Lately I’ve been feeling more and more miserable. After a while you stop trying and just start wallowing in your own self-pity. I am prone to bouts of unreasonable depression by nature. Sometimes however, I actually have valid reasons.
I never was all that keen on my job to begin with, but for months and months now I have begun to hate getting up in the mornings. And once there, I count down the hours till I can leave. For starters, its soul destroying being an architect and being forced to work as a mindless designer. If I wanted an unchallenging job where there’s no need to think or take initiative, I wouldn’t have spend 7 years studying architecture. Fortunately it’s not all bad. I am learning stuff. Or at least I did in the beginning. Now I think I’ve learnt all I will in this job. The upside of my workdays is when I have to deal with civil engineers and mechanical engineers over the phone. It certainly breaks the monotony, even when they drive me up the wall.
And what with the economic crisis – which in Greece is mostly in people’s minds so far – we don’t have much work. My main project – where I had lots of fun having disagreements and misunderstandings with the civil and mechanical engineers – has been put on the shelf by the clients. I’m so bored that when the other day my boss asked me to come up with a couple of ideas for glass doors with frosting, for the bathroom doors of a rich client, I came up with 32 ideas and could have easily reached 100.
Possibly the worst thing of my job however must be the atmosphere. Unfortunately I never got on with my co-workers (all women). I tried in the beginning, but we’re just so different that they think I’m weird and I think they’re dull and bitchy. So we barely talk.
Since the summer it’s got worse, everyone’s on edge. The boss has been edgy and nervous and the other girls go around with long faces. They make it painfully obvious they don’t enjoy their job either. Especially the mothers who go on and on about how they’d rather be at home with their kids. I’d rather they’d be at home with their kids too!
I have completed two years at this job. It’s a good time to look for a new one. Only Christmas is coming. It’s singularly stupid to leave a job before Christmas and miss out on the present. I should start seriously looking from January. However this stupid crisis is messing up my plans. Not many people are hiring lately. I have two out of work friends (one architect and one civil engineer) who have been looking for jobs since September with no luck. The situation is rather depressing.
And to make things so many times worse the art gallery my sister works for is going to close down in two months. The owner has had enough and is closing it. It’s much more than the crisis. For a year now he’s been talking about moving or closing.
The truth is the gallery is located in what has recently become one of the worst areas of Athens. It’s noisy and dirty and overrun with immigrants, junkies, prostitutes and the homeless. The gallery is opposite the central soup kitchen for the homeless. On the corner of the road giant groups of Pakistanis are always congregated. And walking down the street you frequently come across people shooting up. Do junkies shoot heroin in busy streets in plain in view in every city of the world or is it an Athenian thing? People are knifed in the area (and Athens has a very low crime rate compared with London). Every now and then the police show up and aggressively make the junkies move on. To where? I wonder. Or they raid the whorehouses looking for African prostitutes without licenses.
I remember taking a friend for a walk round the area a couple of years ago. He was overjoyed. “This is just like I remember New York being,” he said. And then he dragged me into Pakistani video clubs and Chinese junk shops before we sat down to eat and a run down Indian place, where we were the only Greeks in the place, and I the only woman. The food was not nearly as good as Brick Lane in London, and the other men in the place wouldn’t stop staring at me. Obviously we paid special “greek” prices and it ended up coming to the same as an ordinary taverna would have. Of course that wasn’t the biggest let down of the evening. That would have been the fact that it was supposedly a date of sorts. Nothing came of it, except me feeling like a fool barking up a wrong tree. A couple of years later the guy confessed he was a gay in denial. Trust my luck!
Back to my main train of thought: I’m depressed. I don’t like my job. I hate surviving on minimum wage. My sister (and flat-mate) is losing her job. I still don’t have a boyfriend. And I still am overweight.
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