Dealing with the numbness

Day in and day out, everything pretty much remains the same. Get up, get coffee, go to work, deal with a mind numbingly boring workday, go home, eat, watch TV, read, go to sleep, start over again, all the time with one eye on the weekend.

The excruciating ordinariness of it all can be overwhelming if one cannot find a way to distract oneself from the sheer pointlessness of it all. Most people here have genuine reasons why they get up and perform this silly dance day after day; they have families they need to support... there's a point to all the sacrifices.

So why do I do it? At the age of 39, most of my dreams have shriveled up and blown away... but I keep coming to work every day, doing my best to do a good job at what I do, trying not scream at innocent bystanders, trying hard not to drive my car off an overpass.

I give myself little excuses; I have a house, car payments, etc that must be paid, so I have to go to work, occasionally remembering that the reason I have the car in the first place is so I can get to work.... the endless loop continues until I pay off this 6 year payment plan on my cheap Korean import (the best I can afford).

Regardless of the reasons for why I stay (I still haven't completely figured this out yet; my feeling is that the predominant cause is fear... or laziness), I develop techniques to prevent my head from imploding...

One of the skills I developed from years ago in the academic world was working quickly and efficiently. If one works in spurts, then there's lots of time available for goofing off.

The main method passing time is surfing the web. Though technically this is frowned upon (they can track all of your internet movements; long gone are the days when clueless employers thought that anything done on a computer is work), my current department head seems not to care much, as long as I do my job. Also it's important to develop a fast "Alt-Tab" reflex so as to be able to quickly shift from the baseball fan-site to a spreadsheet or query in a split-second, so nobody notices you are not actually "working."

I also keep, what I refer to as a "chimp mirror" on top of my monitor. This enables me to notice if someone is creeping up behind me. It works sometimes.... but occasionally I get caught reading something non-work-related (or blogging). Luckily this hasn't cost me my job (yet). (Maybe there's a subconscious part of me that does want to be caught; however that part of me is not the financially responsible sector of my brain, so it often scares me, when I "wake up").

Possibly the most frustrating part of being in this environment stems from my total lack of ability to "act professionally." In the corporate world, form often takes precedence over substance. Though, as I have recently realized, most of the time I end up doing something like twice the work as those who do the same job, I do not get recognized for this, mainly because I do not spend a lot of time taking responsibility for others' work, or also because I often take the path of least resistance... not fighting unwinnable battles, not identifying the work in front of me as something which I "own"... I just try to please.

So basically, I am stuck doing the same tasks that I was doing four and a half years ago when I started here, without much chance for advancement (as if that was something I really wanted.... though more money would be nice).

Anyway, it's Friday, so if I can get through the rest of this day, I at least wont have to think about how little I have to think about for a couple of days...