About That Job You Don't Like...

"So tell me exactly what is so terrible about this job," my boss demanded as she entered my office.

I looked down at my desk awkwardly.  I had just resigned, and she apparently wasn't taking it very well.

I started spitting out some filler words as my brain searched for how to respond.  The irony about quitting a job is that your employer wants to know exactly why you are leaving, but you can't exactly tell them.

"It was mostly for family reasons," I said.  "But I also didn't always feel like I was a valued member of the team.  More often than not, I went an entire work day without anyone saying a word to me."  

"What, so you wanted us to throw you a party every day,?" she said.

I don't remember exactly what I said in response,  but that  doesn't really matter because I woke up from my dream right about at that point.

Thankfully, I didn't really have that interaction with my boss.

But I did resign my position this week.

Resigning was hard in some ways, because I like what I do.  Resigning was easy in other ways, because I worked at the kind of place that made me have dreams like the one I had last night.

It's hard to know when to leave a job you don't love.  Maybe it will get better if you just hold out?  Maybe the money is pretty good or you've finally built up some vacation time, and leaving would get in the way of doing whatever else you want to do in your life.  Or maybe it just doesn't seem like a good time to change your routine.

Besides, what if the next job is worse?

Some people I know have been in their current job for decades.  In theory, I want to be that person, but it somehow never works out that way for me.  Once I had a good job in a bad city, once I had a job that I liked, but the higher-ups changed it around so that I didn't love it so much anymore.   Actually that happened twice.

Some people keep their head down and just tolerate work they hate.  I admire that in a certain way, but I have this thing where I tend to keep looking around when life doesn't seem completely fulfilling for ways to make it better.

Hopefully, I'll get there.

A few times, that search has led me to landing at toxic places that were soul-crushing and miserable.  Thankfully, I found a way out of those, and it was an easy and happy goodbye.

This one was a little more complicated, and I waffled for months on whether or not to leave.  But in the end, I decided to make the change.  My job, let's say, just wasn't working.

So I'm going back to work for the federal government in a position similar to the one I left last year.  That job treated me well and provided me interesting work, and (except during one ill-considered federal hiring freeze), had the work-life balance I'm currently missing.

I'm looking forward to a shorter commute, some new opportunities, and not having to bill hours anymore.  Billing, the process where you have to write down how you spend every second of your work day, and hit an arbitrary quota of productivity, is quite possibly the worst thing about practicing law.

I hope it works out.  I hope to stay until I retire, and use my federal pension for many years thereafter.

But I hope, at minimum, not have any more nightmares about my job.