At loose ends

Okay so I'm sitting here at just before 11 pm on a Wednesday night, contemplating why I've felt in such a funky mood lately.

It all started with my Spring Break Odyssey, "do the right thing" trip to OK/MO/KS to visit my mom's siblings. My not-vacation. They're all old - over 65 - and I pretty much felt uncomfortable the whole trip. I'm not around old people a lot. And, I don't like thinking of my mother as old enough to die.

I'm not sure that the trip in itself was enough to send me spiraling the way I've been. But it sure could have been the catalyst. This funk isn't the melancholy, "poor lonely me" kinda thing. It's more like this restlessness; a sense of being jarred out of my complacency with The Way Things Are.

My job, for one. I got a 5% raise in November last year to be lead worker of the help desk team. I had these grand plans . . . that have fizzled to nearly nothing. The rotated people were far below "up to snuff", plus the one person who does know what she's doing was out of the office for 60% of the time until recently. Yay for the 5%, but frustrating to be stymied.

Then, I normally do this pretty nifty little spreadsheet tool to help our customers with a mathematical computation that they're either unable or unwilling to learn. It's an "extra", not part of our "book of business", and far above the expectations of those in my salary range. I did it because I like working with the formulas, and to be honest I enjoyed the ego strokes when people raved about it. But, this year with substandard help and only 40% of the one position, I simply didn't have time to do this. And I got absolutely slammed by our customers for not doing it. Not politely, not "oh but we liked it so much", but "How dare you give us a tool that we come to depend on then take it away and expect us to do it ourselves?" My boss supported me not doing it, because taking the time to make that spreadsheet simply wasn't feasible IF we wanted to continue our other customer service commitments. It got to the point where I said it was outside of my salary class and I wasn't going to do it. So then my boss' boss tells my boss to authorize overtime for me to get it done, and long story short I cave and do it. Know what? I HATE IT!! Yes, it's good work. Yes, it's something our customers clamor to get. But I am so disgusted with all the drama around it that I never want to touch it again. I told my boss to start outlining the business rules for one of the programmers to do a VB app for it because I wasn't going to do it next year. And yes, I could do the VB app, too, but ain't no way I'm going to do that work at the salary I'm making.

Okay another aspect of why I feel unsettled is feeling frustrated that I'm stuck. I don't have the schooling necessary for a similar-paying job in the private industry, and the open positions with the state are all lower paid. Plus, I'm bored to tears with what I'm doing at work now and I haven't had any motivation lately to change those circumstances. I spend most of each day since returning from my not-vacation doing busy work to make me look productive, while still not "cheating" my employer by doing personal stuff on work time.

I want to move. But - I'm on track for paying off everything I own and coming up with a down payment on a house. If I move, that will push that particular goal back by at least a year, maybe more. Too, I'm not convinced that I want to buy a house here, although at first that is indeed what I wanted. And I don't know where I want to move. Part of me wants to move back to my hometown, knowing I have personal contacts and wouldn't have to start from scratch again, plus I'd get to see my daughter more often. Part of me wants to open up a map and throw a dart, then move wherever that lands. And still another part of me yearns to be near extended family in the midwest.

I need new work challenges. Real challenges, not ones manufactured by TPTB to impress elected officials with inflated accomplishments. I need clear direction/focus in what I want to do with my life. I need to go through all the stuff in my apartment, in my finances, and in my life and purge/refine/acquire as necessary.

I need a helper. A paid professional maybe, or a no-nonsense, no-agenda friend who can dig in with me to help me out and help me up out of this quagmire. Someone not afraid to get his/her hands dirty. I have tried doing this alone, but it isn't working. I need a clear starting point, and "just do it" isn't working. Where do I find such help?