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Sunday, September 16, 2007
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Hello again, blog.
Need to post. Things change, again, and once more I'm in a place where I'm uncomfortable and uncertain about the future. Change is good, mixing things up keeps life interesting and all that shit, sure. But I have... trouble with change. It's the run-up, the anticipation that bothers me - that's when I get the horrible hollow feeling in the region between my gut and chest, the sensation that I've always had difficulty explaining to people. Feeling hungry and sick at the same time. This nasty, petty existential angst thing. And I'm generally quite good at pushing myself through it, forcing myself to face up to it, because once the actual change is underway, I sail through without any worries. But the build-up... that's hard.
And it's because of work. Again.
As much as I love my job, the fact that I'm fully aware that I'm not being paid properly for doing it makes me itch inside, and is something that the people I immediately work for also know about. The yearly salary's about £3k below where it should be, and if I say that £3k is roughly 25% of what I *am* getting paid, you'll probably understand why that's such a major issue. Basically, I'm getting fucking peanuts for something with some relatively major responsibilites and a hefty workload.
So, in order to keep me happy, what the people above me have done is dangle the carrot of paying for me to get some more qualifications, while the job evaluation goes through whatever proctracted process it has to (a process that feels, to somebody on this end of it, like nothing more than a series of delaaying tactics, if I'm entirely honest about it).
It's nice, in a way. It at least demonstrates that they want to keep me, if nothing else, which is more than I ever had in the old job. The main motivation is undoubtedly that they're fully aware of the difficulties they'll face if I do up and leave - not because *I'm* particularly essential, as a person, but because I've taken on so many additional responsibilities that nobody else is dealing with, that if I leave it'll be extremely hard to get anybody else trained up. When there's one person processing all of your income and expenditure, one person keeping track of your budgets, one person paying all your employees, you're inevitably going to face a fairly massive hurdle if that one person disappears.
So, tomorrow I start an NVQ.
Here's my itchiness: it's not long since I finished my degree. I went into that late, got a decent result, then spent two years unemployed as, I suspect, a direct result of my CV having seven years' worth of that old job on it and not an enormous amount more. So: one step forwards (degree), two steps back (prolonged period of unemployment).
And then another step forwards: into a job that I love and have discovered a previously unsuspected innate ability with, working with and for people who have, to a large extent, become more friends than employers.
An NVQ? That's got to be another two steps back. I'm 32 next month and here I am, about to start over from scratch. Yet a-fucking-gain. The NVQ forces me to accept that the degree was, to all intents and purposes, a total waste of time. I could have got this job without it - I wouldn't have been the person I am without the experience of those years, but in terms of qualifications, I could have got this job where I was before returning to full-time education.
Worse, it looks an awful lot like everything I'll be learning for the next twelve months (or twenty-four, should the pay increase materialise in the interim period and temporarily stop me from looking for alternative employment), I already know. It's exceptionally basic stuff that *might* have been useful to me this time last year, but I'm now some way past. When you've spent eighteen months providing a payroll, finance and HR service on your own, for a staff of around 150 people and a combined budget of £800,000 - well, it's been a trial by fire, but it's ensured that I've had to get a bloody good grounding in these things pretty quickly, just to survive. So, going to college to be taught how to "record income", how to "use IT"... it's going to be diffciult not to feel patronised by that.
The main issue for me is that it's a waste of my time. It won't help me in my current job, because it simply can't teach me anything that I don't already know, that I haven't already been dealing with for a year and a half. Worse, it's taking a day away from me - I'll now have four days to do what five was already far too few for.
And it's Mondays. 0900 - 1600. It's going to take a power of will to stop myself from falling asleep.
But maybe it's a good thing. I'd been getting comfortable with the job, and when I'm comfortable I tend to stay still. I can't carry on earning as little as I am - it's not enough for me to even think about renting a place of my own in this town, for fuck's sake - and even if this course doesn't add anything of worth to my resume, it might at least light a fire under my arse and get me considering different possibilities.
We'll see.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 21:09
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