Ten Keys to Making a Sucky Job Less Sucky

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For twenty-one years I toiled at a sucky government job. Management cared more about enriching the coffers of the Republican Party than providing the taxpayers with great service. Union officials cared more about its members getting more pay than becoming more productive. And my typical co-worker cared more about dodging work than being a hero to the taxpaying schlubs. Here are two sayings that I routinely heard from my co-workers that epitomized that sorry attitude:

1. “It looks great from where I live.”

I first encountered this saying when I became a foreman for a road crew. I was checking on the landscaping progress of a huge swath of commons and I noticed that there was unsightly confetti everywhere. Rather than pick up all the litter prior to cutting the grass, my crew just ran it over with their lawnmowers and created a bigger mess. When I called the crew on its rank unprofessionalism, one crew member blurted out: “I don’t see what the big deal is. It looks great from where I live.” In other words, as long as their shoddy work didn’t visibly blight their streets or neighborhoods, it was perfectly okay. Screw the taxpayers.

2. “Our jobs are nothing but high-class welfare.”

Sometimes this saying was voiced as an omission of guilt. My more honorable co-workers knew we weren’t doing right by the taxpayers and fessing up was one way to manage the shame. But more often than not, it was voiced as a rebuke. Most of my co-workers firmly believed that welfare recipients didn’t work. And it didn’t matter if the welfare recipients were dwelling in public housing or lingering on the public payroll. Work was a violation of some immutable law. Asking a welfare recipient to work was like asking gravity to ignore a ball dropped from a rooftop. So if you had the audacity to expect anything more than desultory, half-assed effort from your co-workers, you were a lunatic. And this lunacy rarely went unchecked: “Okay, Mr. Goody Two-Shoes, cool your jets. Our jobs are nothing but high-class welfare. And that’s never going to change. So stop trying to be a hero.”

Yes, I worked in an utterly dismal environment—a “madhouse,” if you will. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I managed to make the last half of my government career somewhat tolerable. In other words, I discovered the keys to making a sucky job less sucky. And those keys boiled down to three things: gaining respect, managing expectations, and remaining aloof. Let’s see how.

One: Get Good at Your Job

My government job was hardly devoid of good people. There were plenty of them, in fact. And I found that winning their genuine respect not only elevated my sense of self-worth but also made my time at work less stomach-wrenching.

So how did I gain the genuine respect of my good co-workers? I got good at my job. Around halfway through my government career, I decided to act as if my job mattered. I stopped calling in sick for frivolous reasons. If a task required a day to complete, I’d completed it in a day rather than three days. And whatever I did, I did well—regardless of how mundane or trivial it was. I cut grass like a champ, I shoveled asphalt like a champ, and I removed dead animals from my municipality’s roads like a champ.

Two: Solve Problems

To my fellow highway employees and me, snow was gold. If a snow emergency was declared early on a Friday night, and snow continued falling well into Saturday, one could easily accumulate 40 hours of overtime plowing snow during the weekend. But in order to turn snow into gold, one had to be called in to plow.

Quite naturally, who was called in and when became very contentious. No snowstorm was battled and won without people feeling snubbed—that they were left sitting home while others with less seniority and more political heft got the call to duty.

To the credit of the last highway commissioner I toiled under, he recognized that our call-in system had become too arbitrary and hamfisted and that it was killing morale. So he came to me for help.

Making our call-in system fair required two things. I needed the business rules of a snowstorm—what equipment was needed for each category of storm—and I needed the employment data of the highway employees—what yard they worked out of, what equipment they operated, what date they were hired, and, most importantly, what phone numbers were needed to reach them.

Once I had this information, I crafted a “snow emergency” database for the personnel office. The personnel people would use this database to update snow-related employment data when necessary and produce a master call-in sheet whenever a snowstorm was imminent. Our call-in system became significantly less arbitrary overnight and I became a hero—a renowned problem solver.

Three: Create Challenges for Yourself

The more dysfunctional your workplace is, the more opportunities you have to make things better.

For most of my government career, I ignored such opportunities. But then I discovered that fixing the seemingly unfixable—and doing it because it was your idea—was a great way to boost your self-esteem.

A great example of this was my department’s budget process. No one liked the budget preparation process—not the commissioner, not the bureau heads, and certainly not the guy who manned our one-man accounting office. It was just too old school. Calculations were made with pencils and adding machines, budget forms were filled out on typewriters, and edits to those filled-out budget forms were made with Wite-Out.

So I went to the guy who manned our one-man accounting office and asked him if I could automate our budget preparation process and introduce it to the digital age. Not surprisingly, he happily accepted my offer.

Over the next few months, I devoted all my spare time at work to “fixing” the budget preparation process. Initially, I wasn’t sure how I would improve the process. I knew databases and programming would be central to the solution, though. So I began there. And sure enough, after much think-equity and much cursing at the programming gods, my database-centric solution prevailed. Our budget preparation process no longer relied on pencils, adding machines, paper budget forms, and typewriters. It now relied on keystrokes and mouse clicks. I made our dysfunctional workplace a little less dysfunctional, and I made my pointless government job a little less pointless.

Four: Exploit Opportunities for Free On-The-Job Training

Check out the four-minute mark of the below video (it’s queued up at the four-minute mark so all you have to do is click the start button):

The propaganda must be pushed 24/7/365. So the propagandist Shepard Smith had to give Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of Ark Invest, the opportunity to explain to his benighted viewers just how sexist the financial sector is. But Mrs. Wood refused to play along. Instead, she gave an answer that would help anyone in any job. Here’s how she viewed being a newbie woman in a “man’s world”:

“Wow. I get to learn, and I’m paid for learning. This is amazing.”

Every job has its complement of buttheads—some jobs more than others. My government job was chock full of buttheads. But every job also has opportunities for you to learn something valuable. The key is to ignore the buttheads and focus on the learning opportunities.

Unlike Cathie Wood, it took me a while to figure out just how “amazing” it is “to get paid for learning.” But I finally figured it out in the second half of my government career.

My favorite example of a “Cathie-Woodism” (i.e., appreciating just how amazing it is to get paid to learn) was my decision to make my department’s dysfunctional budget preparation process less dysfunctional (see key number three above). And here are just some of the things I got paid to learn for taking on that challenge:

• Our municipality’s budget process
• How to turn your desktop computer into a server
• HTML
• Javascript
• How to make input fields and forms idiot-proof
• How to save the input from an HTML webpage into an Access database
• How to make Access reports that replicated the budget forms our department submitted to Town Hall
• The VBA code and functions needed to take the budget data stored in an Access database and seamlessly place that data in the appropriate spots of our budget forms

Victimhood may bring you social cachet, but it doesn’t bring you career advancement. Don’t be a victim a work. Use the system to beat the system. Pounce on any learning opportunity you can find, and then use the knowledge and skills you were paid to learn to get a better job.

Five: Find a Role or Niche Where You Don’t Have to Compromise Your Values

There was an unwritten rule at my municipality that road crews didn’t work after lunch. That annoyed the crap out of me when I was a foreman. But there was little I could do to change things. The relationship between management and labor was just too incestuous. Practically every laborer in the highway department was the ne’er-do-well son, brother, cousin, or friend of some muckety-muck.

Fortunately, I discovered databases and programming and got pretty good at those IT skills. In fact, I got so good management took me off the road and put me in the office. I became the highway department’s one-man IT division, so to speak. And this meant I no longer depended on anyone to do my job. My submission to the culture of sloth was over.

Six: Don’t Expect Your Bosses or C0-workers to Care

If your expectations are low, you’ll never be disappointed. Having high or moderate expectations in a dysfunctional workplace is a recipe for mental anguish.

It took me a while to figure this out, but once I did, work became significantly more tolerable. Each day I drove into work I would mentally prepare myself: “Your co-workers will be surly. Your co-workers will be allergic to quality work. Your co-workers will be AWOL when you need them most.” And then I would consider ways to mitigate those flaws: “Don’t engage in small talk. Don’t overwhelm your co-workers with big tasks—just give them bite-sized tasks. Don’t wait to get the important stuff done—do the important stuff first thing in the morning.”

Having this attitude and experimenting with mitigation strategies worked wonders. I rarely if ever became disappointed at work. Dealing with shit attitudes and shit workmanship became as mentally taxing as brushing my teeth or tying my shoes. I didn’t recoil from the ever-present shit. I didn’t take the ever-present shit personally. I just rolled with it.

Seven: Play the Promotion Game If You Want a Promotion

Few things make a sucky job less sucky better than more pay. But in order to get better pay, you have to accurately determine what your employer values.

In my last job before retirement, I was a data analyst, and my company valued two things regarding advancement: competency and location. If you wanted to get ahead, you’d better be competent at your job, and you’d better be willing to move to Dallas. If you didn’t meet these two criteria, you weren’t getting a promotion.

Things were different at my government job. Competency wasn’t a priority for advancement. It was nice if you had it, but it wasn’t required. Nope, what mattered most was devotion to the Republican Party. If you did right by the Republican Party—if you got it votes and/or campaign donations—it would do right by you.

Knowing what you need to do to get a promotion is one thing. Having the stomach to do what you need to do to get a promotion is another. Mrs. Groovy was never moving to Dallas. So advancing in my last job before retirement was out of the question. At my government job, however, advancement was just a matter of making some strategic donations to the Republican Party. And as I neared the end of my government career, I had enough discretionary savings to make those strategic donations. And the Republican Party dutifully put more money in my pocket. But the whole endeavor was unseemingly and the increase in pay only marginally outweighed the decrease in dignity. I’m glad my capitulation to the promotion game was short-lived (see key ten below).

Eight: Make Sure Your Co-Workers Remain Acquaintances and Not Friends

If you have a toxic work environment and your co-workers are your friends, you’re inviting toxicity into your non-work life. You’ll be lamenting the suckiness of your job at work and at play. Not good.

Nine: Don’t Gossip

Children destroy, adults build. Gossip is the business of destroying reputations. Those who gossip are therefore childlike.

For the first half of my government career, I was childlike. I wasn’t a habitual gossiper, but I did engage in the wretched sport.

But happily, something clicked. My moral gene kicked in and I decided to renounce gossip. I wouldn’t talk about other people, and when co-workers started down that dismal path, I would quickly get him or her on a different path.

Eventually, my co-workers realized that gossip wasn’t my bag and they stopped tempting me with it. And then something wonderful happened. Work became decidedly less demeaning. No amount of my time was devoted to talking trash or decorating backs with knives. My time was devoted to getting things done and making things better. And being an adult felt good.

Ten: Have an Exit Strategy

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
—George Orwell, 1984

Despite all I did to make my government job less sucky, the George Orwell quote above perfectly captures the ultimate futility of my efforts. There was just too much incompetence, sloth, inefficiency, and corruption at my workplace for me to ever feel good about my job. Every day I went to work, a little stamping boot would inevitably rise up and stamp down hard on something I valued—my sense of fairness, my sense of decency, my sense of honor.

But all that changed in 2003. That was the year Mrs. Groovy and I devised our three-year plan to leave Long Island and start a new life in North Carolina. Knowing that the stamping boots of incompetence, sloth, inefficiency, and corruption wouldn’t be stamping on my face forever was incredibly liberating. My face could easily handle three more years of boot stamping. Suffering 20 more years of boot stamping was an entirely different proposition, though. I shudder to think what such prolonged abuse would have done to my soul.

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Do my ten keys to making a sucky job less sucky make sense? Or are they kinda sucky themselves? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Cheers.