Sucker

Informal.
One who is easily deceived; a dupe.

Yes, this is me. Somehow, it always happens. I start a job and, being one of the few people with a good work ethic left in this world (It happens when your first job is working for your dad. Especially when you have that job from the 8th grade until the day before you leave for college. If you slack off working for your dad, it's like you're stealing. From your dad.), I always find myself with more and more being put on me to do. And I see other coworkers at my level or sometimes my boss (which, I'm sad to say, is the one this time) doing less and less. How does this always happen?

Abercrombie, Sonic, my on-campus job at OU... The only time it hasn't happened were the times I was a server, and it's hard for it to happen there. (But being a server sucks!) And now it's happened here. I thought I was done with that! That's why I went to college and got a degree -- so I could have a "real" job and no longer be making the same pay as some slacker dropout chick who comes in talking about how she took some experimental drug and has been high for the last 72 hours. At least that part doesn't happen anymore. But I still feel like a sucker.

It all started a couple months after I started working here. My boss gave me a few daily tasks. I knew they were annoying little tasks that have to be done each day, but at the time, I was excited. I looked at it as him giving me more responsibility, testing me, seeing what I could do. hahaha ... Boy, am I naive. I began to realize that he had only pushed off on me the things that weren't fun to do, things he didn't want to do. But it still didn't quite bother me -- he's the boss.

Then, one day I was in the bathroom. Another coworker was saying something about how she was ready for the day to be over (it was just before noon). I said, "Me too! I hate Thursdays!" I explained to her the task I have to do each Thursday that's tedious and takes a long time. She said, "You do that?" She said she thought my boss did it. "Nope," I said. "I do it." I quickly said that it's not so bad, it's just tedious some weeks. (Probably the most valuable lesson I learned as an innocent intern at a TV station in Oklahoma was that you can't trust most coworkers enough to talk about work problems, even when prodded.) Then, my coworker said about my boss, "Well, he's always been lazy." And she said, "If you're doing that, what in the hell does he do all day?" I thought that was a pretty damn good question. Since that day, it's made me frustrated, and I notice it more. Just knowing that I'm not the only one who feels that way and that I may actually be right ...

What prodded this is that I often get a head-start on my little Thursday projects (there are two) on Wednesday. Sometimes, I even try to get one or both done on Wednesday. Well, I had finished the smaller one and was working on the bigger one. My boss had had an appointment yesterday morning, and he managed to get absolutely nothing done in the afternoon, so all that was completed all day was my single Thursday project. (Just to add to my case, he was out the afternoon before for something else, and I had gotten everything pretty much done for that day.) I was working on the second project, but it would definitely take some time. My boss has taken on a similar, much smaller Thursday project, and his wasn't done either. He said he was going to go home and do it that night (last night), and if I could finish mine up that night, it'd be great. So I stayed late because he was going to be doing his at home later. I got mine to the point I could do no more, since I'd seen it too much and too long. I had everything ready, though, where all he had to do was trim it a bit. I even took part of my work home and did it last night. After all, he was going to be working at home, too. It only took a few minutes, but still.

So I came to work this morning and checked with him on what I had taken home. He then asked me if I would be able to do his part of the Thursday project. He hadn't done it. Now, no one else in our department knows how we divide these little "projects." It's not labeled with my name or his name. They just get done. We *ahem* he divided them that way so it would be "fair," which is funny, since I got the two biggest, and he got the smallest. But I wound up doing all three parts of our Thursday projects.

So I'm in this familiar position yet again, wondering, "If I'm doing more and more, what is my boss doing?"

At least in this job, I'm making more than minimum wage.