Friday, May 20, 2005
(8:36 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Friday Morning Confessional
This is the only Friday Morning Confessional. Next week, we will go back to the Afternoon format. For this week, though, I am facing up to the fact that I have posted this in the morning almost every single time and that when I have failed to post it early enough, I have always received e-mail asking what the problem is.
Times are changing, of course. We now have the Tuesday Hatred, a new incarnation of The Hate List for the 21st century. Will confessions of the form "I confess that I find X really annoying" be a thing of the past now? Will people save complaints for Tuesday and misdeeds for Friday, or after at least a year of continually stretching the bounds of what counts as a confession, have we reached the point where it is impossible to place any kind of limit on what can be "confessed"? I confess that I don't know.
I confess to reading this site in its entirety, in one sitting. The premise is that people make postcards telling their biggest secrets, and the site author scans them and posts a new set every week. Ogged was right -- it's hard to stop reading. It reminds me of how much I enjoyed the Griffin and Sabine books.
I confess that at this point, I wouldn't mind if I had a different job every week this summer. It's not just that I'm so desperate for money that I will take whatever comes my way. Right now, though, it feels good to go in, do some defined job, and collect my money, without having to deal with all the dumb stuff of working in an office -- cliquishness, petty politics, etc. This is especially the case given that I am unlikely to find a job that requires me to be anything more than an interchangeable cog in the office machinery. Let's say that I'm really good at using office applications on the computer, or I type exceptionally quickly, or I file things away more efficiently than anyone who's ever worked in the office -- big deal. And there's no way I'm going to be paid enough in a job like that to make me feel like I'm a valued and integral part of the work. Thus, I feel like there's no reason that I should be eager to put myself in a position where I could potentially be bitched at by the same person for more than a week.
At the same time, I confess that if I found decent-paying steady work that would allow me close to full time for the summer and the option to work part time for flexible hours during the schoolyear, I would absolutely take it.
Maybe the point of this contrast is that I don't want to be working at someplace long-term through a temp agency. When you work a job for long enough, it starts to creep into your head even when you're off the clock -- and why should I put up with that, and will all the dumb relationship stuff in an office environment, when the company I'm working for doesn't want to assume the risk of paying me directly? I see no reason to let some business become a big part of my life when the ability to fire me at the drop of a hat is so precious to them that they are willing to pay a substantial amount over and above my wages -- although there's little to no chance that they would ever pay me directly what they're paying the temp agency to make use of me. It's helping me to get by for now, though, so one should probably not attach too much weight to these complaints.
