Pickles & Dimes

There’s been quite the adjustment period with my new job. In a good way. Everything is much more relaxed, my hours are 9-5, and someone apologized to me yesterday for giving me a “last-minute assignment” that wasn’t due for two days and would only take me a few hours to complete. I wanted to laugh in their face and explain that my last job routinely had me completing 90-page proposals in three hours.

This is a good job. I know it, and I know I’m fortunate.

I was thinking about roles and expectations yesterday, and how people who are underemployed are really getting screwed (and possibly screwing themselves). I’ve worked at places where I underemployed myself (the pay was better, but I was overqualified for the position), and that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. It might’ve hurt my chances for advancement somewhere down the road, or delayed my career trajectory.

You surrender yourself to a certain role, and even though you’re much more capable of countless other tasks and skills, people pigeon-hole you as just that one role: Proofreader. Proposal Coordinator. Marketing. It’s really hard to convince people you can do other things because they tend to want to apply a one-word label to your very existence.

I’ve been doing copywriting for at least 10 years. But at some of my positions, my title didn’t label me as such, even though I wrote every day in some capacity. When I left my last position, where I did writing and marketing and business development and proposals and even administrative tasks not in my jurisdiction, so many people came up to me and congratulated me by saying, “Wow, you’re really taking a step up, huh?”

No, I’m not. I wouldn’t have been hired for this new position if I didn’t have the skills. And I’m glad I’m finally wearing the official label I’ve been wanting to wear for years: senior copywriter.

What role are you playing right now? Is it the one you want to be known for?

So, the humidity around here lately, huh? A few days ago Jason informed me that the only place in the entire world that was warmer than Minneapolis (taking into account both the temperature and the heat index) was somewhere in the Amazon Rainforest. Wonderful! It’s the air you can wear!

Naturally, yesterday I decided to mow the lawn because what better way to enjoy my week off between jobs than to die of heatstroke, right? I got the lawnmower started on the very first try, unlike my usual experiences, and attacked the front yard right away, which was breezy and shaded and all-around wonderful. I finished by 9:00 a.m., feeling virtuous and heroic and only slightly sweaty and less-than-fresh smelling.

Then I moved to the backyard. Even though I had prepared myself by wearing my frozen neck chiller and having two ice-cold bottles of water ready, it was horrible. There was no shade, it was dusty and dirty, and because I was covered head to toe in a fine sheen of sweat, I amassed an impressive collection of grass clippings all over my body. Also, my personal scent became decidedly “funky.” When I took a water break at one point, I was panting like a dog. Meanwhile, my own dog was sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of the house, lying in a sun spot with Sunny, like this:

(Shorty lies there until he gets so warm he has to jump up, panting, and sprint to his water bowl so he can rehydrate himself and resume his post.)

When I finally finished all the yardwork (mowing, weed trimming, weed spraying, weed pulling, and flower watering), I had spent nearly three and half hours outside. (Although at least half an hour of that was spent swearing at the weed trimmer, as it “trimmed” for about 10 seconds before randomly unspooling the trimmer string to tangle itself into a complicated snarly mess.)

Worth it, though:

Today it is beautiful out. The humidity has dropped what feels like 1,000%, and of course I’m planning on staying inside all day. I did, however, decide to water the lawn this morning, and as I set the sprinkler in an optimum spot, I saw a mound of dirt wriggling. As I watched, horrified, the mound grew bigger and bigger. I ran to our nearby woodpile, muttering, “You have GOT to be kidding me!” and grabbed the longest, pointiest stick available. When I got to the mound I jammed the stick in as hard as I could. I didn’t feel like I speared anything, which was probably a good thing because I’m not sure how I would’ve explained to Jason why I abandoned a giant pointy murder weapon to remain sticking out of the middle of our yard. Stupid moles/voles/gophers – I hate them! Now they’re doing their damage in broad daylight, less than a week after we sprayed our entire yard with something that’s supposed to make their food source taste bitter. The only thing that’s bitter is me, apparently. Die, rodents!

Meanwhile, Abby is the only sane thing in this place, sleeping downstairs near the path of the air conditioning vent.

While Sunny is toasting her belly on the refrigerator:

And Shorty is suspiciously keeping an eye on his bone while lying in yet another sun spot:

Word has been slowly spreading at work that my last day is Friday, so a lot of my coworkers have been coming to wish me well. (One VP: “Well, congratulations and damn you.”) However, hardly anyone is surprised by the fact that I’d want to leave. The running joke (and true fact) is that my position has a high burnout rate, and the average tenure is two years. (For the record, I’ve been here two years and three months, so they pretty much nailed that dead to rights.) It’s too bad; I don’t see why the company is content to spend the time training someone (it takes about 6 months to learn everything to the point that you’re self-sufficient) knowing that they’ll have to start the whole process again in 18 months.

Anyway, my boss is appropriately freaking out because until they hire someone, she’ll be doing all of the work. She’s trying to hire two people to replace me, which 1) is what really needs to happen to manage the workload, and 2) just inflates my ego because HEY, THEY HAD TO REPLACE ME WITH TWO PEOPLE BECAUSE I WAS SO AWESOME. One potential candidate has the same first name as me and I really, really want them to hire her just to mess with the coworkers who only come into the office every few months. “Um, Shauna? You seem…different…somehow?…” HA.

Related, why is it that some people feel the need to rain on your parade? I’ve had no less than six people say something along the lines of this when I told them where I’ll be working: “Oh, there? I heard they burn out their people really fast.” Or, “My friend works there and hates it!” Or, my personal favorite, from two different people, after I told them my new commute will be 15 minutes: “I heard they’re moving to a new location.”

(The kicker is my new employer is moving to a new location – 25 miles from my home and with an even more hellish commute than I have now, if that is even possible. I spent about 37 seconds hyperventilating about this terrifying nugget of information until I emailed my new boss to ask him about it. He replied almost immediately that the corporate headquarters is moving, but the agency where I’m working is not. Thank jeebus. When I relayed this to the coworker who alarmed me in the first place, he seemed disappointed.)

Anyway, why can’t people say nice things? I would never tell anyone something bad about their new employer. (Unless they were beating their employees with wet socks filled with rocks or something.)

For me, work had become a giant pond of quicksand in the middle of a very isolated jungle. Over the past few years, I had sunk deeper and deeper into it, but it happened so slowly that I was almost unaware of it. Sometimes I’d think, “Hey, this quicksand kind of sucks. I should get out before it suffocates me.” But it was so heavy, and I was so tired from being in it day in and day out, so I rationalized the situation: “You know, this isn’t so bad. Most people would be happy to be here. I should be grateful; I could just be roaming around the jungle aimlessly, about to be eaten by a crocodile.”

And it became the New Normal. It was what it was: something I tolerated for nine straight hours a day because leaving for lunch was impossible, what with the jungle lunch meetings and jungle seminars and other jungle-related things that somehow needed to be done between the hours of 11:00 and 2:00. And then, it wasn’t just the quicksand anymore: it was the stressful humidity of the environment, the nearly constant mosquito-like buzzing of the project managers, the risk of malaria. In a jungle filled with 530+ mosquitoes, I was the only person who did certain tasks. So everyone came to me. EVERYONE. And over time, this somehow led to the mosquitoes waiting later and later to give me things, because I Could Be Counted On. So everything became last-minute. And because my time in the quicksand involved constant interruptions from mosquitoes and crocodiles and lost jungle explorers, that made working on the last-minute things even more stressful, which in turn, made life very unhappy. Plus, just traveling to and from the jungle took a long, long time, so every Monday through Friday from the hours of 6:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., I was not doing a single fun thing. That killed a little bit of my soul, I think.

So I made escape plans. Very specific, highly demanding escape plans. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving the jungle just to end up in another jungle. No more jungles – I wanted the desert! An oasis, preferably. With skeeball.

One day, two heavy ropes appeared in the jungle: good ropes, sturdy ropes, ropes that led to the desert. Deserts with better pay, better amenities and (hopefully) better wildlife. Deserts with fewer responsibilities and mosquitoes. And most importantly, deserts that required only a short camel trip to reach them.

I visited the deserts. One was great. I’d be doing pleasant desert work with some jungle overtones, but it was definitely ideal. The people were nice. But the other desert was a dream – the perfect oasis where I could do the work I loved. I watched them review my life’s work, silently wondering if it was good enough, was I good enough? They told me I was one of two candidates left. The desert was so close – what if I didn’t get there? How could I face the jungle again?

And finally, after hoping and dreaming, the desert offered me the rope for good. And I used it to pull myself to where I wanted to be: in that oasis.

Which just so happens to have skeeball.