X in the road Date Wednesday, April 24, 2024 - 12:11 AM PST Topic Work I’m sitting in a beautiful courtyard in the shade having a smoke on my lunch break. I watch executives walk by with their fancy new cellular phones. I watch ladies in new clothes wander around with shopping bags of expensive clothing. It frustrates me and makes me think about what I am doing wrong that I can never buy new clothing and that my cell phone was shut off a year ago due to lack of funds. Here I am again, working another short-term job filling in for some individual while the temp agencies pay me as little as they can. Each day I sit and think about my future and each day I realize that I really don’t have one. Should I go back to college and if so, what the hell will I do there. I need a career that can pay me well and won’t flop tomorrow. I’ve been a supervisor of a video capture department at an online adult content provider. I’ve worked as a web designer making $40 an hour and then that industry went away. But here I am now going back to the job I was brought up to do by my Paralegal mother. A secretary! The last job I worked was for about a month at the Waste Management Department of Washington as a temp. I was outside smoking with one of the accountants there who was only a few months younger than I am. We discussed how frustrating it is to not have a career. “Here I am nearly 30 years old and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,” she told me with a sigh. “Typical Generation X.” That really stuck with me. I remember all these news articles when I was working as a web designer about successful Gen X boys and girls who were making a killing in the tech industry. The industry that had once paid so well and was in such high demand that it had churned out one geek after another with a demand for yet more. Then one day it happened. At least that is how it felt to those of us who had suddenly been replaced by people who had already lost their jobs, had years more experience and would gladly work for less just to get off unemployment. It makes me want to see a news article showing where those “Amazing self starting Generation X Success Stories” have ended up. Because I know my savings account emptied after a year without a good job. So what do I do now? I copy reports, sort papers, fill coffee cups and answer the phone with a nice happy voice. I wonder how the hell I’m going to pay rent or buy clothing for my child. I wonder when someone is finally going to stop looking at my resume as “over qualified due to technical experience” for clerical jobs while technical jobs view it as “under qualified due to recent clerical work”. Or those who look at me if I actually get as far as an interview and ask me “so why have you been doing so much temporary work”. I just want to scream in their face “because I would rather work while people like you turn me down for one job after another than sit at home and lose everything waiting on one of you fuck wits to hire me”! I’m sitting at a point in my life where I have many roads I can follow and all of them are covered in dust, fog and clouds. There is no way to see which way to go. Should I view this as a problem just here in Washington and try to find another place to live? The only way I can go to college is if I can get it all paid for as well as living expenses. Going to college at night and working during the day just isn’t possible when you have an eleven-year-old daughter and no immediate family within 2000 miles of you. So here I sit at my little branch in life pondering which direction to go while I sink into the mud. Totally unwilling to move away from the quick sand but hating the fact that I am sinking. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=695