ghosthound

When I work Saturday nights into Sunday mornings at my job, I am usually the only one there besides my direct supervisor. I also rarely see him as he prefers to stay in his office and play on the internet via his smartphone. Because of this, it often feels like I have the place to myself for eight hours of silence.

My duties at this job on the night in question are really minimal. I have to "straighten things up." All this means is that I have to not burn the place down and walk around the confines of the warehouse once or twice to make sure the doors don't unlock themselves, somehow. Mostly I just curl up with a book and a pair of headphones and drown the world away while I get paid for it.

The problem with the place is that it's full of people's hate of it. It's got all three primary shifts and a customer-base that comes through it during the day. So you've got the slug-trail of dumb, shallow human resentment garbage that's left in the wake of an influx of customers in a place staffed during the day by listless, apathetic people who are paid too little to properly call it a living wage. The exception is people who have been there as long as me. We make barely a living wage.

That sort of collective dislike of a workplace builds up. Frustrations, self-loathing, hate of coworkers or management, the slow, sick, burn of realizing that your life's dreams are shriveling up by the day as this place eats you... I feel all of these things not from myself but from the emotional energy of everyone else that works there. It's oppressive. It's a heavy funk in the air that settles around my bones and depresses me.

As much as it depresses me, it does sometimes help me. It shows me what I can't become. I am at this third-shift job partly because it is convenient for me geographically and situationally and partly because it is an in-between job in a sense. It pays better than a job at a fast-food place and not as much as a job that could be properly considered a career. It allows me a fair income and the knowledge that nobody takes it seriously enough to bitch if I, say, write 2,600 words during a workshift on the laptop I brought in because fuck my job; I want to write.

Maybe that's just my excuse to be lazy. I'm not sure.

The problem comes back constantly to the negative energy of the place. It's renewed each day by the people who work there. I can't blame them for disliking it. It's just something I've got to soldier through, I suppose.