Defined, drudgery is “Tedious, menial, or unpleasant work” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition).

No employer would ever incorporate this term into a help wanted ad, even if it was the term that fit the description of the position so well that the person reading it would instantly know what was incorporated. Mindless, mind numbing, spirit crushing acts of stapling pieces of paper together, or taking pieces of paper and putting them into alphabetical order, or of course, doing something with those pieces of paper that involved a copy machine…acts where the motion is repetitive, the skill level fit for a 3rd grader, and the ones that make you question why it is that you elect to put yourself in such a position where such things are required.

It’s a given that every work position will have some elements of drudgery. The higher up one gets, the less drudgery there is to perform, and the more interesting the drudgery is as well. The president of a company will rarely be caught stapling pieces of paper together for hours, but what replaces it I hope s/he finds no less tedious.

I took an extended vacation from the world of office work. A friend of mine years ago looked at it this way-he was going to take his retirement in his 20s to mid 30s and enjoy all the benefits of retirement while he was still young and able, and then following that time he was going to enter the world of work and continue along that route as every useful American is supposed to. I kind of followed along those lines, and it’s only been the last couple of years that I’ve returned to this world we call work. This is part of the reason I’m in a position more suited for someone just out of college rather than someone in their mid-30s. However, with an economic situation that is so preposterous-the jobs in Honolulu pay less than what they did when I consciously LEFT the corporate world 12 YEARS ago in San Francisco and the rents here NOW are among the highest in the country. It’s quite sad really, as the rich get richer and the poor struggle more and more just to stay alive. Regardless, it is what it is, I’m here within it, and I am accepting of the fact that my sabbatical from work has put me in a low level job now, even though it’s pretty far below my capabilities. My mother worked in an office where she had to hire people, and she warned me that the words “self employed” (aka all the time I was not working in an established firm of business) are usually synonymous with “kiss of death” to most hiring officers. So in some ways, I knew what I was in for.

My opportunities for advancement here are few-this is an engineering firm, and I am not an engineer. My responsibilities are few, which I like, but most of them are sorely lacking in any sense of real usefulness, which makes me feel like a drone.

I know I’m far from alone here, and to all of you out there who are spending the majority of your day today stapling or copying or doing some other menial and seemingly worthless task, I guess try to take comfort in the fact that you are, by far, NOT alone. I fantasize what would happen if we all skipped town one day; would the companies implode because their senior executives don’t know how to operate a stapler, or a copy machine, or a coffee machine? All of our technology that has removed us from the base needs of survival (acquiring food, clothing, and shelter to start) has ultimately gotten us here, sitting on our asses doing activities that are so tedious as to perhaps cause brain damage. But on the plus side, as long as I’m here APPEARING to be busy, I can often do pretty well whatever I want. So I suck up and get the drudgery done so I can work on things more personally fulfilling. It IS just a job, after all…