Summer Job Woes

phaxx

Last summer, I had a fairly decent job doing amateur graphic design, artwork cleaning and so on. The pay was okay, 7.50 an hour. Very flexible hours, I could come in at 10, leave at 4/5, no fuss was made if I was 30 minutes late, or more. It's local, 10 minute walk. I could take four-day weekends often enough to go to LANs and anything else.

The problem was, I really dislike who I'm working for. He's a terrible pain to get on with, very moody, depressed, impatient, talkative, and pretty much computer illiterate. He has the absolute basic windows skills, but he used to blame me for a few things he couldn't do.

Back in December/January I had a big argument with him on the phone, apparently I had left the Photoshop "Open" dialog box in a directory he wasn't familiar with, and couldn't get out of it. He was unable to follow my instructions to go up a directory so he could get on his way when I tried to help. I've pretty much left, but when he's in serious need of help (he's *lost* without me ) I lend a hand for an hour or so.

In short, he's a pain in the fncking hole and I hated working there. Everything else about it is great.


My question is, I need work for this summer, I have lots of plans and intend to do a bit of travelling. I'm too far from Dublin to get something simple like work in an internet cafe, and there's nothing like that locally.

It doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of tech-related work where I am (Wicklow) so I may end up taking something else, maybe even shop work.

Anyway, should I take something simple like shop work and avoid this guy, or go back and put up with three months (roughly) of ****e?

As I said, he's kinda lost without me, (I helped build the whole setup from scratch, I know most of the business well) and would gladly take me back for the summer, most likely on a similar arrangement as last summer. He wouldn't mind the two-week break I have planned, nor the odd four-day weekend for a LAN, but he's awful to put up with.

woolymammoth

i think you have to ask yourself how much of this guy are you
gonna see! its a 3 month easy number with only one bad
element to it. is he gonna be around all the time that you
won't be able to avoid him? maybe you could degin & print some
easy to understand manuals with lots of pics on how to do this &
that in windows and photoshop. get him to refer to those instead
of 'distracting you from your work'! if you think you'll be able to
avoid dealing with him regularly then it mightn't seem so bad.

phaxx

Heh, yeah, he's the only one there, usually. I can't avoid him, and I've already done some instructions for the common tasks so he can putter along at his own rate and do them himself when I'm not around.

Squall

Well, If i was you ide ask for a pay raise. If he cant give it to you then it gives you an excuse to leave and get something else. And if he agrees then the extra money should be enough to convince you to put up with him.

eth0_

Phaxx - i'd say go for it, it's better to be doing a job you enjoy and will learn from than just working a shop for the summer.
And cliched as this sounds, it's character building. I don't know how old you are, but when I was 17 I had a part time job in McDonalds (I know, shame), and while it was cool at the start because quite a few of my friends worked there part-time too, after a while they left, and I began to notice what complete jerk-offs I was working under, and I quit soon after because I just hated the managers in there who found the need to give the part-time staff **** because they were so unsatisfied with their careers.

But now i'm in my 2nd job since i've left college, I can honestly say, you will probably never have a job where you get on well with all your colleagues. There's two guys I work with now that I really cannot stand, but I really like my company, my job is pretty ok, and I do have a lot of nice colleagues; the fact one of the guys I don't like is a complete idiot and the other has dreadful social skills and thinks far too much of himself, balances out against this.

Go back to the cranky boss

RicardoSmith

I agree with eth0_ you'll always get morons you have to deal with. Look on it as good training for the idiots you'll have to deal with in other jobs. If you like the work and you are good at it, put you head down and build up a good rapor with the clients and get a good body of work together and try and get some of the work for yourself. You could eventually just work for yourself.