Recently, the focus on of my sitting around at work has shifted from irritated boredom to an attempt to explain why I don't like my current job. After all, the two students around me seem to be doing just fine. Both of them are extending their contracts.
My initial thought was that I don't have the personality for this type of work. So I took multiple Big 5 Personality Traits tests and here were the results:
It appears that all the tests point to high conscientiousness and low agreeableness. This means that in theory I am highly organized and highly efficient while being low in friendliness and compassion. Now, let's take a look at my experiences.
The first thing I noticed was how slow and boring things were in the government. It was not uncommon for me to be assigned a fairly simple task for the entire day. For example, I was often asked to fill out a form and get a signature. At first, I would obviously fill out the form in 15 minutes (it's really not that hard) and then request more work. Their response time varied between 2 to 24 hours. I quickly learned that unless I want to spend my day doing meaningless tasks, I better use all of the time that has been allocated to me. Usually, I would complete the task within 15 minutes, and simply set a delay on the email. This allowed me to do other, more intellectually stimulating tasks like researching stocks and writing my thesis. Even the occasional chess game was more interesting than what they had to offer.
From the first day, I felt some awkwardness and tension around the people in the office. I clearly did not belong in their green-life-ecology-student club. They were actually happy to be there. I was there to see if I like it, with massive doubts that an office job is for me. From my first day having lunch with them seemed forced. A week in I was labeled cynical. That's no surprise since I quickly understood that we are all replaceable and our tasks are quite repetitive in nature. My dark humor didn't help - it was mostly seen as shocking and highly unprofessional by these self-important imbeciles. After a month, I stopped going to the student events altogether because I could no longer take the moronic conversations about how they went berry-picking during the weekend and how they aspire to make a difference working for the government. These people try so hard to prove to each other that they are adults by discussing their living situations and asking about each other's work. If only they actually cared. Most of their conversations are just monologues with polite waiting periods while the other person is preaching.
I can only conclude that government workers are very agreeable since I have never seen them scold anyone and their entire conversations revolve around patting each other on the back for taking some time off. They are probably also fairly easy going, the myth of government doing mostly nothing all day is unfortunately true. I would argue that the inefficiency stems from the bureaucratic process that cannot be avoided. Those that stick around are those that are fine with very slow and procedural work.
Thankfully, I only have a week left to work here.
My initial thought was that I don't have the personality for this type of work. So I took multiple Big 5 Personality Traits tests and here were the results:
It appears that all the tests point to high conscientiousness and low agreeableness. This means that in theory I am highly organized and highly efficient while being low in friendliness and compassion. Now, let's take a look at my experiences.
The first thing I noticed was how slow and boring things were in the government. It was not uncommon for me to be assigned a fairly simple task for the entire day. For example, I was often asked to fill out a form and get a signature. At first, I would obviously fill out the form in 15 minutes (it's really not that hard) and then request more work. Their response time varied between 2 to 24 hours. I quickly learned that unless I want to spend my day doing meaningless tasks, I better use all of the time that has been allocated to me. Usually, I would complete the task within 15 minutes, and simply set a delay on the email. This allowed me to do other, more intellectually stimulating tasks like researching stocks and writing my thesis. Even the occasional chess game was more interesting than what they had to offer.
From the first day, I felt some awkwardness and tension around the people in the office. I clearly did not belong in their green-life-ecology-student club. They were actually happy to be there. I was there to see if I like it, with massive doubts that an office job is for me. From my first day having lunch with them seemed forced. A week in I was labeled cynical. That's no surprise since I quickly understood that we are all replaceable and our tasks are quite repetitive in nature. My dark humor didn't help - it was mostly seen as shocking and highly unprofessional by these self-important imbeciles. After a month, I stopped going to the student events altogether because I could no longer take the moronic conversations about how they went berry-picking during the weekend and how they aspire to make a difference working for the government. These people try so hard to prove to each other that they are adults by discussing their living situations and asking about each other's work. If only they actually cared. Most of their conversations are just monologues with polite waiting periods while the other person is preaching.
I can only conclude that government workers are very agreeable since I have never seen them scold anyone and their entire conversations revolve around patting each other on the back for taking some time off. They are probably also fairly easy going, the myth of government doing mostly nothing all day is unfortunately true. I would argue that the inefficiency stems from the bureaucratic process that cannot be avoided. Those that stick around are those that are fine with very slow and procedural work.
Thankfully, I only have a week left to work here.
