You Have So Much Potential

That’s when I knew I was cornered like a cockroach

Ever since I started looking for a job, my life has gone downhill like an unemployed freight train with a sh*tfaced conductor. I now realize everything was fine, hunky-dory, and A-OK.

I was living in a Jimmy Buffet song and didn’t appreciate my plush, vacant calendar and lost shaker of pink Himalayan salt.

I’ve been spending more time at the casino lately. It’s harder to get up in the morning. I resent having to do most everything — things I have no business resenting like play rehearsals and brushing my own teeth.

I’ve thought it over and truthfully I don’t want to work. The lone reason is money. When your sole reason to work is money, you feel like you don’t have enough (money).

My solution to feeling vaguely insolvent is to spend more money and do less work that could earn me money in the future, like finishing this book.

Then yesterday, someone sent an email asking if I wanted to do an interview for — you guessed it — a job with benefits.

Horrors. How shall I move forward when it’s clear I have the soul of a poet, the heart of a mercenary, and the work ethic of a ground sloth?

It’s Time to Do the Unthinkable

I’m not endowed with fantastic goal-setting genes. Somehow, I’ve inherited a type A personality and a complete lack of ambition. It’s annoying and I’d like to be done with it, but I’m stuck with a competitive nature and very little motivation.

I suspect a glitch in the hardware and/or software.

Apparently, I want to win but am unwilling to take steps A through Z to get the medal. I’m happy taking steps A through F, yet no one seems to appreciate how hard that is for me.

I recently wrote about IQ and how having one has been no friend of mine. I was often told I was smart and had a high IQ, which was code for:

“You should be doing better.”

The other toxic phrase they tossed around like pair of loaded dice was:

“You have so much potential.”

I hated the word potential for a long, long time. It’s still triggering because it belches a deeper, more sinister meaning:

“You aren’t okay the way you are.”

… nestled with:

“When are you going to be the person I think you should be?”

Enough already with the code phrases. I emailed the guy back, I think his name is Ed or Earl or Al, with a “yes” and a list of days and times I’m available as if I had to check my packed schedule.

The World Beyond the Shire

I recently ventured beyond the living room couch, where I began writing shortly after Covid whacked us all over the head with a new and alarming lifestyle.

I relocated to my own office, which I’ve been decorating in a combo of 1970s and blacklight decor. It’s swell on so many levels but that’s not why I moved there. Being in my own office is the culmination of adulthood. In a stunning reversal of lifelong office aversion, I’ve finally embraced my own space.

I’ve been to offices and, like the gray-faced cogs who trudge there daily, I adapted. At home, I never liked having one; I wanted space akin to an open vista after returning from workday drudgery — not another cell.

During Covid, or maybe because I like writing, I slunk into my low furniture to toil and made a nest.

Now I have to leave the office I’ve fashioned out of a cozy, thick carpet, chairs you’d never find in an office building, and an assortment of tweentastic glow-in-the-dark eye candy.

Where is the justice, I ask?

Ed (or Al) Will Never Hire Me

I’m only talking to Ed-Al for practice. Hopefully, he doesn’t read Medium.

The job is an hour and 24 minutes away, and it’s not a mindless highway shuttle but a curvy shoulderless rollercoaster along Scenic Highway 7 — past the Restoration Station Thrift Store, where I got those bitchin’ office chairs — so unless he offers me fully remote, it won’t happen.

I suspect his reason for calling is because I know things about Social Security, which is where Ed-Al is located Monday thru Friday. I immediately googled the office, reading reviews which are predictably either 5-stars (“They were nice to me!”) or 1-star (“The government hung up on me, rat-bastards.”)

I once worked for Social Security, so I babbled in bureaucratese in my cover letter and Ed-Al recognized a fellow scarred Jedi Knight.

It’s gotta be hard to find experienced people who have the first clue how the mind-boggling rules of Social Security coagulate, and I suspect the job may resemble working at a motor vehicle department.

Unhappy customers are like unhappy families, to paraphrase Tolstoy.

Each one is unique, in the sense that you cannot imagine how messed up, angry, and clueless the average American is.

The Government Is Perfect

I’m a loyal fan of the government because in my experience it is a predictable lifeform. Government workers do a lot of repetitive, thankless jobs that we, the public, do not appreciate.

Bureaucrats at all levels clean park bathrooms, deliver mail, dig ditches, and suppress an abiding and absolutely logical instinct to roll their eyes at your ignorant face.

When I labored at Social Security, I routinely explained the big picture — this is going to take a long time and you might not get what you want. Most people were grateful to know they had a 1 in 3 chance to get disability benefits, but a persistent minority wanted something government can’t give.

I’m talking about happiness, which as we know is the same as a regular, guaranteed paycheck for all eternity.

You might get your money back from the government — wages you paid them over a lifetime. They won’t hand it over quickly. You’ll be made to feel defective that you are receiving an “entitlement” by a stingy lizard politician who wields the word as if no one should ever be entitled to anything.

The bureaucrats will not care about your individual circumstances, because if they did they would go bonkers and spontaneously combust, eviscerating your minuscule chance of a benefit check.

Final Attempts to Remain Free

If I keep applying for jobs I don’t want, I’m likely to remain fully employed as a freelance writer and amateur interior decorator.

Is this my grifter strategy?

I’ll continue observing my erratic attempts to engage with the beast I call a Real Job, and maybe I’ll overcome the fear and dread that is currently stalking me like a crocodile wearing a clown costume, on a flimsy leash.

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Jean Campbell recently started her first Substack newsletter to laser focus on getting her book, City of Lies: A Street Hustler’s Omaha Journey published.