Alexis Turner

Work

(work — )

4 Oct. 2008

I generally make a point not to blog about work for several reasons, mainly related to privacy and professionalism, but I suppose also because work is generally a boring subject and I would much rather think about fun academic things. But now that they're closing the current company and laying everyone off it doesn't exactly have to be a secret that I'm looking for work, so I feel like I can blog safely about something that has been bothering the living shit out of me. And, what the hell, just to make it interesting we'll discuss it from some sort of a social, anthropological, academic level. Or some shit.

Anyway, as all 2 of my readers may know, I'm currently a webmaster. When I tell hot babes this in bars, their hungry little eyes light up and it seems to impress them mightily. Not necessarily enough for them to go home with me (sigh), but enough that even I, dense as I am, notice it. Apparently, being a webmaster has some level of cache in the world that I live in. I am assuming, for the time being, that this is because it is a professional, white collar, basically well-paying job with a modicum of responsibility that you only get to do after being in the workforce for a few years. In other words, it could be described as a "respectable," "good," "well-paying" job. The kind of job that people climb that little ladder to get to and then cling to with their dying breaths.

The fact is, though, that I hate being a webmaster. Hate. Hate. Hate. It. I. Hate. It. When I first started working at this job many folks in the office went out for drinks one afternoon and a discussion started about people's favorite jobs. One fellow said that his first job out of college was driving a bookmobile into the rural hills of California. He got a sad, nostalgic little gleam in his eye. "I loved that job," he said. "I got to listen to the radio all day and think and drive, and occasionally I would meet people and bring them things that they really needed and I felt like I was really making a difference to them." And then he asked me what my favorite job was, and I told him it was doing desktop support for the same reasons he had just elaborated. Everyone at the table laughed.

Apparently, even non-techies (these were all publishers, editors, and sales people, mind you) know that tech support is not a job to be liked. It is a job you do when you are first getting into computers, but it's not a career, God forbid. You do it as long as you can without scratching your own eyeballs out or driving a pencil through your ear and into your brain, and the moment you can get out to do bigger and better things, that is what you do. It is a stepping stone for pimply faced 16 year old kids who love machines more than people, or for those who have PhDs in 10 different computer-related fields but need a crash course in English. But it is certainly not something you do by choice. Which probably explains why calling tech support is like wading through fields of shit in the 8th circle of hell. Because it is seen as disposable. Something to be tolerated with gritted teeth. Because no one stays in it long enough to actually be good at it.

But the fact was, I liked tech support, and every single person I worked with liked tech support. We liked each other. We liked the people we were helping...Well, mostly, anyway. Tech support—good tech support—is not about listening to some screaming harpy and reading questions off a teleprompter. It is about understanding other people. We were shrinks as much as we were techies, calming people, tricking them into helping us when they thought they couldn't, cajoling them into being nice and polite when they really wanted to rip off someone's face, understanding what they were talking about even when they didn't understand themselves. We liked putting ourselves in other people's shoes, trying to change our mental frameworks to understand what they were seeing. We liked fixing things, solving problems, helping people. We liked learning something new every single day and challenging ourselves. We liked puzzles. We liked digging into the guts of machines and logs and code and finding hidden treasure. We liked hanging up the phone after a particularly rough call and bitching to each other about pebkacs, enjoying a camaraderie from being in the trenches together. Shit, sometimes we'd even close up shop for an hour to go drink soda and smoke cigarettes at the 7-11, just so we could go back recharged 10x over and kick ass the entire rest of the day. And when that day was done we could honestly say, "I just solved 30 problems today. I helped 15 people. I do not have anything outstanding on my plate. My work here is done."

Tech support was fucking fun.

But, of course, tech support is a stepping stone, and so every single one of us left this job that we looked forward to every day because it was beneath us. We were part of a class of people who don't do tech support. So we moved on to "bigger and better" things. I am still in touch with all of these people 7 years later, and I can tell you that every single one of us regrets every single day that we left that job.

And the part of this that pisses me off so bad? That I am going into job interviews now and having to explain myself to people who do not believe me when I tell them that I would like to "take a step back" in my career by doing what they view as the equivalent of flipping burgers. I can't even get hired to do tech support, as badly as I want to, because people truly believe that I am lying to them when I walk into an interview and say that I want to go back to this job. "Surely you must want more money?" I see in their faces. "Surely you're doing this temporarily just because you're getting laid off?" their mouths say. "Surely you do not actually want to do this job at all but you are desperate and thus accidentally sent us your resume when you blindly sent it to 100000 companies at once?"

I said before that everyone at my office laughed when I said I liked tech support, but I was exaggerating a little bit. Everyone laughed, except for the man who drove the bookmobile. Because he fucking knew. He knew what it was to have a job where you actually get to make a difference. Even if the job doesn't convey power, or money, or respect. Even if it is "beneath you." Even if the job is challenging. He had a job where he actually brought something to people who needed it, but now he is sitting behind a desk pushing paper into different piles and making spreadsheets of numbers that don't matter to anyone or anything, and sometimes just to mix things up he goes to a windowless room for an hour with 10 other people and this is his one time all day where he gets to interact with other humans. They don't really need to have this meeting about the numbers on his spreadsheet, but if they didn't have it they wouldn't talk to another human being for the entire day, so they do it anyway, just to stave off their loneliness, really. And while he sits looking at the Powerpoint presentation, he misses that fucking bookmobile more than anything in the world.