Midlife Crisis

I am having a crisis of confidence.

I hate my job. I can honestly say that  I don't want to work there a minute longer.  I have hated my job for awhile, actually for a long time, but I have always put up with it, knowing the money was good for where we were living and it was pretty flexible, so good for the kids.

I have worked in my job for 5 years. It has been 5 years since we moved up from Sydney. During this time I have complained time and time again and I have many times applied for jobs, but not serious about leaving when I found out the money that was on offer working for other places.

This year it has all come to ahead. My boss has taken on a franchise and has hired another person in the office. Suddenly after 5 years, I am not in control and I have been forced out. I have not been involved in any of the 'new' company things and I feel like the outsider, rather than the new girl feeling this way.

For the first 4.5 years it was just me and my boss. It has been stressful the whole time. I generally work on my own, with my boss running the job sites. The cash flow was always poor and I was constantly being hounded for money.  As I was only part time (30 hours per week over 3 days) my boss still needed support when I wasnt there. I had emails coming to my personal phone and I had subcontractors and my boss ringing me all times of the day.

One of the perks of my job was a fuel card. It was part of my wage and i have had it for the past 4 years.  I knew I was given the perk and i was happy to do the extra work without being paid.  Last month I was told in a group meeting that my fuel card would be taken away. I am annoyed that my boss did not have the guts to tell me this when I was on my own and he does not even care that I have not had a pay rise for 4 years and now I have been given a pay cut.   In response to the fuel card being taken away, I took the emails off my phone and now I am only contactable when I am working.  Do I think that this has contributed to the problems that I feel are at work - probably.

 I have always gotten headaches, but rarely called them migranes, which would render me useless and I would find myself on the bathroom floor with my head down the toilet. This would happen every couple of months, and i found that if I went to sleep they would be gone in the morning.  Earlier this year i started getting migranes, frequent migranes.  Like three times a week and they would last for more than a day. I would go to bed with a headache and I would wake up with one. My head would be throbbing in the night.  I was quite scared that they were now so frequent and so intense.  Nothing was helping. I was popping Neurofen like they were candy and they were doing nothing.  The new girl at work suggested I get my eyes checked as the headaches always seemed to come on when i was at work.  I went and had my eyes checked and they were all good, so then the fear set in and i was petrified that I had a brain tumor.  I went to my GP and she said it was classic migrane symptoms and would send me off to have a  catscan. She also gave me anti-nausea medicine and migrane tablets - little did I know at the time that those tablets cost $40.00 a box and only contain 4 tablets.   Within two days I was popping my first migrane tablet.  When I went back to the GP the following week, she said that the catscan was clear (thank goodness) and she would have to put me on preventer tablets to stop the migranes. How pathetic is that. So much stress in my job that I have to take daily medication to combat the migranes.

Let me go back and give you a bit of a background on me.

I am on of four kids. I have three brothers. I am the only girl. All my brothers were diagnosed with ADD when I was a child. One has since had his diagnosis cancelled and they changed it to Dyslexia. My father is an Accountant. He has never worked in an accounting office, but always worked quite high up for large corporations.  I remember as a child him not being too interested in my schooling (probably because he was working his butt off to support four kids in private school) the only thing I remember him telling me that I was the only one of the kids that would go to uni.  I dont think I was ever asked if I wanted to go to uni, it was just expected of me.  I would do anything to make my dad proud of me.  In year 11 and 12 I took Economics - oh my goodness I hated that subject, but I thought if I did it my dad would be proud of me.  I dont think it worked.  The end of school came and I had no idea what I wanted to be, but I knew I had to go to uni.

I took a year off after school and worked and when the uni application time came around I went for the degree that sounded the most interesting - it was Criminology.  I took it thinking my dad would be proud.  I think he thought it was a useless degree and it was. Three years later what did I get - a degree that wasnt worth the paper it was written on and a HECS debt.  During this time I had been working at Vodafone in the customer service department and then I was promoted to the customer accounting section.  I did quite well here, but I resigned so that I could spend a month in England with my now husband.

When I came back from England I started looking for jobs. I knew I was going to move to England so it was only a short term job and I sort of fell into accounting. I starting doing accounts for a little tin pot company. I did that for the last couple of weeks before I moved to England and when I was in England I did the same work - no training, but I picked it up easily and it seemed quite easy to get a job.

When we moved back to Australia at the end of 2002 I thought that I should probably go to Tafe and get some qualifications. It would make it easier to get a job. So I did the Diploma of Accounting. It was full time for 1.5 years and I loved it.  I got high distinctions in everything. I remember in company accounts I was disappointed that I got 99% and my Chinese teacher told me to suck it up, even he would be happy with that mark.  After the diploma I found out that I could get half of the accounting degree credited for prior study. It was in a job interview at the end of 2004 that I stupidly told my future boss that I was going to go to uni and study for my accounting degree. They gave me the job on the condition that I followed through.  So as I was told I went.  I got half of the degree credited, but I really felt like I had been left behind.  Yes I did well and came out with a 5.20GPA, but I felt like I walked out as clueless as I walked in.

At work I had no training, no help from a qualified accountant. I was drifting.  In my positions since I have done the same thing. Never had mentorship from a qualified accountant and so I have just drifted.  Where I work now, it is dodgy to the core. So much is wrong there, but I have felt that I am pushing shit up a hill trying to do things the correct way.  The problem with being there for so long, I have not progressed. I am not doing anything you need a degree for. Any monkey can do my job.  Now when I look for job adverts, every accounting job I think that I am not qualified enough and so I dont go for. Any of the jobs I do go for, they want to offer monkeys wages.

About 8 weeks ago I decided that I had had enough.  I started applying for jobs. The first job I applied for was for a landcaping architects. I currently work in the building industry. I have also worked for a very well known landscaping company. I thought with my experience I would be a shoe in for an interview - I didnt even get that, just a rejection letter.  All of the jobs I have applied for since, I have not even received a rejection letter, I have not heard anything.   Jobs that I go for they even have noted that there will be such a high volume of applicants they will only contact you if you are successful - great. I have also found out that there are probably about 200 applicants for every part time job advertised. So pushing shit up a hill to find another job - talk about pathetic!!!

So here I am at 36 years old working out what the fuck I am going to do.  I dont want to be a stay at home mum - we do and we dont have the money for that. I would love to be a lady that lunches, but I know that I would eventually go insane.  One of the things I am scared of is going from one shit job to the next one. I may be lucky and score a job, but am I going to be in the same position in a couple of years.  Really I am qualified to do nothing.

I have two university degrees.  They were both a waste of time.  The thought of going back at 36 years old scares the pants off me.  Social work was what I thought about last year, but I dont think I could hack the heartache. Last year I briefly thought about nursing and then I put it out of my mind when my work was quite good for a brief moment.  When it all turned to shit again at the beginning of this year, it came back into my mind.  To me it felt like an itch that I needed to scratch.  I have always loved anything medical and have always said that my dream job would be to work on the triage desk in emergency just to find out what everyone has done to themselves. I love medical shows and would watch them around the clock if allowed to.

Sadly when I looked into nursing, even though it was before Uni started for the year, I was too late to get in. So now all I can do is think about nursing and going back to uni.

I think of myself as a bit of a loser. 36 years old and one crappy job after another. Would i even cut it as a nurse. Would i cope? I told my husband Mat what I was thinking. Did he think I was mad - actually he was the voice of reason.  If I do end up going to uni next year I will be 37. I will be 40 when I graduate. That means that I have  about 20 years left at work, or according to Tony Abbott I will have 30 years left at work.