My job? I guess I have one since I am teaching students the programming stuff (in German language) and I am even paid for it.

Yeah, the money is more-less miserable but I do enjoy what I do entirely.

And yeah, kids ain't social parasites. Everybody has right to be a student without being called a parasite.

Satis, that's actually what many people consider the difference between American and European work ethic, right there. Live to work vs. work to live. Hell, I consider you a workaholic by European standards. But that's more because of the social frame you work in than your own opinions on work.

I join the choir and voted "hell on earth". Actually it's a two-sided situation for me...but mostly, my job sucks monkey balls. As you may or may not know, I'm a civil servant right now and in my six-month probation period (before possibly extending to a year). The job I'm doing is mostly translating official papers from French to Dutch which, as such, is kinda fun, but it's a B-level position which means I get paid as someone holding a bachelor's degree. With my Master degrees I am technically speaking eligible for an A-level position which would mean about 400€ extra every month. Nett. So yeah, that's lame.

Obviously I've been trying to manoeuvre into an A-lvl spot but these are (apparently) rare to come by and/or completely f00ked. I already turned down two because they sucked. But I digress. The reasons why my job is hell on earth are

-I have only 6 immediate colleagues, all of whom are old and most of whom are lame. So no social incentive.
-I rarely have anything to do. There are days i don't do anything at all. Even occasionally an entire week.
-Because of that, people try to get me to help out on incredibly boring data checking jobs. Like, on a Data Entry monkey work level. I'm not a fucking accountant, so i tend to act like a jerk when it comes to those things which, frankly, doesn't improve my popularity.
-You wouldn't believe the level of incompetence and staleness that exudes from the entire building, the entire civil service structure. I could tell you stories...it may not directly affect my job but it sure doesn't improve my mood.
-Creativity stifled + lower pay than what I can expect: not fun.
-No career prospects.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE:

-SOME days, just messing about and surfing the web is just what you want. Alas, most days it isn't.
-Work firewall blocks quite some sites but strangely enough I can youtube all I want. Good to waste the day away.
-Holidays. I got shitloads of paid time off. Not as much as J, but I get to choose mine and I don't have to work as hard. I just had a 5-day weekend and from the 24th of December til the 5th of January I'm on paid leave (issued by work, not me). In between that I'm taking a week off and then a day off every other week. Bizzarely, since this place specializes in wasting money, I also get to share in the Christmas bonus because I started my job before the end of September this year. i'm not complaining.


So...I hope that gives you an idea of what I'm up against. Yeah, I know, I shouldn't complain with that kind of holidays, but meh. I'd just like to do something interesting (or just SOMETHING). I did a diplomatic exam on Friday, we'll see how that works out.

J, I know teaching is a double-edged knife. You won't hear me say it's easy sailing...there's a reason I didn't become a teacher. But yeah, I have a lot of friends who didn't go to college with me who are all "damn teachers never work and get so many holidays". I can't be bothered to disagree, tho.

P.S. I might just join the social parasite squad in a few months when I have to choose between extending till July or resigning. Maybe I found a better job by then, who knows.

Heh... just for the record, the 'social parasite' answer is tongue-in-cheek. There are no true social parasites that post here. I consider being a full-time student as a positive thing... at least you're improving yourself. It's the people that sit on their ass watching tv and wasting away that I disdain.

At any rate, my job used to be similar to that. Tons of downtime. Especially when I was in tech support. Dude... don't waste it! I took the opportunity to learn PHP, javascript and c#. You may not dig programming, but there are other things you can do that are productive... hell, learn 3d texturing and modeling. I could use some help with the game I haven't started developing yet.

lol@worth ethic too. Europeans look lazy compared to Americans, who look lazy compared to the Japanese (and presumably other asian countries). Which is why we should all learn Chinese before it's too late.

Especially since China holds a large chunk of US foreign debt, woohoo for United States of China jk.

Err.. I don't feel lazy in comparison to an average American. I think people here just suffer much more "system overhead" (aka bureaucracy and other stuff based on bad infrastructure in Bulgaria in particular) in order to maintain vital functionality.

Anyway... with a schedule that often eats 12 hours clean from a working day, I can hardly consider myself a lazy ass. Indeed hardly.

If I would be doing anything remotely interesting I wouldn't really mind working longer hours. But that very wish seems to be something out of a fairy tale. Ah well...I keep on searching I suppose.


I do keep myself occupied at work, don't get me wrong...I write short stories and whatnot. But I work best without interruptions, and my work/attention suffers when people ask me things or if I have to 'pay attention' every time my boss enters the room etc. I can't really work in short periods of time, it's either working hard for an extended period or working sloppily with interruptions. I wrote my master's thesis in a 1.5 week non-stop run too...I just can't do it like most people do (ie chipping away sentence by sentence, page by page for an entire year).

Maybe slightly autistic. I dunno.

No, I'm the same way, I do my best work when I sit down and go solid with no interruptions. One of the reasons I have an mp3 player. Unfortunately with my work load the way it is (and my boss's boss being a retard) that's no longer possible... so I'm nowhere near as productive. Oh well, they suffer for it more than me.

Haha, I hear ya. I TRY to cut myself off from my immediate colleagues by using earphones, either with actual music playing or just as a matter of...dissuasion. Problem is, the colleague sitting right next to me is something of a chatterbox and old, so she doesn't understand the principle of me meaning "don't fucking talk to me" when I have my headphones on. So I go like "Oh? uhuh. mm. yeah. uhu" while she rants on about uninteresting shit.

So far she still didn't get the message. In a normal situation I'd tell her to fuck off, but since I sit next to her all day every day that's not really a good idea. I sometimes need to focus not to do so, tho. Yesterday I got so bored/pissed that a haze came over me and I was this close to telling her to shut her yapper.

On most days I can condone it, tho. Without getting killing urges.

Well I'm looking for a new job. I love my store, I love my team. I hate my regional manager and I hate the fact I'm management yet get paid minimum wage. One job I'm looking at is at a major chain (Marks and Spencer) of clothes/food stores, is for a sales assistant (yay no responsibilities!) and yet pays twice as much as my job. Plus they apparently give good benefits etc and look after you well (whereas Game, ok, gives 25% discount on everything but hardware, which is 10% but other than that treats you like total crap)

That said, if I could get 40 hours every week in this job AND our regional manager would leave/die, I'd happily stay there.