutting reflex” has been activated, which is no good, no good at all. I’ve been cut free for around 10 months now, and with all of the GOOD things happening, that’s certainly not an option. So, I didn’t do it, but like a recovering addict/alcoholic/what have you, that instinct and desire is always there in the back of your head. You’re never recover-ED. You’re always recover-ING.

This panic came from feeling like I don’t have anything in life under control. Derby was slipping, my relationship (the new-ish one) was great and so I didn’t want anything toxic touching it, work blew, money was tight, and I couldn’t figure out what the next steps were. So I talked to Nicole. I talked to Zaj, I talked to Tom, I even talked to Jesse about it a little bit. I talked to Megan, my roommate, a little bit about it on our way home from practice. All the feedback I got helped me find a foothold. So when Friday rolled around and I had a great weekend to look forward to, the wheels stopped rolling the wrong direction. Now that it’s Monday and great weekend is complete, I have plans.

That being said, I’m going to do an entry-by-entry breakdown of all of the different parts of my life. This way, I can think through each thing completely, without interference from anything else. I can figure out exactly what’s wrong with the bad parts so they can be fixed. I can figure out what steps need to be taken in what order. I’m not trying to force life in any given direction, just feel like I have the reins again and not be so damn scared. So here it goes.

What the fuck do I do with my life?

You could have been really pretty if you hadn’t gotten so fat.

Why didn’t you do something productive when you went to college? Why couldn’t you have been one of those people who knew what you wanted to do with your life? Why didn’t you just become a teacher during undergrad? Why can’t you develop some kind of profitable skill? I don’t want to sell anything. I don’t want to help people who don’t want to be helped. I want to do something that makes me happy. I want to know how to do that.

Why do I feel like I’m still 18 half the time, shit still in front of me, and the other half I feel like I’m 60 and nothing can change anymore?

Why am I having my mid-life crisis at 25?

I’m trying to tell myself that I’m not a sleazy, overweight, underachieving, unmotivated dirtbag, jerk, waste of space.

I just want my own purpose. My own reason for trudging along. I don’t like my job. I’m burnt out on most aspects of my life. I want to hide in a hole. Some things are really good and make me really happy and I think it’s motivating me to rework the parts of my life that aren’t. But I’m not at home anymore, my therapist isn’t here. I have to figure this out all on my own. I’ve taken a few steps toward this but now I’m at the do-or-die part. Now it actually has to happen. And I don’t know if I’m smart enough for it to happen, or dedicated enough, or able to sustain myself enough. Or what exactly I want to do.

Why can’t I just get my shit together?