This bitch is living the dream.

I hate my job.

OK, well, I don’t hate it per se. I just, you know — I hate it!

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I don’t hate my job. I hate working. Oh god, do I ever hate working. I’ve held my current job for 13 years and the graph where the x-axis is time, and the y-axis is how hard it is for me to deal with, is a bell curve. That is to say, working sucked when I first started, it got easier for a bit, then it started to get harder, and now it sucks again.

As someone with crippling anxiety, I had the hardest time adjusting to the beginning of my career. For one thing, I had about $100 in my savings account when I got hired, so the pressure to perform competently during the honeymoon phase was staggering. Don’t forget that I went to school for engineering, which means I was expected to do engineering things in the real world. Do you know how much of a big ask that is? It’s incredible that I haven’t accidentally killed myself doing engineering things yet, so imagine how I must have felt during my first few months at my new engineering job. Scary.

On top of having to make money consistently so I didn’t starve to death, I had a hard time with a few shitty coworkers who made it their mission to fuck with me as a projection of their own insecurities. One time I called “300M” a stainless steel on a lab sheet and the 55-year-old supervisor told on me! What the fuck is that petty shit? Talk to me, you slut.

Don’t even get me started on my boss’ boss, who took me “under his wing” by not only giving me work that needed to be done immediately every single time, but by being a complete coked-up, hyperactive, impulsive, disorganized, and forgetful tyrant about it. Once I took a day off so I could move out of my crappy apartment and into another crappy apartment, and the guy texted me all day asking me questions as if I was in the office and able to answer them. I was like “You should know, shitfucker. You’re the one in charge.” Thankfully the dude hasn’t worked here for about 11 years. If he were still around I’d have quit pretty early on.

As I got used to my job and people stopped treating me like dirt with poop on it, things got easier. I required less oversight, my confidence talking to clients was built up, my projects were easier to set up and execute, and I was performing noticeably well. We got bonuses every month for our billings, I was able to actually afford things like a trip to Europe and an Xbox, and I was motivated to keep trying my best. That lasted a long time.

Slow your roll, bro! I haven’t even started talking about sandwiches yet!

I don’t know if it was the bout of depression that started in 2019 that I haven’t fully recovered from, but everything is hard now. My two kids take up a lot of my energy. My long commute has felt substantially longer lately. It’s cold right now. My workload bounces between oppressively high to boringly low with not much in between. Bonuses have been long gone for years, so there’s no incentive to push myself. I find it hard to care when I’ve got a pile of other things I’d rather be doing than work at my job: read books, watch movies and shows, take walks, write in my blog, maybe write a book, play video games — hell, I’d even rather do my chores and keep my house clean! My house looks like if the tornado from The Wizard of Oz took a shit in it, and I have no free time to devote to it.

I suppose what I’m saying is that I hate working because it feels like a waste of my time. I wish I had the capacity to get much more into Solo Roleplaying games. I have a novel in my head that I absolutely have no energy to parse and put to paper. I want to sit on my ass and playing video games for a three-hour stretch, which is something I haven’t been able to do since summers between school. I might even want to join a gym, a feat that seems so massively out of reach that it’s silly to even consider it.

I hate working.

Even Artificial Intelligence has something to say about sandwiches!

So I have a proposition for any sexy hiring managers that may be reading my blog right now. I assume you probably work for some giant corporation that willingly pollutes the Earth’s water and sky at a magnitude so unfathomable that the average person doesn’t even have calculators that go up that high. Ergo, paying me would be a drop in the bucket, right? Negligible. Here’s what I want to you to do: Hire me to eat sandwiches for $100,000 per year. Whoa, hold on, this is actually quite simple. Don’t argue yet! Just hear me out! Ready? PAY. ME. TO. EAT. SANDWICHES.

For $100,000 per year I will go to my kitchen at precisely noon and get out the bread, the turkey, the cheese, the mayonnaise, the lettuce, and the hot peppers. I will pick two perfect slices of bread and lovingly spread the mayonnaise on each piece, ensuring adequate coating. I will then place the turkey and cheese on one side, put it on a plate, and place it in the microwave for roughly 20 seconds. I will then spoon hot peppers on the other piece of bread, making sure that no oil from the hot peppers drips off. I will then daintily sprinkle shredded lettuce upon the bread slice. I will then place the two pieces together, creating a small stack of food that goes in this order from top to bottom: bread, mayo, hot peppers, lettuce, cheese, turkey, mayo, bread. I will then take my first bite; savoring the flavors, enjoying the mouthfeel, and sating my rumbling belly. I will keep taking bites until the sandwich is finished at precisely 12:06.

And you will pay me $100,000 per year to do this every day. I will even work on weekends. I don’t require a desk or office supplies. I will not request any vacation time. I will never call in sick. I will be the most loyal employee you have in your company of 90,000 people. I will always perform my duties competently and on time. I will even pay for my own materials. What do you have to lose?

In short, pay me 100,000 goddamned dollars per year to eat fucking sandwiches or I will kill myself.

Hello? Is anyone listening? I’m so lonely.