Two Small Pieces of Good News

(1) It appears that my unused vacation time will be transformed into money when I leave my job. I currently have 163 hours accrued. That will make for a nice little parting gift. You know, to get me through my upcoming poverty. I have to remind myself that I am on Operation Cheap Ass and not Operation Money Bags for a reason. That reason: I am not interested in buying and having a whole bunch of material goods or swimming around in piles of money Scrooge McDuck style. Continuing to work this job when it will make it impossible to pursue my long-term, happy-making goals isn't the solution.

I want to blog a lot more later (when I am not so tired and uninspired - I got less than four hours of sleep last night) about the book Stumbling on Happiness (written by a Harvard psychology professor) that I finished reading a few days ago. (And that I bought for myself last Xmas.) But I will report that I used the technique that his review of the happiness literature and his own research suggest is the best way to estimate how you will feel about experiencing some particular situation in the future in thinking about whether I wanted to pursue the possibility of reducing my hours at my current job from full-time to half-time (rather than getting a different part-time job altogether). Because our imaginations are unreliable, he tells us, it is better to instead ask someone who is currently experiencing the future you are contemplating for yourself and find out how they feel about it - an approach that we basically all always reject because we feel that we are so unique that no surrogate (or group of surrogates) can be a good proxy for us or shed any important light on what our own special experience would be. I took the challenge he posed and tested this out for myself. And lucky me, I have a perfect surrogate to look to - my co-worker K who is currently working half-time at my job, doing the same kind of work I would be doing and under almost identical conditions, and who used to have my exact job before I did. I quickly determined that K is overworked, stressed out, and generally unhappy with her situation (which she sticks with because one awesome thing about state service is that the benefits that come with a part-time situation are excellent compared to what you would get almost anywhere else and she is paid very well for a part-timer, the same hourly rate that she made before). So it was pretty easy to decide that I have no reason to believe that I would feel radically differently if I were in her place, thus making it an unappealing prospect I am not going to pursue at all.

In my I/O psychology class, the book listed a consistent result from many different studies of workers' experiences of the workplace - the group of employees with the lowest reported levels of stress is college professors. Yes!

(2) For some reason I had it stuck in my head that I needed to give four weeks notice at my job, but upon a review of our policy and guidelines today, I discovered that, duh, my employment is entirely at-will and thus I can leave at a moment's notice if I choose, just as they could lay me off the same way. (Oh man, wouldn't that be perfect? A RIF would be just the ticket right now.) So I am perfectly okay doing the standard two weeks notice. (Doing less would be unprofessional and flat-out meaner to my co-workers who are already going crazy than I want to be.)