2003-11-13 - 1:01 a.m.

So, I'm a whore.

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought or processed, or repair anything sold, bought or processed.

If that were my motto, I'd certainly be working for the wrong company.

I can't believe I was in a meeting for two hours today where the entire purpose of the meeting was to design a program that tracks when people in the company call each other and what they say.

Seriously.

There was a 20 minute discussion on what someone should say when another person in the company calls them to ask a question and they should really be asking someone else. How the person being called should gently tell them they need to go through channels.

Seriously.

So all this work... all this information gathered... and we haven't even dealt with a customer yet.

Yeah yeah blah blah, internal customers and all that. Think outside the box, enhance our position, value added, mission critical, empowered, goal oriented, help me I'm drowning in buzzwords. But I heard myself throwing a few around with everyone else.

This company does nothing useful that I can see. They sell things which they buy from other companies, and charge the manufacturing companies money for the privilege of selling their stuff for them. Apparently there's a market for that. They're doing okay. They're paying me almost as much as I've ever made as a permanent employee anywhere, and that's with paying an agency fee too. So they must be doing okay.

So what am I doing there? Pulling in the paycheck. I've had too many phases in the past few years where I wasn't managing to do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm earning it. I'm actually doing what they pay me to do, and I'm good at it. I'm sure not doing anything to help humanity while I'm there though.

I've decided this is the whore phase of my career. Working for the money and not trying to get any fulfillment out of the job. That can come from elsewhere. It's just weird - I've never had a job where I didn't think the company I was working for did absolutely nothing that was useful or helpful to anyone. These people just buy, sell and process. But apparently there's money in that.

So I keep looking. Not like I'm turning down the opportunity to do something that is more useful to humanity. But while I'd like to do something with a shred of a redeeming quality, this is the entire box of crayolas right now. And the disapproving Viking can just keep his comments to himself, because he certainly went through his whore phase, and generated just as much rationalization as I'm doing now. Neither of us did anything to hurt anyone else... and possibly not even ourselves.

my mood -

the mood of the whole world wide bleepin' web -