Back in my days as an Intelligence Analyst I worked on a job called CITP - Counter Insurgency Targeting Program. The outside looking in it was a cool job. Hunting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like many things, if you are on the inside it is not nearly as cool. We were a bunch of dorks that had delusions of grandeur. One of these manifestations was a 24 hour watch.
When you are in a war zone it is critically important to have a 24 hour watch for the commanders and other decision makers to have access to the latest information to keep your troops safe.
This was not that.
The CITP Watch was in Charlottesville, VA. Roughly 6,000 miles away from anything even rounding up to hardship.
As contractors we were all voluntold for shifts a few times a year to supplement the government civilians that ran the watch. My shift started early morning and this older guy came in around 9 AM. He went to the white board and erased the 1756 replacing it with 1755 and declared to the room that is how many days left he has until retirement from the job.
This made me want to throw up.
How could someone who dislikes their job so much that they have a countdown clock but it is FIVE YEARS OUT.
Initial disgust changed to sympathy. I felt bad for this guy. We all had countdown clocks when I was in the US Army doing deployments to Iraq but these were 15 months or a year deployment. Most importantly, none of us really wanted to be there*. If given a real choice we would have been stateside.
This sorry son of a bitch chose every day to come into a job he hated for a $30K/year pension. Based on his BMI there was a strong possibility he wouldn't even make it to retirement. Why did he do it?
You meet a lot of these people throughout life. Putting up with something they dislike or hate. Sometimes it is noble - they hate it but it feeds their family and they CAN'T do anything else. Most of the time it is out of fear. Fear that it is not the job they hate but something more internal. Changing jobs would only prove it wasn't the job after all.
Chances are this guy retired and then took a contracting job in the same office working for the same people because the money was good ..... and still complained every day.
Sometimes having examples of what not to be is better than what to strive for. I never want to be that guy. Counting down the decades. He may have had the worst life out of anyone I have ever met.
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*We all volunteered for the US Army during a time of war. Of course that was the macro choice but we really couldn't get out of deployments unless we wanted to go to jail (or fake hemorrhoids).
