... that the people you work for have never actually read your resume?
I do. At least, I do in this job.
My current job is boring as sin. Actually, that's a terrible expression. I bet some sin is actually quite exciting, hence why it's sin. Therefore, this job is as boring as ... staring at paint dry. (That's better.)
All I've been doing in this job for the past several months is data entry. Unexciting data entry. Ironically some people have commented to me that what I'm doing looks interesting. Yeah, maybe, for the first 100 items or so. But after that it gets old really fast.
What am I entering you ask? Well, I work in the back office of a university library. One of the many things our department does is handle donated items. Most, but not all, of our donations are from estates and are collections of something that the donor had been interested in. In the case of the donations I'm working on, the donor was a former RCMP officer in BC. He apparently loved the RCMP so much he collected every book and periodical and piece of paper that had anything to do with the RCMP. Even recruitment brochures, advertisements for commemorative items, colouring books, etc.
The collection has been divided into a couple of categories. One category is monographs (i.e. books). Those get searched in our system, and if we don't have a circulating copy, they get entered into our system and sent to our warehouse where they'll probably stay for thousands of years and no one will ever touch them again. Another category is periodicals. Some periodicals are being handled as periodicals, and entered into a periodical record - specifically in situations where we do not already have that item. But for all other periodicals we're recording them into a 'collection level record'. This means ALL the items will appear in one item in our catalogue and a webpage will display a list of everything in that collection (so people can request specific items if they want - but they'll never do, because no one cares).
Well I'm the schmuck who gets to create the collection level record by entering every single items into a spreadsheet with as much of an explanation as to why it's in the collection as possible. That means, in addition to the name and date, etc., of the publications, I also have to find out WHY it was in this guy's collection in the first place. And in order to do that I have to flip through the entire freaking item because there's usually only ONE article that references the RCMP in some capacity, and it's almost never in the damn title.
I've done almost 3,000 items to date and I'm about ready to poke out my eyeballs. It was interesting to look at some of these periodicals the first few days I was doing this, but no more. I know way more about the RCMP than I ever wanted to know in seven lifetimes. I dream about the damn RCMP for god sakes.
I had hoped to finish this work before my 3 week vacation, but people keep adding to it. When I came back from vacation I finished the third cart and started on the fourth, and just today someone gave me a fifth. I would rather run myself over with the freaking cart than go through the items on it.
Every once in a blue moon I get to do something else that's more technical, but whatever it is normally doesn't last very long because it's relatively easy. Almost everything I've done in this job is easy. Easy is fine most of the time, but after 14 months of this job I'm seriously starting to feel like my brain is atrophying. I'm seriously concerned I'm getting dumber doing this work, and that scares me.
I'm not going to go into a rant about the type of work I use to do and how much responsibility I had, because that is in the past. But I am certainly, without question, capable of much more than what I'm doing today. And I feel it really unfortunate that the library isn't taking advantage of that. It seems quite stupid of them, in fact, to waste me on work like this when certain people are overloaded and overworked with more important items.
But that leads to another problem here. I am considered a "student" in this department. And the person who hired me considers "students" expendable and inhuman, therefore she doesn't have to treat them respectfully or the same as anyone else. When she refers to "the students" she might as well be using a derogatory term, because that's what it sounds like. I irony is that most of the so-called students that work here are working on a grad degree. So we highly overqualified for the positions we're doing, yet this manager doesn't look at us and think "great resource." She looks at us and thinks "must be controlled with a whip."
There are many other management and culture related problems in this department, but this is a couple of the ones I'm directly affected by. A coworker recently told me about her chat with HR about some issues and how they encouraged her to encourage others to come talk to them. I'm seriously thinking about it. I've been around long enough to provide them with a good understanding of what it's like to work here and why it sucks.
back to work ....
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