EPTEver watch horrible bosses? Sometimes I feel like puling off something like that. My boss is a 50 year old Chinese man who has the typical Asian parent syndrome, except, its at work. Simply put, he does not show any approval and only points out the mistakes. Positive reinforcement is dead with this guy. So that's one tough thing to deal with when your work environment is always full of negativity and the bar being set at perfection. He hired me part-time after I volunteer'd for him for two years straight as a student research at my university. It's the least he could do right? Put me on some pay. Did I mention he brought in a random undergraduate girl first to take the job, only to have her not show up for her first day? Regardless, I did not mind working for him because I needed the money, I was going for a publication, and I was in limbo between undergrad and grad school. He hired me a year ago, with the pretense that after a month of work part time (and volunteering half time so essentially working full time for half cost) he would assess whether to hire me full time. It's been a year and he hasn't taken any steps to hire me full time. I was ok with it because the half time volunteering was all in research for a publication in Nature Medicine, a prestigious journal in the medical community.
So now after a year, after bending over and taking all his shit up my ass. A year of wondering if I would ever get that full time pay. A year of constant criticism, and seemingly unending disapproval. I finally snapped. The previous week he had handed me the inventory logs for a -80 freezer in our lab. The shit was on printed out excel charts. The shit wasn't even on the computer. I should mention that the previous month I had spent converting his on-paper ordering database and moved it into a well organized access file. A week into organizing through hundreds of papers logging over 2,000 biological samples, using my computer ingenuity I converted the excel file into an access database, made filtered reports and printed them out for him. The first draft. I bring it to him, he points out all the mistakes and calls me incompetent and "untrustable" with this task. Fuck that, but I suck it up, take it away and fix the mistakes. He walks into the office two days later and asks to see the inventory. I had the mistakes fixed, yet somehow he manages to find one little detail that isn't a mistake, but doesn't fit his expectations. No good job, nothing, just criticism. I had enough I blew up on him. I told him that the previous 4 employees that left the lab on negative terms with him. Told him to find someone else to do the job, I had enough.
Being a spineless old fool, with a huge ego, he just laughs it off and thinks he's all in the right. I didn't show up to work today and tomorrow I have off because of the MCAT I am taking in the morning. I am writing this as a ways to vent all the frustration I have had built up in the last three years with this man. But also I really feel like sharing this experience with people because it is a huge contrast to the weekend I spent working at MLG at Anaheim.
Working at MLG Anaheim, I got paid pretty much the same rate, about 10 an hour. But the work environment is worlds different. People actually use the words "good job". I know, from a realistic perspective, working as ticket booth employee at a gaming convention for one weekend is pretty much a dead end unless you can apply yourself to other aspects of the event and climb up the ladder. Where-as working at a research lab as an aspiring physician, getting published in medical journals and eventually, with a bit of luck, making 6 figures. Obviously being a doctor is the better choice but now I am beginning to understand the flip side: sanity. Is my sanity and happiness really worth working in medicine? I mean, this job is just a tangent to everything that is to come. Applying to schools, the MCAT, and 4 more years of schooling with 2 years of residency (where you are everyone's bitch for 2 years) and over 100k in loans.
Sometimes I wish, I pray to God, that a miracle would happen and a door would open for me to change the path that I set 5 years ago in college. Can a 23 year old, with a B.S in biological sciences do something in the field of ESPORTS? I do not see why not. Bioware was founded upon a group of doctors who put down their practice to start a game developing company. I'll keep my eyes and ears open. Maybe something will come along for me.
