A few weeks ago, we drew your attention to a feature on our site where we invite you to tell us why work sucks. For those of you who wrote in, thank you for sharing your stories. For those of you who didn’t, we still want to hear from you. We can talk about the why the traditional work culture is broken and dysfunctional, but it’s much more powerful to hear it firsthand. Here are three examples of the kinds of stories we received. We made some very minor edits for clarity. Otherwise, each statement is in the author’s own words.
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Work sucks because . . . in a tight chain of processes, I spend most of my time waiting for other people to come over with materials for me to work with. I work (and get paid) half-time. They are full-time and expect ‘flexibility’ from me, which means, they are allowed to be hectic, important and spontaneous, and I wait. I fill this out because I am waiting, right this moment, while one promises me materials to be mailed out urgently, today, and the other issues general declarations of Why Not Right Now. I have absolutely nothing to do and am killing time while I’d much rather go and pamper the lovely new hardwood floors in my new flat that I’m moving into on Monday.
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Work sucks because . . . I started out giving my best, and never tiring of going to work, because I wanted to see what I could come up with next to improve our products. It didn’t take long before this attitude was beaten out of me. No value is placed on what we do. After years of trying to survive, always “damned if I did and damned if I didn’t”, I’ve now become a drone, just putting in my time.
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I recently received an e-mail from a supervisor reminding me of the necessity to take a lunch break each and every day. The previous week I had worked a few extra hours on Tuesday and thought I could slip out at 7.5 hours without my lunch later in the week. My work was completed and I was not hindering any co-workers by leaving early. My supervisor reminded me that while leaving early without a lunch is sometimes OK, it needed to be approved and should be the exception not the rule. Having my supervisor remind me to stop and eat lunch was both insulting (I can decide for myself when and if I am hungry) and incredible frustrating that I have so little control over my own schedule.
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