Spite and Malice

My general distaste for work has turned into an active dislike of my place of employment. No longer do I dread my alarm going off strictly because I'd rather go back to bed than spend half my day at work or commuting there.

No, now I'm beginning to sense feelings of hatred.

I can't quite say why this is the case. It doesn't seem that any single thing at work pushed me over that edge today. (In fact, I can't really remember what I did today; I just know that whatever it was, it wasn't terribly important.)

But it's more the accumulation of more general feelings and inclinations.

To wit: when I started I thought I was doing something interesting and important, valuable and useful, noble and admirable. The thought of working to collect and preserve oral histories, particularly of the more popular variety, was the sort of thing that made me want to go boast about my job to everyone. I mean, this was the sort of thing in which I could take pride. But then, when I started I thought lots of things, none of which have panned out in actuality.

Like that I'd only be working 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Or that having to spend nine and a half hours at work meant getting a really long lunch break. Or that I'd be using my talents.

I could deal with the long hours for not-so-much pay (I'm basically making a little more than $13 an hour, assuming you base my salary on working nine hours a day, rather than the 10 or more I work more often), or even not putting my skills to good use, so long as I continued to feel like I was making sacrifices for a worthwhile endeavor. But I can't delude myself about that anymore.

My gut feeling, which seems right on matters like this more often than not, is that I'm squandering my precious time and energy on this project. It's certainly the sort of mission that seems good and noble, the kind that inspires well-to-do liberals and the like to reach for their checkbooks. Having seen the day-to-day operation of the organization and developed a vibe for the office environment and personality of the executive director, it seems like that's the real mission. Not preserving vital stories for future generations to hear. It's organizational inertia, a particularly common and debilitating ailment that afflicts many nonprofits.

This is the sort of thing that leads to sloppiness, to waste. Instead of doing it out of idealism or enthusiasm, we seem to work only to please the corporate sponsors and other impressive folks. This leads to great feats of ridiculosity. Like our executive director taking the title, undoubtedly self-appointed, of "public historian."

Public historian?!? What the hell is that? It makes no sense. The great, legendary Chicago journalist and voice of the people Studs Terkel is a public historian. He's the only one who comes to my mind. And by definition, he's too modest to call himself such. Nothing screams pretensiousness like a title that utterly ludicrous and meaningless. Not only is our executive director nothing like Studs Terkel, she doesn't appear to do anything that would remotely qualify her as a historian. No one in the office really does. Us writers? We're glorified journalists. Nothing more. Argh.

Perhaps the straw that broke my back today, though, was when she was telling me what I'll be doing through next week, namely working media outlets to publicize our fundraiser. When I asked her what I should do if someone wants a credential to cover the event, she said it was fine, though she was "elitist" about it. Meaning that The New York Times or Chicago Tribune could send a legion of reporters and it wouldn't be a problem. But if a lesser paper, the kind she obviously looks down at, something like, say, The Daily Northwestern wanted to send one lowly reporter to cover it, they'd get shut out. This despite the fact that last year at the news conference before the event, there was exactly one working journalist in attendance; the rest of the crowd assembled were journalism students from Northwestern. Unbelievable.

You see, people?! You see what I have to tolerate?!