About a month ago, I went into my bosses office, and suggested that it might be time for me to move on. I had been dreading going to work (to the point of waking up several times at night thinking about it) and felt that any ideas I put forth were pretty much DOA. It was incredibly tough to do this. I mean, I’m well aware of how sucky the job market is and this was (theoretically) a dream job for me. How could I turn my back on all this?

Let’s backtrack. I had started this job in January of 2008. During my final interview, I had been impressed with how open to new ideas the management were. They were excited to have someone come in & put their imprint on the position. I was being given the ball, and told to run with it. Unfortunately, almost immediately, communication issues arose with my supervisor. She was detail oriented and fixated on micro planning every tiny aspect of things. I would argue she was myopic she would argue that I was rash and unprepared.  I think we were both right. I do consider it a great failure on my part that I (who pride myself on people skills and relationships) was unable to come to common ground with her.

The bottom line was that my time there was a real blow to me. It hurts to find out that your dream job is not at all what you thought. It sucks to have three different bosses in the course of a year. It’s frustrating to have everything you do redone. The whole situation was just bad, and I did not make things any better. Towards the end, I started to see myself slipping out of interest, and that’s when I decided I needed to leave. If I cared about our members as much as I said I did, and held my integrity so important, I could not continue to half ass my way through the job.

So, I quit. I didn’t have another job lined up, and had only just started looking. I did not want to do the interview dance, where you lie to everybody and keep working just to get a paycheck. I did not want to stand in the way of good stuff getting done by our members because my name (and the concomitant baggage) was attached to it. Most of all, I just wanted to be happy where I worked.

So, I quit. The strangest part of it was how surprised management was. I had honestly thought (and perhaps hoped) that I was cl0se to being fired, but this made me re-think that. I am thankful for this experience, and I still think we did a lot of great work, and the organization will continue to do great work. I’m really just sad at how things turned out, and wonder where my dream job went wrong.

Last 5 posts by Ezra

• Is there ever really a good excuse for a husband to visit Thailand or San Francisco without his wife? - September 7th, 2010
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