Working in an office is draining me

If you’ve been read­ing my blog, you’d have noticed that I’m now work­ing as an ‘assis­tant engi­neer’. I’m only really reap­ing ben­e­fits such as the expe­ri­ence of work­ing for such a pres­ti­gious com­pany. — Plus, it is a decent com­pany I could place on my CV if I ever need to go job hunt­ing. How­ever, I’m still on my first month at this job and I totally hate it.

It is a full-time job, from 9am-6pm, how­ever it might as well be from 8am to 7pm as I have to leave at 8am to arrive at work in time and I leave at 6pm and it takes an hour to get back home. After work, I feel drained, emo­tion­less and gut­ted. — It doesn’t feel quite right.

Per­haps or I have a feel­ing, that I feel this way because it is an office job. I’m locked up in a big room, full other peo­ple look­ing at com­puter screens as if they are zom­bies try­ing to work out 2+2. There’s no emo­tion on peo­ples faces. I lit­er­ally don’t know how peo­ple can do this type of job with­out going crazy. I was talk­ing to my fel­low engi­neers today and they said to me that they’ve been work­ing at this com­pany for over 5 years, some even over that amount. I called them crazy, how­ever they just laughed it off as it meant nothing.

How could they have worked there for such a long time? — I thought to myself.

Per­haps, it is their work ethics.

You see, in Tai­wan every­one has to do mil­i­tary ser­vice for a year.

I guess it trains the brain to do work which may have seemed ‘crazy’ to do before, know­ing the fact that you’ve done worse and so any type of work becomes sim­ple. I actu­ally spoke about this to one of my co-workers and he said it trained his brain to be able to work hard and to do long hours with­out any issues.

Even so, I still think most of the peo­ple work­ing at this com­pany have become zom­bies, they just haven’t noticed that yet. I can’t blame them either, since in a coun­try like Tai­wan, there are no trade unions who have any power to help you; if you are in any trou­ble. There are no gov­ern­ment agen­cies you can turn to, to really help you out if you are in trou­ble; money-wise. So I won’t blame them. But with this type of work ethic, how will other coun­tries in the west com­pete in the future, when their (Asian) economies become more com­pa­ra­ble. Why do I think my co-workers are zom­bies? Take this example:

Every morn­ing there is a call out that goes through the speak­ers say­ing that the air-conditioning is being turned on. Every­one leaps to their feet to close all the win­dows and doors. It works like clock-work. You can lit­er­ally record the same actions tak­ing place on a daily basis. They are zom­bies. Plus, some have been work­ing at this place for over 10 years. I don’t know how they stay sane.

All I know is that I want to live life, I don’t want to live work­ing. Or this say­ing is actu­ally more appropriate:

I don’t want to live life work­ing, I want to work to live life.

This is so true. I would never ever force myself to do some dead-end career and waste my life doing that.