I Took a Stress Test at Work and Here’s What I Learned

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I’ve been taking it slow on the blogging front lately while I reorganize some of my priorities in my writing, my Day Job, and everywhere else.  One factor that ties all those things together, though, is stress.

Back in October, two weeks after I talked to my boss about my stress problems, a single-page multiple-choice English stress survey suddenly appeared on the desks of all the foreign teachers in my city with notes asking us to fill them out.  Now, even though the city had asked every ALT to fill out the survey, the timing seemed like quite a coincidence ;-)

I got my results back a few weeks ago (also in English!) and they were…about what I expected. However, they also reinforced that I’ve been on the right track about the challenges I’m facing right now, including where those challenges are coming from and how to fix them. Continue reading »

Do You Shut Down or Check Out When You’re at Work?

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In my last few posts I’ve talked about my recent stresses and how I’m slowly making things better.  While some of those stresses are related to my daily life and creative work, a few of them have been Day Job-related—though again, I won’t be talking about them here for Day Job-related secrecy reasons.

What I have been doing, though, is talking to some coworkers I trust (both Japanese and Western) about the problem.  Talking to people I work with about work problems has a few benefits, including:

  1. It makes me feel better
  2. It lets my coworkers know about the problem so it’s not a secret anymore
  3. It lets me gain their perspective and hear their advice

As a result of Benefit Number 3, I’ve been hearing different ways that my coworkers deal with their own stresses, one of which I’d like to write about this week… Continue reading »

I Was Having Problems at My Day Job and Talked to My Boss About It

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Yep, this is kind of a serious post.

Things in general haven’t been going well for a while, and I’ve kind of been in denial about it.  My writing’s still stalled, I’ve been way too insanely busy, and I’ve been pushing myself too hard during the week and then crashing hard on weekends.  None of these has been doing me any good.

Apart from all this I’ve been experiencing some pretty bad lows, many of which can be indirectly traced back to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Even though Japan’s been grappling with the virus far better than the States, over here I still have to deal with cancelled plans, limited activities, and lot of other negative changes.

Here’s a big negative change: I had to cancel my trip back to the States in August, when I was planning on meeting friends, seeing family, and attending my brother’s wedding.  That sucked pretty hard. Continue reading »

How Many Paid Holidays Does Your Country Give You???

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Last weekend was the 4th of July, which in America was a time for fireworks, socially distanced barbecues, and most importantly, an extra day off from work.

July 4th was a Saturday this year, which means that per American federal holiday guidelines, the holiday was observed on Friday, July 3rd and Day Jobbers across the country took a three-day weekend.  For me in Japan, though, Friday was a regular workday, and I celebrated the 4th by playing some online Scythe with my friends back home.

There is, however, an up side: this month Japan has two holidays, Marine Day and Sports Day, which, because of the now-postponed Tokyo Olympics, the government moved to July 23rd and 24th, respectively, giving us a four-day weekend.  Score! Continue reading »

Texting While Working on Something Else is the Bane of My Existence and I Hate it So Freakin’ Much

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Before starting this post I responded to a text someone had sent me and then put my phone away on silent so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at.

Why?  Because I HATE getting distracted by texts when I’m trying to work on something.

My usual mode of working involves disconnecting from my phone and all the distractions that come with it when I’m trying to get something done.  This normally works pretty well…except when I’m feeling down, or having trouble with my work, or waiting for something important.  In these cases I’ll intermittently pick up my phone hoping for a new message that’ll boost up my energy,.

That kind of compulsive phone-checking is…not good, and I don’t like that it invades my work habits.  At best, these microchecks distract me even further Continue reading »

Every Job is a Real Job as Long as It Pays Real Money

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I hate it when people use the term “real job” to describe a certain type of employment.  Like, what do people even mean when they say this?  If some jobs are “real jobs,” are the rest of the jobs out there “fake jobs?”  How about “unreal jobs?”  “Pretend jobs?”

I’ve sometimes asked people to describe what they meant by “real job” and each time, without exception, the person found themselves at a loss for words.  Being full-time seemed to have something to do with it, but not all full-time jobs were “real jobs.”  Paying out a lot of money also seemed to make certain kinds of jobs “real,” but that wasn’t the whole story.  Was a “real job” one where you took your responsibilities seriously?  Not really, since I know a lot of people who don’t take their so-called “real jobs” seriously at all.  Or was it a job that leads to a bigger career?  That description falls short too, Continue reading »

Good Work Will Find Its Way: An Interview with Author Jonathan Face

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Jonathan Face is a computer programmer by day and the author of Catharsis, a horror novel set in a small New Hampshire town, which has over 28,000 downloads on Amazon. He’s also the author of The Remnants Part I and II, and most recently, Odd Tales, a collection of short fiction.  We grew up in the same small town of Warner, New Hampshire, and he graduated from the same high school as me a few years before I got there.  We met for the first time when I was back in the state and sat down at his parents’ dining room table to talk about minimum wage jobs, self-publishing, job security, and being open with your coworkers about your writing life. Continue reading »

Does Your Day Job Have Power Over You?

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A while ago I heard a guest on Kelly Carlin’s podcast talking about power—who has it, and more importantly, how we know who has it.  His point was pretty simple: the people who have power over us are the ones we’re not allowed to criticize.

Think about this for a bit: the people who have power over you are the ones you’re not allowed to criticize.

His counterexample was the government, because in America people criticize the government all the time.  When President Trump, say, talks about grabbing women, or looks the other way when the Saudis assassinate a dissenting journalist, or declares a national emergency because he couldn’t get boarder wall funding from congress, or even looks at the sun during an eclipse, journalists, writers, pundits, and random people on Twitter will all be there to criticize him, with their only consequence being some childish name-calling.  In these cases, people feel safe voicing criticisms knowing that speaking out won’t directly take away their livelihoods or affect their personal lives.  This suggests Continue reading »

How to Deal When Your Day Job Makes You Do Pointless Shit

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We’ve all been there: You’re sitting at your Day Job minding your own business when your boss or some coworker comes up and asks you to attend a boring meeting, fill out a pointless report, finish some useless project, or take on a new task that you know will absolutely 100% never benefit anyone or anything.  It’s times like this when you sit back, throw your clenched fists in the air, and voice that familiar lament we’ve all felt a million times:

Why do I have to do this????

Being handed pointless tasks at work reminds me of being in middle school when a teacher needed to fill a lesson period and would give us some hastily photocopied worksheet that didn’t even try to teach us anything or hone any skills.  Instead, the whole point of the worksheet Continue reading »

Does Your Job Make You Censor Yourself?

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  • Have you ever wanted to post online about something you were involved in but were afraid of how your job would react?
  • Have you ever kept a creative project secret from your coworkers even if you could openly talk about it with everyone else?
  • Do you worry that some aspect of your life outside of work clashes with your at-work persona in ways that could potentially cause a BIG problem?

All of these are feelings I’ve dealt with, and they’re a big deal. Continue reading »

Day Job Quandary: Is It Better to Be Bored or Busy?

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I go back and forth on this all the time.

I’ve had workdays where I had thousands upon thousands of things that needed doing, To-Do lists a mile long, people asking me every two minutes to do more things, and a string of deadlines that I absolutely had to get done no matter what.  And it sucked.

But then I’ve had jobs where there wasn’t nearly enough to do (or nothing of any real importance to do) so that I had to stretch out what little work I actually had over hours and hours as I faced near-interminable boredom and a fury of clock-watching that made me feel like I’d be stuck there forever with no escape.  And that sucked too.

This begs the question: Is it better to have a Day Job where you feel busy and overwhelmed, or one where you feel bored and underused? Continue reading »

I Worked as an Online Test-Grader for a Year and It SUCKED

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If you’ve been following this blog for longer than a year then you know that waaaaaaay back when I started in the fall of 2016 I was working at my part-time Secret Work-From-Home Day Job, which served as my main source of income while I edited the second and third drafts of my novel.

At the time I didn’t talk much about my Secret Work-From-Home Day Job on the grounds that revealing too much about my job or my employer could cause some confidentiality issues, or that I’d be found by company Google searches and they’d discover my decidedly noncomformist workplace philosophies.  In retrospect, though, the secrecy was probably unnecessary since not actually naming my employer or discussing actual work stuff kept me safe Continue reading »