the smell of paint fumes in the morning

I never wanted a job like this. I never wanted stress or to have to be in charge of anyone or to worry about the company for which I work going under. I don't want to be looking for work again.

To try and calm myself down and put this in perspective: I have a job, which is more than a lot of people can say right now, and I have a job that pays pretty well too. We're ok financially if I were to lose my job. I just checked our savings last night, and we have six months worth of expenses saved up. I like the people with whom I work, for the most part, which again is more than a lot of people can say.

When I finished graduate school, we debated, upon leaving London, to where we should move. New York? Chicago? Atlanta? Nashville? We kept creeping closer and closer to home with the darts thrown at our map. The problem with big cities is that I'd be expected to get a big-city job, like at a fancy auction house or cold, imposing museum. I'd be expected to climb that corporate ladder, pushing past others, leaving them in my dust, or else suffer as a pee-on on the lower rungs of the ladder for the rest of my life.

I suppose I could have made myself happy there, on those low rungs. See, I've never been interested in being a VP or any kind of middle management. I just want to be left alone, and those people are never left alone. I need to run my own life. But I also don't have the drive to try and open my own gallery in a big city. The problem there is, again, you have to strive to be better than you are, cut throat, grow or die. In a small town, there isn't that problem because there is so little competition. A new gallery in this town would be welcome and appreciated.

I'm admitting it now because I feel like I've been lying to myself. But maybe this isn't the complete truth, maybe this is just me freaking out this morning. I don't care about my job. I mean I care about keeping it, I care about my coworkers, and I care about my position in HR and the affect I have on others here and on their professional lives. But I don't care about the industry we're in. It bores me. And the way this office is managed is so frustrating because I have no control over it. I see things that can be fixed but have no way of fixing them. Helpless.

I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated because:
-People (the bosses) don't think about things before they do them
-We moved into our new office before the toilets were even set up and went Thursday last week through yesterday peeing at the gas station next door. We still don't have running water in the sinks.
-No one thought about the fact that open ceilings on these offices mean we might as well not even have walls or doors. I can hardly hear myself think. The trainers have set up in the conference room because it's the only quiet place. I want to find them earphones of some sort but it wouldn't matter because we can't afford them right now. We can't even afford to buy our new employees email addresses from our webserver or new computers to work on. Why do we have new employees?? Because we are all so overwhelmed we can't get the work done, but now that we have new employees we can't get them set up so they can take the load off of us.
-We launched this software without even having our server farm set up correctly, and the boss signed a contract that said every so-many minutes we're down we owe thousands to our franchise client. So this morning when it was down for 10 minutes, who knows how many of our clients saw that weird error page and got frustrated too, and who knows how much we owe now.
-The boss tries to charge people for their software without consulting the sales team to find out what kind of deal is made, so he told our controller yesterday to charge someone even though sales had agreed with them not to charge til Feb. 1, and even though the controller was told that, he's either too spineless to say no or too dumb to remember. All because we need the money.
-It's freaking cold in here, and it smells like paint.

So what do I want to do? I want to own my own antique store/art gallery. I was so close about a year and a half ago, I had a lady wanting to sell hers to me, but she backed out at the last minute. Talk about heartbreak. I had worked at her store for over a year in hopes of buying it from her. I was practically running it-- all I wasn't doing was signing the checks. So I know what it takes. To be able to make my own decisions, to know when I say something, that's what's going to happen, not that a boss will toss my words to the side. I know what I'm doing, what I decide is right, at least in comparison to him, because I see the way I run my household and the way I ran that antique store, the way I increased her profits and solved issues. I'm not perfect, no way, but I don't have grand ambitions like he does, gambling with the professional lives of 20 people. I would only be gambling with my own, at least until I was stable enough to bring other people on. Stability. I need stability, and order, and solidity.

I care about art. I don't care about construction. I care about this community and improving it, about helping local people, but all our clients are elsewhere and so many of my coworkers are from somewhere else. I'm scared to leave though, and too busy to leave too-- I'm here 9 to 6 or 7 most days. Plus I do like the people and would leave them in a huge lurch if I left. I've always said I don't care about what I do as long as I like the people and the work, and I suppose that's true, but the work is taking its toll on me-- long days, poor conditions, stress.

Most things I worry about never happen anyway. Most of the time I remember this. Most of the time I'm content even with a tornado swirling around me because I know three things:
If I lose my job, I will be ok financially.
If I lose my job, I will find something else.
If I lose my job, even though it will be tough and I will mourn for a while, I will find my way through it and will be better off in the end.

Something about this morning is keeping me from remembering those things. Something is making me want to run away screaming. I suppose it's fear of seeing everything I've worked for this past year crumble in front of my eyes. But in reality, I have nothing to lose. This job is not me, I am so much more than this.