Life is not shit

Believe it.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Jobz!

I am now making a post from my workplace. I've always deamed of having a job where I had a computer that was online and could chat with buddies or just surf to my enjoyment. Finally that dream is now reality! Up to now I've only had grueling, physical labour. Don't get me wrong! I've nothing against some good old fashioned hard work, but one doesn't make a career out of it. I had worked in a laboratory, feeding labrats and cleaning their cages, I'd cleaned people parking lots and front yards, and probably the most annoying job I've had, working in a sandwich bar. My boss and co-workers were all fine people, but the stress of customers coming to gorge themselves and the infernal amount of cleaning to be done each day made me want to stick my head in the deep-fryer. I'd grown to hate the people who came to eat there, or at least be resentful towards them. I hated myself for being a customers at several of these places in the past, now understanding just how stressful and annoying the job is. To top it all off the place was open at night, and I had the night shift. Ugh. And I would pray that people would stop coming so we could close down the store, but even at 3:00 AM people still came, all drunk from some excersion to a local pub. GO HOME! DON'T YOU SLEEP?! I'd think to myself.
But, in spite of all this, I still had a profound spiritual exiliration at the end of each shift, when my boss would give me a ride home and I'd walk a bit at 5:30 in the morning, with the first light barely touching the horizon and only a few people waking up. That was a good feeling, but it just wasn't worth the hellish torture I had undergone in that sandwich place. So I desperately tried looking for someplace else. Lady luck must've had her gaze upon me, because a job that's right up my ally finally came up. My older brother had been working for 4 years now as a salesperson for an institute called The Wall Street School of English and it just so happened that they needed a new tutor for the facility in my erea! Coming from an English speaking family in Israel, this was no sweat! I went for an interview, turned on the charm and I was in! The hard part would be quitting my sandwich job at such a short notice. And it was hard.
I shy away from confrontations, I'm not good at it and I don't enjoy it. But sometimes it's unavoidable, and that fact became einescapably clear that night I came back to the sandwich place to tell my boss it would be my las shift there. Hell was on the verge of breaking loose. Apperantly, one of my co-workers who would've made my quitting less influential, had gotten himself into militairy prison. So me quitting was just about the most terrible news to my boss, and he reacted appropriately, with anger and frustration and told me 'no, you're not quitting', and then ignored me and went back to work. Throughout the remainder of the evening I tried to pick up the conversation because this would be my last shift, and I didn't care if he didn't pay me at all for the month's work I'd put in, the new job was much more important. I'd managed to soften him up, told him that I wasn't doing any of this out of malice, I had no idea I had to give a notice before I quit (I really had no idea!), and he relaxed and accepted it, and asked if I'd mind coming one last shift a week later, and I said ok, I felt bad for ditching the guy. Then I began my new job, this job, where I'm sitting now and writing this post while stopping every now and then to help a student in need. Finally I feel at home, finally a job I can keep for more than a month, a job I'm actually good at, and not to mention it pays well. The only sour spot is knowing that at some point in the near future I will want to start my university studies, and the study times will likely not fit the busy full-time work schedual. But for now I'm happy and content, I'll leave worries of the future where they belong - in the future.