Everybody Hates Their Job

I recently overheard one employee telling another how much they hated their job and I found this picture at www.picchore.com to be quite appropriate. Everybody hates their job - to some degree. Those who say they love their jobs are either bored and their job is the only interesting thing in their lives or they know they are getting paid much much more than they deserve.

Everybody has something they'd rather do than work. I'm my own boss and picked my line of work, and I still have dozens of things that I would rather do than work. But the generation of kids graduating high school right now seem to have a higher than normal hatred of work. After spending 30 hours a week in school for 13 years (the rest spent playing xbox and texting apparently) they somehow seem to think that they should be able to find a job for 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year that is going to pay them assloads of money, while being an orgasm-a-minute fun, never be boring and provide them with entertainment during the workday.

That isn't how the real world works.

I place a large portion of the blame for this mentality on the education system in the US. Teachers have had 13 years to indoctrinate these kids with the sheer fact that work sucks and the reality that they will need to work the rest of their lives, but still they graduate and enter the workforce with this delusional attitude that simply because they are high school graduates they will find a good paying job and love it. Lower expectations from the beginning would result in much higher job satisfaction for these uneducated, unskilled would-be workers.

It's too bad that the role models (whether they like it or not) of students are teachers, who are happier than most with their employment status and job details in general. Students see teachers making pretty good salaries with ironclad job security where they only have to know a limited range of memorized facts, which they relay to students for less than 2/3 of the year with weeks of vacation and sick days (not to mention short work days). 

"Mr. Smith seems to really like his job and he's got to deal with a room full of assholes like us....gee, working must not be that bad."

Then comes the real world where you don't get paid sabbaticals or vacation days or $50,000 per year for working 180 seven hour days.