ERNEST CAMILLERI - MaltaRightNow.com

| WORK |By Alison BezzinaYou’ve just landed the job of your dreams! They’vegiven you a great salary, a fantastic office, an absurdlist of benefits, and the title on your business cardwill get you into all the exclusive clubs on the island.There’s just one little glitch: every morning you wakeup feeling as though an elephant is sitting on yourchest, and your heart is threatening to beat itself out ofyour rib cage. I’m not referring to your typical Mondaymorning blues, as these affect all the Working Dronesand Cubicle Cave men and women who wake up withtheir clubbing hangover. No, I’m referring to the sortof angst that makes your head spin and your stomachchurn every single morning.If fighting the dread of dragging yourself to work isthe most exhausting activity of your day, by the endof it you are bound to be left feeling like a drowningrat. It’s so terrible that at the break of dawn you findyourself running through a list of silly excuses to avoidgoing to work. You start with the idea of calling in sick,but you know you’re not up for the doctor charadeagain, not to mention the awkward phone call to HR.You then consider taking emergency leave but youknow that your boss considers this the ultimate offavours and that you’d have to pay through your teethto even the playing field. No matter how you spin it,all your interim options turn into dust; and you find thatall you can do is to fantasise about quitting altogether.Just thinking about throwing in the towel shifts theelephant off your chest, and with enough roomto exhale, you visualise yourself writing a pungentresignation letter, aloofly handing it to your boss, andhead held high walking out of the front door into thewarm sunshine. You see this so clearly that you nowfeel as though you are sitting on top of the elephant,but as soon as the alarm goes off, you’re thrown backinto reality with the elephant sitting too comfortably onyour head!Jobs are us!As so happens with every responsible human being,right on the heels of that beautiful quitting vision comesan array of heavy thoughts that hold you back fromgoing through with it. All of the reasons that your brainmanages to drum up against quitting may sound toyou like the voice of sanity, offering perfectly goodarguments why it is in fact better to stay and endurethat bad job just a little longer. But if you look a littlecloser, you’ll realise that anything that wears you downon a daily basis is never worth sticking to. No matterhow good the pay is, and no matter how much youwill have to cut back, staying in a job that demoralisesyou to the point that you feel like a prisoner-of-warabout to be slaughtered is just as bad as staying in aL&s | august ’08 13