“Why do you care…

August 5th

… it's only a job, and you seem to be the only one who cares, and why care if no one else cares about it”. A coworker said it to me this morning after I let a long sigh (and I might have cursed a little under my breath) while reading an email. I do care. I do care about a lot of things, and my job is one of them. And I don’t even particularly like my current job. Come to think about it — I don’t like and wouldn’t like any job or any work for money, since it interferes with my free time. And I wish I had those eight extra hours a day for my things that don’t bring money but make me happy.

But since working is still unavoidable, once I am in the office, I care about what I do. I care about working the right way, taking care of my responsibilities, and getting the job done. Since my work requires close cooperation with a lot of different people from different departments in my organization and from people from outside entities, if they don’t care about what they do — that makes my work that much more difficult and sometimes simply impossible. And it seems that a lot of them don’t care. And don’t care not only about the work at hand, but also don't care about not caring per se.

That is usually seen through a sheer lack of competence in what they do. And I am saying that I am fully competent in what I do, but at least I don’t announce my lack of competence to the whole world. If I don’t know something — I will look it up and learn, or fake it until it is done one way or another, or delegate it to someone else. Here I see people without any basic understanding of what we do and how it is supposed to be done. People do not care about showing incompetence and making work so much more difficult for others. And making others work harder or do extra work just to be able to close a matter at hand.

And I don’t plan to stop acting about what I do. I guess I will be ranting here about it once in a while since this apathy is so ingrained and overwhelming everywhere I look that I don’t see any change forthcoming. Especially when the example comes from the top — in the shape of a corporate not caring about employees with a lack of guidance and clear goals and widespread reductions in personnel that already started.