I used to think that the main requirement for holding onto a job was competence, even though my gut often told me that I didn't even have that. I have since learned that most employers would put showing up when and where required, not requiring much supervision and getting along with bosses and co-workers down as most important, expecting that competence should come along eventually. I was a pretty good student and picked up a couple uni degrees, but had problems when expected to actually perform, particularly in broad daylight. I managed to get through a bit of summer and part-time work in college but blew my first job after graduation, as a high school teacher, for sometimes not showing up, requiring a lot of supervision and not getting along very well with either bosses or co-workers. I recall that the advice I was given by a psychiatrist with I was kicked out of a Peace Corps training program was, "I don't think you are neurotic or psychotic, but I would suggest you get a job in which you don't have to deal with people." The lack of manned lighthouses makes this a bit of a problem these days. To try to save a bit of face, I actually volunteered for the draft, asking the draft board not to tell my employer that I did that, to get out of the teaching job before the end of my one year contract and ended up spending a couple years working as a medic in a field hospital in Vietnam as a consequence. I kept that job for 30 months, mostly because they wouldn't let me out. I then got and MA in economics in 1973 with the help of the GI Bill while hiding on the light night shift working part-time as a hospital orderly. After getting the degree, the closest I'd come to working in my field was giving an enema to a banker one night, so I did the logical thing and moved to Australia on a migrant visa, an attempted big geographical cure. The last thing I wanted to do was to go back to high school teaching, but I soon found myself teaching at a Catholic boys' high school because that was the only job I could get and I was the only applicant. It was that job that got me to AA. It was driving me nuts, but I feared I would blow my resume if I lost it. I still figure that, while thinking that people are out to get you is normally a sign of paranoia, if you are a high school teacher, it is probably true. I didn't really know what the problem was, but knew that I did have a problem with drinking, and hoped that stopping would solve it, even though I still didn't want to stop and couldn't imagine ever living contentedly without it. Stopping drinking didn't solve my job problem, although I was able to stay at it for another two and a half years, even though it was still driving my a bit nuts at the end. Teachers can be nice guys or ogres, but switching between the two as the result of mood swings doesn't work very well. The last thing I did at that job before once again going back to study for a while was to push a kid across the floor of my classroom because he failed to sweep it properly. If something went amiss, I thought that the boss would immediately know about it and that he spent much of his time thinking about how I was going given my self-centeredness at the time. I wasted a lot of time evaluating myself, sometimes thinking I was about the best teacher there, and more often thinking I was the worst, being unable to accept that I could be average. At least, as I said to somebody at one of my early meeting, the job that used to drive me to drink was driving me to meetings, about ten a week for the first three years, in order to try to maintain a bit of sanity while doing it. There were school vacations, but I frantically tried to keep myself busy through them and still dreaded going back to work. Life seemed to be a matter of lasting unit the next one, like a guy who was banging his head against a wall because it felt so good when he stopped. I got to AA in order to hold onto a job and imagined for years that finding the right one would be a panacea that would solve most of my problems, but it took my first eleven years in recovery before I found one that I wanted to hold onto and in which the boss seemed to have the same idea. I either found a way to run away or felt the carpet being swept from under my feet. I recall that Bill W. suggested that one member take the first job that comes along and keep it until a better one comes along. I only did that once, in my last change of jobs. I had been living in Japan teaching English for over five years and had a little business of my own there teaching classes at two schools, a couple companies as will as other children's and adult classes under the sponsorship of a company on another island that was quite content as long as I sent a monthly cut there. I had been offered a full time job at a two year college with very good pay, no night classes, free weekends and long vacations. I talked with my boss about it and he put in someone to replace me, but with agreement that the replacement would go somewhere else if the deal fell through. The job I had for my last fourteen years, until I retired five years ago, was fantastic. I had my own office and mostly ventured outside of it to chat with groups of cute and respectful Japanese girls and I was definitely underworked and overpaid. I was able to show up when and where required, required a minimum of supervision as I was content to do my thing, living and let living, and I was able to get along with students, co-workers and bosses, although I might have given them a somewhat warped impression of what Westerners were like. In the process I learned that some of my thinking had been wrong and less that helpful. I learned to just go along with whatever I was asked to do, finding that, if I gave an inch, they didn't take a mile. I learned that I could give my opinion in meeting, something I didn't do a lot as I had to do so in Japanese, as long as I just let it drop if nobody else supported it. I accepted that sitting in long meetings was just something I could just accept as it was a free Japanese lesson, an opportunity for a bit of meditation, and I was being paid pretty well for just not fallling out of my chair. Ninety minute classes seemed to flash by when I was teaching but the clock seemed to almost freeze up in those meetings. |