This is going to be a little bit of self-therapy, so bare with it…if you like.
It’s kind of always been the same…the places I love to work, rarely, if ever, love me back enough to really give me a chance to belong and stay, be a part of something. On the other hand, the places that I generally hate working at never want to let me go. There definitely is a reason behind it, maybe it IS just because the places I like working at, are places other people like working at, and they know that and have the upper hand. Places I hate, other people hate, and they know that they have to bend over backwards to keep me there.
That said, I don’t buy it. I can tell when the rest of my team is less happy than I am, and when they’re more happy than I am, and it doesn’t always match up to the workplace.
Anyhow, with all that out of the way…I can say with 100% certainty that happiness, for me, is having something I love that loves me back. My dog makes me happy. My bird makes me happy. My work made me happy until today, when I discovered it didn’t love me back as much as I loved it. The time I spent on my own time learning and trying to do things that I thought would be really beneficial for my team, well, kind of wasted time now that I could have been using to develop my own products. But I do that when I enjoy my work, and I just don’t really care much otherwise. When I hate my job, I tend to pour more of that time into my own projects.
I saw a lot of potential in this job, and a lot of potential in the type of work I would be doing. I knew that given a little budget and investment, I could make it all pay off…or at the very least, help them keep their bases fully covered. I’m disappointed that it wasn’t feasible for them, that we couldn’t make it work out.
Then again, I always notice that when I’m happy, I get relaxed and I tend to be myself. I tend to become more passionate about things than people around me can handle. I try harder to fit in and I want to contribute more. Sometimes when I hate something, I only do enough to be done with things, and people seem to accept that a whole lot better because when people get what they expect, they’re fine with that.
I forgot how hard it is to break into a team where they’ve all been situated for years, and you’re the new guy trying to figure everything out…and the reason they brought you in was because you could do something that they weren’t even sure they wanted to do. That’s happened to me before a couple times, and it always ends up bad. You start measuring yourself against people who have far more experience with the things that are there…but more importantly, they start measuring you against those people when you’re still just trying to figure those things out and take ownership of those things.
Those people almost always have long forgotten how it felt to have to learn everything from scratch, and they simply cannot judge you fairly. That’s not their fault, that’s just how the human mind works. We live in the now, and we don’t relive our first month or two on the job all the time.
Anyway, I forgot that my contract was really a quarterly evaluated deal, and the things I brought to the table, they just weren’t ready to have me deliver on. When you like doing what you’re doing and you like the people you’re working with, you want to forget those details. Anyway, I’m off for awhile, and I really do hope that when they’re ready, I’ll be available…but with the goals I’ve laid out to buy this house, I’ve got to find real work, quick. And I’m sure as hell not going to drop another job just for another 3 month contract or part-time deal. It has to be full time, or I’m not interested. As for right now, I can safely say that I’d be thrilled to get a full time job offer, from my (now) previous employer or anyone else, provided I’m not taking a huge step back in salary and quality of work.
Going to be taking some trips to the dog park, looking for work, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll do those 3 Palm Pre apps that I’ve been putting off for a month now. I don’t have anyone else to make happy besides myself and my pets, so what the hell. I might not be able to buy my house, but there are more important things in life than that.