Saturday 26 April 2014

Burnout

And at a certain point, you just lose the will to have a life.

Why go out when nobody is interested in my work stories. Why wearing decent clothes when people at work (be it underlings or guests) don't appreciate it. Why bother with anything at all when all the people I meet I hate - not each of them separately and for a reason, only in the collective sense of belonging to a group of employees which, in the year and half, became an equivalent to continuous nuisance and idiocy. Guests are even worse - snotty idiots, Captains Sweatpants (hey, I made a Big Bang Theory reference) who think that expensive sweatpants are good enough for going out, people who think that the receptionists or whoever are there only for them and their convenience... and people who just are, with all the side effects like making noise. So, why the burning hell I should bother to wash my hair when I'm surrounded by idiots I hate.

I realized that I'm in deep shit indeed when I started speaking in dialect. Not the dialect of the area where I work, my native dialect (of sorts, my mother is a linguist and always prided herself that our household speaks nice, not some contorted whatnots. Also, she hated said dialect, a heavy one, for that matter, although I'm not sure on what grounds, whether just because or because her first teaching gig was deep in the country and she couldn't understand the first-graders. Gotta research). Because, I'm from elsewhere, see, everyone, not here, I'm from that nice town that has an university and two theatres and actual places to go and things to do apart from navigating the swampy meadows and counting orchids. Not that I was going out too much but I could if I wanted, right? And due to that fucking work and fucking morons who needed to go holidaying so they pretended to be sick or something, I missed a concert of Paco de LucĂ­a back at home and now he's dead, right, so I have no chance of going again. Yes, I might not be able to afford a ticket or I might not go but I could. And that's the point. But I digressed. I just distance myself both willingly and subconsciously from work and everything related. I would quit on the spot but I'm not one of them, falling sick when I don't feel like working (okay, marauders were already disposed of, not in the compost heap but told to go away voluntarily or else), I feel a moral obligation or two, such as not leaving people in deep shit as it's not nice and I don't really remember much from the days when I worked two shifts in the reception every day and had to do a shitload of other stuff and was sick of fatigue all the time. It's not done in the low country - or it is, maybe I just haven't met enough people but it's a nice stereotype to fall for, that the hard-working farmers actually worked hard and kept their word. Sometimes I'm not entirely cynical, cherish those moments, they don't happen often.

And then people tell me that everything is fine, right? Because, let's take people looking funny at me, they certainly don't mean it, they live in their own heads and I shouldn't worry. Problem solved, next! You dislike talking to people? You don't need to as you had to before a new receptionist was hired, everything is fine. Problem solved, next! You feel stuck up in the middle of nowhere? You should have learned to drive, your fault, suck it up, problem solved, next! Nowhere to go, nothing to do? Other people actually pay money to stay in the hotel, the view is nice, where's a problem, problem solved etc. See, there's no problems left, everything is fine, go out and enjoy life. Add optimists and rationalizers to the list of things I detest. Phew.