Hey guys,

Thanks for the uplift and the sharing of common frusrations . I'm sure I'm just in a phase that will pass. In case it doesn't just pass, I'm starting to look in the help wanted ads and today I left my name at a place advertising for help. I know I don't stand a snowballs chance in Hawaii of getting it because I don't have the exact experience they're looking for and it seems thay aren't accepting substitutes. A career change would be a nice diversion. If nothing else is gained from looking elsewhere I'll have the sense of "trying to do something else."

Once I applied for a job where the HR manager told me I was over qualified. I knew that what he actually meant was that the job he had for me (glove factory line operator)didn't pay (per hour) what the one I had been doing (construction carpenter) paid.

I told him that any time I was over qualified to feed my family I was in BIG trouble. I showed him that the pay he was starting me at was (in the long run) more than I made working at the higher hourly rate because getting to work enough hours to make a living in the construction trade depended too much on the weather.

I was hired and worked at that company for about 5 1/2 years. When I left the company the HR manager voluntarily and unexpectedly wrote me a good recommendation letter and stressed my contributions while I was there. So much for being overqualified for that job. Although it was a nice gesture on part of my HR manager to give me the recommendation letter, I've never thought I needed to use it to get a job.

S, I'm sure you've tried a similar approach to the "overqualification problem." All I can say if it didn't work for you is that the HR managers you talked to weren't as smart as the one I dealt with.

Mainly, I need to get into something less physically demandng. I can hold up to the job for now, but I can see that I won't be able to last but a few more years at the most. The day to day aggravations of my current job are getting on my nerves more lately because of outside stresses that are simply impossible to ignore. Learning the RC hobby, and doing morse code on ham radio, do help alleviate the sreess because both require your full attention, but I have increasingly less free time in which to use them for escape.

All I really need to learn to do is to just go on doing what's necessary and let the rest just happen. In other words I need to grow duck feathers so the aggravations will just ball up and roll away.

ha

And S. I hear you loud and clear. I experience culture clash regularly. It's hard to be held to a high standard personally and then have to witness that a much different standard is tolerated for others in the same circumstances. But, that's life in this day and time. We just have to live with it until we find a way to not have to live with it.

Roy, of Ziegfreid and Roy, recently had it illustrated very well, and much too graphically, that you can take the Tiger out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the Tiger. Good luck looking and I hope you'll eventually find your way out of the rat race jungle.

The worst thing about the rat race is no matter how fast you can run, pretty soon they find a faster rat to put you up against.

elad