November 27, 2007
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Dead Cat Job
Yesterday, I saw a dead cat – orange and rain soaked – sprawled limply on the sidewalk on my way to work. It was my first day at a job I took out of necessity, leaving passion and enthusiasm behind to catch up on bills accrued from a year abroad, and my encounter with the cat will forever remain symbolic in my mind. It is a dead cat kind of job.
My new employers are ethical and fair by American standards. I have my scant vacation time. I have enough health insurance to keep my heart beating. I have a steady income and 40 hours a week. And I’m not complaining. I’m grateful. I just can’t keep the lyrics from a James song out of my head:
If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor.The riches I’ve grown accustomed to are not monetary; they are experiential. I’ve grown accustomed to working in capacities that interest me, engage me, feed my enormous curiosity and appetite for life. I’ve worked in writing centers, taught workshops, marketed museums and crazy festivals in other countries. And now I’m filling subscription orders at a small, dying magazine publisher in a small, gray, lightness office.
These are the things that I no longer get paid to do:
I do not brainstorm. I do not write copy or web content. I do not plan and host fun, massive special events. I do not present. I do not play nice with VIPs and have the lovely perk of meeting renown contemporary artist/designers and discussing their work with them. I do not research and develop new ways to get the community excited about cultural offerings. I do not get freebies and sponsorships for organizations who I hold near and dear to my heart, organizations that I feel are intrinsic to my community. I do not author chapters. I do not collaborate.
I do not.
My talents are wasted on this job. Being there is not horrible, it is just like watching dull surveillance footage of someone else’s’ life. It’s as if I’m watching myself function in an alternate universe. The mundane tasks of this job are shocking to me. I’m spoiled by my past work experiences, I know it. This job is decent. And lets face it: I applied to a good hundred jobs here. I interviewed for a fair handful. This is what I was offered. Bottom of the barrel.
Perhaps autumn is a bad time to be job hunting. Perhaps this time in American history is a bad time to be job hunting (personally, I believe we are on the brink of a depression comparable in scale and fallout to the one following the 1929 stock market crash). Perhaps I just ran out of patience, out of money, and out of luck and took the first thing that came my way. I suspect that is it.
Anyhow, the job pays more than being an office temp did, but I’m basically looking at it as a prolonged temping assignment. I will do my best – I do all my work with dignity and professionalism, however my rants may sound – but honestly, the job requires about 1% of my brain power. This leaves lots of energy for other things, for which I am grateful. I just need to stop being so shocked that my job under utilizes me – this is probably true for many, many people. I need to find a way to put my talents to work – because they get stir crazy just bubbling under the surface all day.
I am going to start volunteering to write marketing copy for a not for profit that I found that organizes theatre for homeless kids. I believe in the transformative power of performance and expression (lord knows my after-school theatre outlet motivated me to graduate high school) and I am happy to help this group out.
I am signing up for another improv class this January. I am starting a new short story and revising something I was working on in 2006 that I needed distance from before reworking. I am seriously investigating my options for the career switch into teaching high school English that I’ve been wanting for some time now. I want to start participating in Miranda July’s public art project, Learning to Love You More. I will train for a marathon. I will read library book after library book after library book. I will make photo essays and blogs. Speaking of which, check out Naptime in the City that Never Sleeps for a new installment of photos from my favorite neighborhood park.
I want to not only survive my dead cat job, but have extra creative energy outside of work because of it; all the creativity and energy that I am usually paid for will be untapped, bursting to get out at the end of my shift. I need to think this way. Otherwise I don’t know how I can continue to wake up in the morning and go. And I need to go. The rent. It gets due. The credit cards. They must be paid off. The student loans. Well, they never really go away. But they get due, too. And so I must work. And until something better rears its lovely head, this place is a decent, respectable job that I am lucky to have.
____________________________________________________________________________Have you ever had a dead cat job? How did you deal?
Comments (5)
I have had more than my fair share of dead cat jobs which utilize neither my talents or interests. Think of this way: you may learn things in this job, like patience, or dealing with the inevitable (sp?) motonony that life will sometimes deal out, that you would have never learned in the exciting, wonderful jobs you’ve had in the past. I know that in the long run you will greatly appreciate your time as an “everday joe,” even if you never learn to enjoy it.
Two dead cat jobs to be exact. The way I kept myself from going entirely off the deep end was (since I was the receptionist at a mental hospital and left all by my lonesome with the roaming kookies) to create these elaborate sculptures out of paper clips and erasers. Passes eight hours like nobody’s business and made me a big hit with the patients. Some employers frown on this artistic endeavor however. Your only answer – get the hell out the second something else presents itself. Save yourself Truly!!!
Well, now I’m mostly just sad about the dead, rain-soaked kitty.
I’ve had one of those jobs. I raised funds for OSU by phone. The only escape from it was to have conversations with the people I was cold calling if they didn’t hang up. That was great but it got me in trouble. After talking with them it was too hard to ask them for money. It was in a basement room facing a cinder block wall.It felt like a little tomb.But of course you are not standing still there. Getting up the energy to fight on to do those things is not easy. Dead cat jobs can drain a body’s will. So props for that! It is temporary and even if we are going into a recession or depression (admittedly all I hear about it is that it is going to hurt most everyone) there are more people now than then and they need things. They will need to dream. It strikes me that you would excel at a job that would help folks do that. Maybe the volunteer work will offer some leads to other more rewarding employment. I hope so and sending good wishes to you!
I’ve had those jobs too. Even good jobs have their dead cat moments. I have a challenging job, but routine tasks within the job that I can dread if I let myself.Your challenge will be to find a way to not have that job drag you down so that you feel too tired to do the things you want to do with your evenings. No matter what, you are going to have good days and bad days.On the positive side, there is nothing that you need to take away with you from that job at the end of the day. You can walk out of the door as a free woman.