The Stupidest Job

Of all the jobs I have had, it was strangely the one that paid the most that was the stupidest. I have had some pretty menial jobs in the past (cleaning airplanes for Canadian Airlines), and more stressful ones (Copyright Librarian at CISTI). But for sheer pointlessness-per-dollar, being a Planning and Business Officer for NRC's Central Business Support (CBS) takes the cake.

On Mondays I would put on a tie and go to my beige cubicle with the goal of wrapping up the such-and-such report and making progress on the actual tracking of innovation. By Thursday of every week I would trudge home with the same thoughts looping through my mind: "How do I get out of this place"? Of course, I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth: the salary and benefits were great. I had zero commute. The NRC campus was a lovely place to go for a lunch-time run. All I had to do was push a mouse around and go to meetings (so many meetings).

Add all those things up and it becomes hard to leave. The years trickle by and before you know it, the cozy cubicle has become a trap: You are too old to find another job, but a decade or more from retirement. Quite a few of my colleagues were in that position. Counting the months, and years, with only one thought to justify all the pointless meetings: gotta hang on to that pension. Luckily my experience gave me options. Indeed, all three CBS employees who had MLIS degrees left within the first year (including me). We knew that this was a bizarre work environment and that we could find other jobs. The poor folks with MBAs were stuck: they had drunk the kool-aid and took these meetings seriously.

Projects were changed on a whim. Reports could never be finished because (A) we had no way of getting reliable data and (B) my micro-managing boss kept changing what she wanted. Although I am a published researcher and a bang-up programmer, it seems that I was being given ever-simpler tasks because I couldn't deliver on time (because the organization has no reliable data with which to work: every quarterly report took more than 3 months to complete because of the tooth-pulling required to get accurate numbers from such-and-such department). The twighlight zone of CBS was undermining my attempts to make any career headway. Was I really not capable of doing a simple report?