cancer – day 619

I haven’t been writing because I haven’t wanted to post anything about work to my blog. I worked an INSANE number of hours in October, November, December, and January, and today when I had my review with Kilgore I found out that we’re all in agreement that MBBC needs a director, but that I’m not the right person for the job. The Director needs to be someone who can challenge and manage Chris at MIT. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is a job I would neither enjoy nor be good at.

You know, all I really want is to work a normal number of hours (something less than 60/week) and get a raise. I don’t really care about a promotion. Hell, I don’t even care about a career. But I’ve worked SOOOOOOOOOOO hard, I can’t keep doing it for the same salary they started me at more than four years ago.

I know lots of people lost their jobs in the recession and I should be thankful to have a job. If I were working a 40-hour week, or even a 50-hour week, my salary would probably seem fair. But when your average work week is roughly 70 hours/week, you’re basically getting paid about half per hour what you would get at the same salary at 40 hours a week.

I don’t see a promotion in my future, and that doesn’t bother me. Any kind of promotion may mean I have to have people reporting to me, and I’m not excited at the prospect of being responsible for their growth and development and work quality and approving expense reports and reviewing performance and, uhg, all that stuff that goes into being a good manager. I prefer to do the work myself.

What I MUST do, however, is stop working such long hours every day of the week. My New Year’s resolution was to stop working weekends. That hasn’t happened yet, but it’s possible. And I’m going to also cut back from my standard 12-hour day to only ten, or maybe even nine hours. Of course, that means that a lot of work will not get done. I have to resolve myself to that, because there’s apparently no other way the company is going to understand that I am not an unlimited resource.