The Soul-Crushing Feeling of Having a Bad Job

A work horror story.

It’s been just over a year since I wrote my last article about working, and a lot has changed since then. For one, I have changed jobs. Unfortunately, January 2022 me had no idea just how maddening this job would become by the end of the year, or how desperate January 2023 me would be to ditch the place. It seems I had high hopes then. Of what? Of having a normal job, I suppose.

I’ve gone into detail about some of what lead to me making a mad dash to find a new job in a YouTube video, but really it boils down to two things: the fact that I was made to do things wildly outside of my job description, and the fact that my former employers just seemed to have no idea how my job functioned.

For some background, my last gig was as a Videographer for an education nonprofit. To be clear — I don’t think the “nonprofit” aspect of this company had anything to do with what made working there bad. As I understand it, nonprofits (that is, 501(c)(3) designated companies) operate more or less like for-profit companies, the only real difference here being the source of their funding and the fact that the company didn’t charge a dime for the services they provided.

Over time, aside from stock-standard videography, my duties included photography, social media management, a smattering of graphic design, copyediting, copywriting, and farming. Yes, you read that one right. This one requires a little bit of backstory.

Aside from the usual education-adjacent stuff my former employer did, they also ran a farm. This, on its own, isn’t too crazy. Around the time I joined the company, they were building up an entire agricultural wing and hired two very dedicated, very passionate professionals to run it. They had big plans on what to do with this agricultural wing — stuff that would have been amazing, if it ever came to fruition. However, in the fall of 2022, things started falling apart.

For I-don’t-want-to-get-sued reasons, I’m going to have to be a bit vague here, so bear with me.

As part of this agricultural wing, my former employer was going to begin outreach to new farmers to provide support in the areas of business and also the science of farming. A big kickoff was planned for the spring of 2022. For reasons that I legitimately can’t remember, the date of the kickoff kept getting pushed back, and was eventually held in the summer.

The kickoff itself went just fine — I was in charge of recording the whole thing and eventually editing together the footage. It was a unique experience for me because I’d never recorded a live event before, but good and useful experience nonetheless.

But then, a ball dropped. Not long after the kickoff, one of the very dedicated, very passionate individuals serving as one half of the entire agricultural department just…up and left, for reasons I was not and am still not privy to. And when I say “up and left,” I mean it — I only realized they were gone when I tried to email them one Monday about something related to the kickoff and the email bounced.

Now, to be fair, my former co-worker was with child at the time, so it’s entirely possible they just went on maternity leave and decided not to come back. However, given how dedicated and passionate they were, I assumed that after their child debuted onto the world, they’d be right back in the fields, tending to plants with an infant snugly wrapped to their chest. That’s how passionate about agriculture they were. Whether or not they left by choice or was forced to leave is unclear. Again, I am not privy to the reasons. All I know is that after they left, things started to fall apart.

One or two weeks after the kickoff, there were a series of courses planned. However, much like the kickoff, the beginning of these courses was continuously pushed back, again for reasons that I have forgotten. They were supposed to begin in July. They actually began in September. After a gap of three whole months, it’s kinda hard to keep the hype up, and for our first session, of the nearly 200 people who had signed up, 10 showed up for the virtual course.

And then, in October, with two or three courses left in the “semester”, yet another ball dropped: our remaining dedicated, passionate agriculture specialist also left, but this time gave us about a week’s warning. To once again be fair, they were also with child. I guess our office was on a ley line or something. But, this time they made clear this was not maternity leave. They weren’t coming back.

So now, there’s a problem: the two people with the most knowledge on how to run the farm are now gone. The company’s CEO had knowledge as well, of course, but now they were the only person actually tending the farm.

Before, when I’d make the 1-hour road trip out to the farm, I’d just be snapping pictures and video of my other coworkers doing what they did. That was my job, after all. However, there were crops to be harvested that upcoming fall, and one person to do it.

Previously, my boss was somehow able to rope in my non-agriculture coworkers to do the tending — people whose duties were primarily running the education side of things, like making lesson plans and, y’know, teaching children. Why they agreed to it, I’m not sure. A chance to do something different, I suppose. I did like being out there when I wasn’t made to pick vegetables — fresh air, nature, the ground beneath my feet, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous shots of rows of collard greens, verdant trees, and fluffy clouds. The pictures I’ve taken out there are some of my favorites, and I was really able to flex my creative muscle when I was out there. What’s not to like?

Well, eventually, the contracts of the seasonal employees who were hired to teach for us during the school year ended. And — a detail I hadn't mentioned yet — this company consisted of just six full-time employees, one of whom managed to never get roped into doing any farming (lucky them). So now, there were less hands to do the tending, and the rest of us became de facto farmhands.

For a time, I was willing to just grin and bear it. After all, I was still getting pictures and video — as was my job — while I was out there.

One day, though — Monday, September 12th to be exact, according to a journal entry from the following day — I walk into the office and am informed, the minute I set my things down, that we were going to the farm. Like, immediately. For a half second I panicked because clearly I’d forgotten that they told us that during our Friday meeting. But then, that half second ended, and I realized they hadn’t told us that during our Friday meeting. Or sent an email. Or a text. Or a call. I found out we were going minutes before we left. I had projects to work on that day — you know, stuff that related to my job. Stuff that had deadlines (although, as time went on, it became clear that a deadline was a mere suggestion to them).

Thankfully, I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and always keep a pair of boots in the trunk of my car. But if I hadn’t? I’d be out in the mud, slinging hay in whatever nice outfit I’d convinced myself to wear that day. Because I didn’t know we were apparently going to be farming that day, I made the mistake of wearing short sleeves. The hay bales we were slinging were damp and had mushrooms growing out of them which ended up giving me a bit of a rash on my left arm that thankfully went away after a couple days. Needless to say, I was a bit upset about it. I still am, if I’m being honest, because I know whatever rube they get to replace me will likely be roped into doing that as well. However, by the time I was on my way out, they were in the process of hiring people to replace the ones who had left — 6 months later.

November and December of last year, we made frequent trips to the farm because our crops were doing so well. (Cool tip for anyone wanting to grow collard greens — they are incredibly frost resistant.) Most of the time, I was able to get by only collecting maybe a basket’s worth of veg before being able to get pictures and video (my job) of the people we were donating produce to. One time, however, after I harvested my basket’s worth and made my way to where my equipment was, I was very lightly scolded by my other boss to keep harvesting instead of snapping pictures (which was, lest we forget, my job).

December 21st was the final harvest of the year, and on that day, I was particularly fed up with the situation. It was the day before our Christmas break (a Christmas break that the CEO, gracious leader that he was, told us in no uncertain terms that we should be thankful for because we were getting a week and a half off — paid! — and that other employers don’t do that, and that he takes care of SO well, despite this break not really being a “break” because we still had to work from home) and I wanted nothing more than to not be dragged out to this fucking farm anymore. After hours of squatting in the cold, muddy ground to harvest more greens, I stood up, surveyed my surroundings, and thought to myself: what the fuck am I doing here?

Like yeah, at this point we’d given away several dozen pounds of fresh (and apparently very delicious) produce to a disadvantaged community in a rural area, but…this isn’t my job! I’m a videographer, not a farmer. And while I am most certainly not saying that one of these things is better or more valuable than the other, I was hired to do a specific thing. There was no mention of doing anything like this in the job description, or during my two interviews, or in the weeks after I’d started, because if there were, I most certainly would not have taken this job. To me, it’s like if a hospital handed one of its nurses a bucket of shingles and some tar and asked them to fix the roof. Someone with a completely different set of specialized skills is supposed to do this, not me.

I can’t fully articulate my incredulity in that moment. Sometimes, I wonder if maybe I was overreacting that day, mad for no reason. However, I have to take a step back and realize that this probably wouldn’t be happening if the company was actually run properly.

In hindsight, the reason why so many things have fallen (and continue to fall) apart at that company was because the CEO insisted on being in charge of everything — kinda hard to do when you’re running an after school program, a basketball team, a farm, and are also trying to open a whole entire charter school. These things, individually, require a lot of care and attention. Things that, in any normal company, would be delegated to department heads who specialized in these things and took care of tasks that eventually would reach the CEO for final approval, but only after most of the kinks have been worked out. But alas.

I spent the better part of my Christmas break with the entire lower half of my body sore. On Christmas day, after opening gifts with my family, I applied for several jobs, mentally preparing myself for another months-slog through the trenches of LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed, where AIs will toss my résumé into File Thirteen before a person can even look at them. 2023 was going to be the year I left this place behind, I promised myself.

Being made into a farmhand was one thing, but I think the most maddening part of my former job was when I was actually doing my job — you know, the videography — it very often felt like it wasn’t taken seriously, and that they just sorta… didn’t know how it worked.

When I started in August of 2021, I was given a number of educational videos, each ranging from 15–30 minutes, to edit. I won’t lie and say I have the turnaround time of a Marvel VFX slave, but I do think I am quite the speedy editor when the occasion calls for it. So, once I was given a hard drive with all the projects on them (or rather, a collection of hard drives because the footage was not very organized), I churned out three of them in 2 months, doing a couple shoots to add some additional footage where some was missing. Eventually, in October, I figured we could release one video a month, starting in November, and have enough to have a consistent release schedule until April. In the meantime, we could schedule and record more to fill out the year.

Of those three videos I completed first drafts of in my first two months there, only two of them have been completed and posted to the company’s YouTube, a year and a half later when by now, there should be at least 17 — especially considering we were actively shooting more during that time.

As stated before, the CEO insisted on having final say on everything, and that meant being in on revisions as well — a concept that is fine on the surface, before you realize that this person has a million things on their plate and it might be days or weeks before I got notes on drafts. And let me tell you, this revisions process is not something I’d wish on my worst enemy.

When videos were reviewed, all of us — 8 people in the office in total — would gather around a TV and watch it. For every draft. Including ones with only minor changes. So not only was this process long and drawn out for no reason, we were also stealing time from other people who, realistically, didn’t need to watch it.

I had a sort-of wakeup call about this in June of 2022. By then, I was resigned to my fate of molasses-paced projects and spent the abundant free time I had on Wikipedia or working on screenplays. After all, a steady paycheck is a steady paycheck and by then, my fingers had not yet been made to graze a velvety collard. One of my co-workers, a contracted educator, lamented to me how unfair it was that none of my stuff could get finished in a timely manner. I also thought it was unfair, but I guess hearing someone else agree — unprompted — made me realize just how unfair it was.

As part of the growing agricultural wing, they decided to make a series about the history of agriculture in our state. We had a series of interviews with agriculture and food historians lined up and, yet again, if this ever came to fruition, it would have been amazing. Unfortunately, there was little planning done beforehand, so we were left with a collection of loosely related interviews and no real plan for them.

Here, I got to flex my producer muscles and decided to organize it into a multi-part series with each episode representing a certain timeframe, past-to-present style, and spent lots of time creating an outline, writing up scripts, and extracting different parts from each interview and organizing them into their respective eras. I was very proud of the work that I put in to try to make something cohesive despite the lacking direction I was given.

However, when it came time to actually put all of it together, our CEO decided there weren’t any interviews with Indigenous Ag historians (a very fair assessment) and that we should wait before assembling everything and schedule some. However, given that things moved at a snail’s pace there and projects were often forgotten about, these interviews were never scheduled and the series hung in limbo for months.

This problem became especially frustrating my final month there. Over the Christmas holiday, I was tasked with creating a monthly release schedule for our educational web series (for the second time), and I did so, choosing videos that were the closest to completion to be released first so I could have time to edit together the other ones. The video that was to be released first was more or less completed by my standards, and just needed final review. I think you can figure out where this is going.

If not, I will tell you. This particular video’s latest draft had been posted for review back in September. It sat untouched for five months before we revisited it again, where I assumed that we’d maybe just have to find a couple more pictures to make it visually interesting, insert end credits, and make sure the closed captions were correct. Things that would take a day, max.

What I was told was that we’d have to rewrite and reshoot the intro. In what was essentially the 11th hour. It was at that point that I realized that this monthly release schedule was never gonna happen.

So, I rewrote the intro. It took a week before it was reviewed. I reshot the intro with the approved script. They decided they wanted a different script. I wrote a different script, and then reshot the intro for the second time. They decided that they wanted to bite the style of a certain very popular news program on network television. So, I watched the intro of it, realized we didn’t quite have the equipment to do it, but still figured out a way to make it visually similar, and shot it that way. By now, we were more than halfway through January. It sat for several days before they looked at it again, and decided they wanted it done a different way — the way I had originally shot it. So, I just replaced it with the old version. At this point, there’s now one week left in the month of January. My proposed release date of the 20th had gone by. And, by then, I had accepted a new job, and was past the point of caring if they had finally figured out what the fuck they actually wanted.

So, now I’m out of that place. After a year and six months, does this Gen Z-er still dream of labor? Yes. It’s gonna take a lot more than one shitty job to get me to write off working completely, especially when I think still my line of work is the coolest thing on the planet. When I was actually doing videography work — being behind a camera, writing scripts, being knuckle-deep in Premiere and After Effects — I was happy. Surprise surprise, working for a company where you aren’t taken seriously and where your own boss — the one who hired you to do the job you are doing — doesn’t think you can do your job to a successful degree when you have been doing so for several months really sucks the joy out of things.

A little parting gift my old boss gave me was some advice for when I went to my new job working at a local news station: (paraphrasing) “they aren’t gonna care about your input there, so don’t bother trying to give it like you did here.” Nah, dude. YOU didn’t care about my input. In my position at my new job, I’ve been caught off guard once or twice because I was told that the direction to go with the way I shot and edited things would be my decision. I would finally have some agency.

After one week of working at my new job, I got the immediate impression that the people there actually give a shit about me being there and are looking forward to what I have to contribute, a feeling that was lacking at my old job. Not only that, but one thing my former boss seemingly failed to realize was that I wouldn’t have to constantly give my input if I was ever given clear direction.

I’ve learned a lot working there. None of it was related to the art of film or video making, but lessons are lessons. Something that my mom remarked when I tearfully regaled her with my occupation frustrations over my last few months at my old job was that I was so unbelievably happy to get that job.

I can remember when I got that call — I was so excited, I forgot most of what my soon-to-be new supervisor told me and excitedly galloped into my living room back home: “Mom! I got the job!”

Since I began writing this article, I found a job. It’s not in the most ideal city, but it’s exactly what I want to be doing, what I spent 3 ½ years and put myself in over $60,000 of debt to learn how to do, so it’s a start. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I finally get to start my life, and that I didn’t have to perpetuate a grift to do that.

This excerpt is the final paragraph in my first article in this series. My mom was right. I was genuinely relieved to find a job and “start my life,” as I put it. But over time, the excitement was sucked out of me. I started dreading going to work — the weekly slog, as I regarded it — because I knew each week would be the same old-same old routine of getting nothing done.

Is having a job where you get paid to sit and wait a good thing? To some, maybe. During this time, I was able to write two feature-length screenplays because I was doing so little in between waiting for notes, and I ended up collecting a tremendous amount of tidbits from my time idly browsing Wikipedia, so that must count for something. Still, I never liked sitting with my thumb up my ass doing nothing. It was creatively stifling.

Although I get a little mad every time I think about my old job, I am trying to move on. There are a lot of exciting opportunities for me at my new job that I’m looking forward to. I’m still figuring out what exactly it is I want to do long-term, but that will come with time.

My future is bright — and free of collard greens.