Nobody's stopping me but me

I was having a particularly grumpy day this morning, about pretty much everything. One of those days when you just don't want to even get out of bed, never mind bounce around chirpily facing the world. Part of it was down to the fact the bathroom scales stubbornly refused to show me anything I wanted to see this morning, but the larger part is simply that I don't like my job very much.

Now lets be fair about this - I never like my jobs overly much - I am simply one of those people that fall firmly in the category of work to live, not live to work, but this one is taking me to a new low of dislike at the moment. I get up in the morning with absolutely no enthusiasm for it at all, and spend most of the day attempting to distract myself from how incredibly tedious I find it. Which I then feel guilty about for wasting my esteemed employers money.

To be fair to my job I earn a decent whack of money and have some fairly cushy benefits with it, but the internal politics drive me demented, the work doesn't hold my attention and frankly I have no connection to the business at all.

None of which would be so terrible if it wasn't for the fact that I can say the same thing about the last .... (counts up on fingers) .... 4 graduate jobs I've had. Which is all of the graduate jobs I've had. In the just-under-6 years since I graduated.


It's not that I don't like finance, as I do, I liked it enough to spend 3 years sitting 14 exams to qualify in it, after I finished my degree. The problem is that I don't like the companies. I've worked in practice and in industry, in large companies, small ones and global corporations. All I really want is to work for something I truly believe in that will keep me motivated, interested and engaged.

As I think I mentioned in my opening post what I'd really love to do is run a windsurfing centre somewhere on the coast, or have my very own boutique, even a chain of them, something involving one of my passions in life (those particular ones would be windsurfing, shopping and fashion if you hadn't spotted the obvious lol). But how on earth does anyone go about following their dreams? There's not exactly some course you can take to tell you how to do it. I'd need to get rid of my debts, raise capital, trust in my own finance knowledge and skills, and work like stink to find the people I'd need to help me make it work. And deep down I'm too scared of failure to try.

So in the meantime I'm stuck treading water in this job, trying not to scream at the perfect pointlessness of it all.

And now that today's naval gazing is over with, what of the rest of the week? Weeelllll - tomorrow I'll go to the theatre with friends in the evening, and I haven't been to the theatre in ages so that will be great. Saturday I'm running off to Oxford to meet one of my old uni housemates for shopping and dinner, and then Sunday will be mountain-biking - muddy, dusty and sweaty - awesome! Hopefully, I'll be able to use Monday to catch up with some friends over coffee and put the world to rights.

Sorry, not the most cheerful of posts overall, but I feel better for having a whinge. And I suppose I should be grateful I at least have a job in the current credit crunch!