A "dream job"

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I was hired as a technical writer and assistant to the plant manager for $30,000 a year. They knew of my mental difficulties and assured me that in no way would anyone ever bully me there. I thought this was going to work out very well.

I was put in a stark, windowless little back room with only a telephone and a computer with internet so that no one would bother me there. All that was in this room was a chair, a desk, a telephone, and the computer. My putative job duties were to create and update a technical database for a door & window manufacturer that was to be the totality of all their parts, products, and manufacturing procedures. I am very good with meticulous and detailed tasks like that. But as I soon discovered, my job was in fact impossible because nobody knew what the parts, products, or manufacturing procedures really were and therefore I had no raw data to work with.

Furthermore, the database I was supposed to be populating with data was created as an in-house system by a crazed and drunken Russian self-taught computer programmer who barely spoke English and hated humans. Due to its numerous bugs and programming errors it simply did not work. Everyone around me was far too busy to stop their job in order to look anything up or fix anything; so, for example, I was told to get a concise list of the price for each screw and washer in a door, and upon approaching the purchaser he told me that it would take days for him to find information like that and he couldn't spare the time - EVER. Also, the price, model, and vendor would fluctuate frequently without notice for each part and there were thousands upon thousands of parts. Even when I was able to find out a price I had no way of keeping up with its frequently changing.

So there I sat in that empty concrete room, which was painted a dull yellow, without a single person speaking to me or even seeing me for days and days. Once or twice a week the plant manager, whom I was supposedly assisting, would suddenly barge in to ask me to do some other, usually unimportant and impossible, task. Other times they would merely ask me to photocopy a stack of papers because the receptionist was busy -- photocopying became my only successful task. The other 39 hours per week I was supposed to stay out of everyone's way and pretend to be working, though even that did not matter because I was alone in that room without anyone watching. Most days I went without seeing a single person or speaking one word to anyone.

I "worked" there for a little over a year until the company was sold. The internet was my only source of distraction from the empty yellow room. I ended up downloading many movies, games, and activities as well as spending 8 hours per day every day chatting online. Eventually I began to feel crazy and was unable to stop myself from having severe panic attacks and having to abruptly go home in the middle of the day. Most of the time no one noticed that I'd gone home just as they had never noticed that I was there. A lot of the time there wasn't even anyone around that I could notify of my leaving except for the accountant lady up in the office, who had nothing to do with me but would take a message about my absence in case anyone asked.

Eventually I began coming in and leaving at random times, or not coming in at all, sometimes not for several days in a row. I couldn't face my empty days in the yellow room and panicked daily. Most of the time no one noticed my random attendance, though they reprimanded me the very rare times they did notice it, but only because they noticed my car was not in its parking spot and for no other reason. It was as if I did not exist.

Well, at least no one bullied me.

Well that sucked. Sounds like solitary confinement.

Here's to a better future!

That would be a cool job, especially for thirty thousand a year! I would love that job! No one would be annoying me and I could go whenever I wanted, no one would notice me sneaking off to my car to go shopping at Gordman's or someplace. It sounds dreary the way you described it, but if you could find ways to have a lot of fun, that situation could be inspirational. I would bring stuff to do when I wasn't working. I would surf the www. If no one was really supervising me and I was just getting the paycheck every two weeks, what would it matter what I did?

I liked reading this. I might not relate to the exact things which happened but I can relate to work being stressful and that's why I liked it.

Knowing myself, I would have been watching videos or on the internet too, and also be stressed and likely have high anxiety from not knowing what to do and some other things you mentioned.

I did weekend tech support for a company... I was the only person in the department on Sat and Sun. I worked twelve hours shifts, but only got one or two calls each day. The calls only lasted about 5 minutes each. I also made more money in two days than I made in a full week at my previous job.

After a while, the being alone bothered me... Sorry just kidding; I loved it. Too bad they had to lay off almost everyone in IT after making some poor business decisions.

Yeah, I think I do fine in regards to just working by myself.

exotic specelist veternarian or zoological medicine specelist veternarian. I plan to be a meerkat specelist in the future.

Everything sounded great to me except for the color of the room. Would they have noticed if you painted it one day?

Either people responding to this post aren't thinking through the actual prospect of working this job or people really are much different from me.
This job you had sounds like the very definition of hell. Stuck in a little room with no real job to do but supposed to be there "working". That would drive me crazy (-er). If I'm not going to be doing something productive, which surfing the net for 8hr a day is not, I'd sooner be outside doing what I want to do and not getting paid anything. 30k a year sounds great, I'm sure alot of us in our situation and in this economy don't make that much, but what price sanity?

exactly.

I would not have lasted very long at all.

Or they would have found me curled up in a corner rocking.

Yeah, the job would stress me out in the sense of not knowing what to do and not being able to do what they asked. That's what I said.

People have looked down on me for my job. I've been asked if I ever wanted to do anything with my life. That I lack ambition. I've been told other things. I also have down time where I get to recuperate.

I find work itself to be stressful especially in dealing with people. Nauseatingly stressfull at times and sometimes I've had paranoia. I also find the structure of society and the economy to be stressfull . I'm glad I have a job. I figure anywhere else it would be even worse.

I see people on this site doing things I have never been able to do or handle very well. It seems they'd consider my job unbearably easy. Which is fine.

I felt that it was going to be great to be paid $30,000 to play on the computer at first, too. I even had special plans to improve myself by becoming bilingual in French by studying French language programs and chatting in French-speaking chatrooms online. Being bilingual in French would have added more than $10,000 to my salary at any future job. I also thought of several good books that I could write and become an author. I thought it would be clever of me to be paid $30,000 for writing my own books.

The reality was different from the plan. The reality was that I wound up in the corner, rocking.

I'm not sure why I was incapable of following my own plans for self-improvement but it was definitely not from lack of trying. It is often the case that plans which NT's find flawless fail to work for me. I am the smartest yet least effective person I know.

Are you my long lost sister? We are cut from the same stone

Being put into a situation like the OP described is called being marginalized. You serve no true purpose and then when you try to do the job you were given, YOU CAN'T! In fact, one person said they can't afford to spend the time it takes to get you the information you need - EVER!

This, at least to ME, qualifies as a form of WORKPLACE BULLYING!

Marginalized, true.

Served no purpose, false. Whomever was tasked with ensuring that Affirmative Action/EEO criteria were met was able to check off TWO categories at once - female and "differently enabled," minimizing the chances of a discrimination lawsuit. Somebody else was able to pad their status in the company, and their resume, by now being able to claim that they had "over 100" (or whatever number) of people under them. Whoever hired the Db developer was able to claim that the reason the Db wasn't working was the incompetent hired to populate it, rather than his decision to hire his brain-dead brother in law to create it. So, you see, she served the purpose of covering almost as many butts as Levis!

Molly - being in that type of situation sux, but you should take pride in the fact that so may people above you in the company depended on you to enhance their reputations!

Bitter? No, I'm not bitter. Cynical. That's the word you're looking for!

Sounds awesome. I want that job.
Right now I'm doing 3 days a week 12 hours a day. Not easy work like yours was but I'm making as much as when I worked part time 6 days and I too get to work alone and unsupervised.