When You Feel Like You're Only A Cog In The Machine

Cog in the machine,

Cogging it up.

Sometimes while in employment for less than a month since the day of one’s hire, you’ve been thoroughly made to feel like a cog in the machine. You may be overworked and willingly do so while your colleagues give no shit about you and don’t even say hi or meet your eye. Oh right, you’re turning into a cog, a very sad cog, left behind at a corner desk to rot away, indefinitely. So how do you know when to leave or not (if you’re thinking of doing so?) and dropping that resignation. You knock your head and think again, what should I do?

Here’s some major boo boo flaws to take into consideration, if you are indeed at the very end of the line and contemplating pulling the plug:

1. Is your boss an absolutely deplorable jerk?

Maybe he or she is. And continuously annoy the shit out of you as asshole more than 20 days in a month. The truly evil savage Miranda Priestly. Some bosses are terrible persons putting on countless facades to appear decent, acceptable and nice. But they harbour selfish intentions and despise people who are less rich and successful, as well as being not as educated as them. King, Queen exploiting narcissists building their colossal empire. After performing your due diligence at work, your boss do not properly thank or appreciate you in any humanly-expected way. On top of making you feel like you don’t mean a thing to them and is replaceable by a click of a mouse.

A long queue awaits this job opportunity and staff members are subordinate pieces of flesh. All your best ingenious ideas seem average and common sense, as though someone else could always do better than you, and so your wages are undeserved. In fact, they would rather not pay the job you’ve done in their deepermost cheapo-est hearts. If they are grateful for your presence in some projects, they would take you out for lunch or dinner, but it’s not special - just any low-price point diner that comes to mind.

AND, of course, on even the fairest of days when nothing went wrong - these bosses place themselves on a pedestal high horse in a condescending throne of authority like you owe them. Yes, you owe them. When you have just been doing your job everyday on time (well not on time all the time), but you do your best in most things. Right, so is it your acme to quit? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

2. Is your workplace environment an unpleasant venue to work in?

Functioning offices should be budding spots that not only are well ergonomically designed, but have good access to toilets, water supply, safety entry and exit. But not for some offbeat, eccentric office settings. Employees may be tasked to sit at certain designated zones with frequent exposure to noises (gossip included) and other hazards leading them to become mentally affected by the commotion, which can hamper work productivity. Computers, softwares, stationery and tools are always limited or out of order and a fix takes eons to arrive.

In addition, if you are not even assigned a desk or a locker to secure your belongings, you would have to carry all your stuff with you every single work day (especially if you are a Customer Service personnel). You would tend to feel lesser of yourself, like a manual labourer not even entitled to a little accommodating space in a job. Worse still, the air-conditioning often screws up and you are left to work out in a sauna by yourself with wonky dusty-rusty fans. When the water container runs out at the dispenser, no one ever initiated replacing it. By the way, the concrete ceiling is on the brink of collapse. Good old fuck’s sake. This doesn’t seem like fair-trade practice.

3. Are your colleagues the suckiest persons alive on this planet?

This is one of the major dealbreakers for members of staff in even the largest of corporations. Your co-workers are SHIT-ASSHOLES. They don’t care, at the very least they don’t. Zero fucks given when they do nothing but watch Chinese dramas made in China during office hours on paid company money. While frequently, very upsettingly not doing their supposed jobs like crediting your salary on goddamn time. Conniving, they simply refuse to apologise for their honest mistakes when reproached in screwing up the slightest. Their horrific excuses and attitudes in negotiating their business out of anything remotely possible when they should be taking charge on point gives you high functioning anxiety and you have to be on guard all the fucking time.

You always have to be on your toes to suavely pull off the Katniss Everdeen defence in fending these shitsos off shirking their responsibilities on you chucking their shabbiest note. On top of them questioning your self-worth in the company because they don’t think you are even worth being nice towards (in their lack of empathy). These asses indulge in bullying as they are ultimately mired in their own agony and misery. Oh, did they forget your payslip after forgetting your salary payment too? These completely sunset cop-out motherfuckers tick the hella out of you into shoving their heads into sharks.

hi, i’m just a lego

4. Pay and perks are the lowest in the market

Yes, the company hands out the lowest wages in the market and do not offer competitive renumeration packages for painstakingly hardworking employees. All the more, making you feel like a cog in the machine which can be replaced this very minute. What about the benefits? Nothing praise-worthy or raveable. Only 7 days of annual leave and you are made to work like a bull regardless if your parents or relatives passed on. You find yourself in miserable, insufferable situations of taking regular non-paid leave while trying to stay out of trouble and gossip spice. Being nice sometimes just doesn’t pay.

5. When you are taking on responsibilities outside your pay grade

If you are doing more than 10 people’s workload duties, some of which are outside your experiences and qualifications, you may have to ask yourself what the fuck are you doing here. You have been cluster-fucked. Oftentimes, some work just don’t measure up to success and you are being handed tasks more than you can operate. There is a huge structural disorganisation going on, and you aren’t certain if the things you do would help to change anything. Obviously, some responsibilities require a manager’s decision, but there isn’t even a manager and that tends to overlap into what you perform. Shit, there is no guiding anchor to carry the weight. You are that cat below winging whatever comes in your way while clinging tightly to a pathetic tree in a billowy tornado. Good luck.

shit’s happening.

6. When the organisation mottos are a complete fluff

Let’s say, this company A is positioned to carry out XX promises and deliver them all in their products and services. However, they never live up to their standards and their name. You begin to question the integrity of the business and it’s inefficient processes that made it so vulnerable to criticism by the public (and even their staff). You wonder why the company’s values are steeped in paradox and contradictions, and never found the reason to iron out it’s position no matter if someone breakthrough tried to contribute to its success. For example, if a beauty company mentions that their facial mask removes all blackheads after use especially printing that truth out on the product label, the mask still just doesn’t do anything right at all and maybe even triggers more spots than necessary. The mask gets a ridiculously poor review by beauty assessors and soon the general beauty population shuns the product company for being a liar. You as an employee for this beauty store will be seriously in twenty feet hollows because after 15 years the product is still stocked on shelves and more people are complaining. How do you press on with even the best marketing?

7. There is absolutely no future for you to be working here

After a long stint at a company, you find yourself still doing the same old stuff from 5 years ago with about similar wages, and no talks about promotion. So where’s the promotion? Where is the meaning in you toiling for the sake of growth in your worn out shoes? The tenure you’ve spent here is a broken clock gear-tripped since antiquity. However, you, the old you just came to a halt in the tracks. In sorry state and begging to get a better role for the dedication, loyalty, above and beyond commitment you’ve easily far outweighed yourself. Years of you being competent have gone to waste because you could have done something else, elsewhere in a company that loves and values you more.

OH, YOU THINK. I’M SO FUCKED.

Should I quit? Hell yeah.

(That said, if you have 3 kids, 2 requiring college education while yourself burdened by mortgage and loans, just do the fucking job and go home by end day.)

Should You See A Career Coach? I Did

By now, we would have already known that there is no free good lunch. Didn’t we already know?

Our late father Lee Kuan Yew reiterated that nothing is for free. Not always free. Gotta bust our kicks doing what it takes to survive on our own in this cosmopolitan jungle. Mantra of meritocracy and self-sufficiency so mighty to our economy runs deep and engineered into our mundane lives. We study hard (sorry I hadn’t) the day we were in school and our parents send us for enhanced tuition classes believing we could stay on top of the rat race. At the end of our education or lack of thereof, we were supposed to land good jobs. Or attempt to find at least a decent one. Really I thought I could.

As long as we are eating, breathing and kicking, we need to work and somehow take that call from the office. Folks less entrepreneurial, find the company who will take you in. Not so fortunate going on the extended rollercoaster ride in securing a job? Why, why. People blame them for their incompetence and lack of social circles. Alas, they sought better and consulted a career coach considering those career guidance advertisements. In Singapore, the institutions NTUC e2i and WSG Careers Connect will hear you out. Everyone knows the philosophy behind, ‘some advice could help and shed light on candidates’ shortcomings”. Jobseekers could leverage on professional coaching expertise to improve their potential. Taking advantage of the career resources and job opportunities available by the career centers are ways to elevate the chances of job hunting. Fingers crossed. 

<- …oh, Ned Stark. Need you not remind me

Don’t do it as though your life depended on it.

If career advice is what you are looking for, dig deeper to know yourself before you enter that coaching door. Popped by NTUC e2i at the Devan Nair Institute of Employable and Employability on a weekday afternoon. Wanted some opinions on landing a suitable job because like many others, I wanted to be wiser at job hunting. The appointment visit was kind of all right and not bad, but to some others, possibly not a necessity. Basically, they set you up with a career coach at the reception if you did not have a reserved online appointment. Grumpy receptionist did not bother much to entertain but when you made your point of your visit so critical she will plot your particulars into the wait register.

Cordial male career counsellor in his 40s, assessed my resume and gave me some tips on how to go for interviews. Before that, he spoke on the strategy to be shortlisted for interviews by suggesting a thorough resume edit with the aid of several textbook resume templates. Wow. Every resume, although a change in formatting and tone, all look the same to me. They were supposed to be different. He recommended to provide accurate and short descriptions on my profile under one page. Neat and concise. This is great. I admit, at times, drafting out a decent work about myself in a single-paged document is tough craft. He branched into detailed talks. Reviewed my career ambition. Enlightening advice on reconsidering that myth of finding the “dream job”. According to this guru, there ain’t such thing as a dream job. No dreams.

Was given market advice on the kind of jobs I was interested in and would be a good fit. Much talk about concepts, diagrams, the MBTI personality test I should be aware to know thyself and job fit. Then again, I’ve seen some of these somewhere on the great ol’ Internet. Could tell the coach refrained from using social comparisons of myself to individuals in similar circumstances. Not sure why. If you would read his in-betweens, you feel the pauses in his words to think and rethink over his explanations. Maybe my profile was average to begin with. And he didn’t know what to do with it.

So I inquired about the acclaimed Professional Conversion Programme (PCP).

This was the bulk of my purpose in seeing a career coach. Curious mousey had to know if it is possible to jump ship into another field vastly different from your previous occupation. Reply I got was a generic positive. He said to apply for the program, and did not mention in-depth specifics about the transferrable skills candidates could leverage on to apply for a change in industries. There wasn’t much word on the fact that if you did not have mirroring diplomas or degrees in terms of the sectors and industries you were applying for, you would most probably be rejected (I rang up some numbers to confirm about this). I was still lost in the answers at this point.

At the culmination of the coaching, I specifically asked if it is possible to land a job quickly through openings offered by WSG. The career coach mentioned that the applicant has to land those opportunities by themselves even if those were available (according to their own merit and effort). Meaning, the job candidate has to make use of those resources, contact the right place, register for them online and in forms, send those resume documents, wait to see if shortlisted for interview (or not). No guarantee.

Is career coaching really that necessary? Most of which were feedback I didn’t quite need.

Take this career coaching as another form of experience out of the well, many other experiences life puts you through. Don’t be blinded by advice the coaching gives you because if you are going to literally swallow everything, it can affect your self-esteem and you negatively spiral into self-doubt. Don’t put your hopes up in career coaching if you are planning to go for one. Remember, every job candidate is different and there is no one failsafe method for anyone in the path to employment. Coaches may be veterans from known industries or ex-directors in MNCs. But you have to know yourself better than they do. Start believing in yourself!