Most of us would rather be at home at any given point during the day, but work is an unfortunate fact of life. We will spend our best years and most alert hours of lives in the workplace, but sometimes we simply have to move on to the next job. These are many reasons why you might want to quit your current job.  Below are difficult, if not impossible, work problems to solve.  In the end, we all need to look our for our own best interest. Our jobs consume too many hours of too many days of our lives for us to stay where we are if we’re miserable. No excuses, now. If these problems exist in your current job, make a plan and get the hell out of there!

• 1. Your company is experiencing a downward spiral
• 2. Your relationship with your manager is damaged beyond repair
• 3. Your life situation has changed
• 4. Your values are at odds with the corporate culture
• 5. You simply find nothing about your job you enjoy anymore
• 6. Your workplace is ethically challenged
• 7. You have found yourself behaving in way that are improper
• 8. You’ve burned your bridges with too many co-workers
• 9. Your stress level is so high its affecting your home life
• 10. You are unchallenged

From Dubai Corespondent James O’Hearn…

Growing up, I was so attracted to books, to the idea of sitting in a far off room by myself, getting lost in a story that having to put my book down and do something else, anything else, always seemed like a punishment. Especially being required to work with my hands. Be it doing laundry, dishes, vacuuming, mowing the lawn, weeding gardens, or helping organize the garage or basement, if there was a task to be done, it was a task I would do anything to avoid.

Coming from a family filled with tradesmen, I was always the anomaly. From time to time, in the summers, I might join my father or my grandfather and work a little construction. I’d shovel dirt, hang drywall, cut board, and choke on the lung shredding particulates of fiberglass pink. The first time I fell asleep on what seemed like foamy, comfy pink pillow of soft strands was also the last time, as I learned that spun glass has a way of making you pay for your indiscretions for a very long time, clinging tenaciously to the most inconvenient and hard to reach cracks and crevices a human body has. I learned and relearned a basic fact – I had no wish to follow in either my father or grandfather’s footsteps. The trades were not for me.

Yet here I am, at the dawn of my fourth decade, finding that those very things I eschewed when young, have become the very things I feel a yearning to do. Visceral memories of time spent in my grandfather’s workshop come flooding back. Helping him build bookcases, chairs, cabinets, and beds. Feeling the grain of the wood, smoothing it with sand paper, varnishing it, and sealing it. I remember my father taking me by the giant geodesic dome at Vancouver’s Expo ’86, pointing at it and proudly saying “I helped build that.” And as I watch my kids tumble around the house, upending everything from one end to another, each day and every day, I cannot help but feel something inside, something urging me to go forth and make, to build. I see small beds, chairs, dressers, toy boxes, tree forts and more. Living, as I do, in a small apartment, there is no room for a workshop, for a large collection of tools, so all these thoughts are just that – thoughts.

Mathew Crawford, in his essay appearing in the NY Times, Shopclass as Soulcraft, describes something similar to my own complaint. He was an academic, a reader, one who eschewed working with hands in order to pursue better goals, higher goals. But at some point he had an epiphany, that what he had thought was a higher goal, was more noble or better, became something else. Something less. When he finally decided to give up white collar work, trading life in the knowledge economy for days spent in greasy dungarees, it was as if he had found himself, and found where he needed to be.

I can’t say that I have had the same experience as Crawford, but I feel the inclinations coming on. Maybe, one day, when I finally go back home, and find a home for myself and my family, a real home with a nice lawn, and space for a shed out back, I’ll have a chance to find where that inclination leads.

From Lama J…

Would you like to be the smart employee everyone at work admires? If you do, you may also have to be under appreciated by your boss and do the heavy-lifting around the office - but your job will be secured and your check guaranteed.

Or would you like to be the dumb boss who gets paid high wages, works less than anyone else and abuses staff? That’s always nice work if you can get it.

I’ve worked in a variety of fields for a wide range of bosses from different parts of this planet. Some were super smart and I learned a great deal from them. Others were big whales with money, but no brains – some even managed to lack both. It’s a question I’ve always asked myself - how does a unintelligent and or lazy individual reach the management level? What did upper management see in this person, an obvious idiot in some cases, to make him a team leader?

Isn’t it true that a leader is called on to do so because he needs to guide his group to fufilling their greatest potential, making the company as a whole better in the process? What if this leader is unintelligent, unorganzied and unmotivated, leading his team, and thus his company, to nowhere but dead-ends and mediocrity? And further still, and what drives me teh craziest – why are some of these people not only allowed to keep their jobs, but sometimes even get promoted to higher positions?

Throughout the current financial crisis, I’ve noticed some of my smarter colleagues getting kicked out while the incompetent ones were left alone. In fact I’ve seen this happen several times over the last year or so. Again I ask myself - what makes a boss let go a good employee and keep a lazy one during a financial crisis? Isn’t that a crisis itself?

Hard work doesn’t always count for more in some people’s eyes, as there are those who work less and still get to come to work everyday. In my own experience, I’ve worked for a boss that I indirectly insulted many times over, but he kept me around for 4 years until I eventually quit and moved onto to something better. Why did he keep me? Because I worked hard for him and did my job very well. Another boss I worked my ass off for, including nights and weekends, often bragged about my great achievements to others. With that said, when he needed to re-structure the company I was the first person to he booted out the door.

A former colleague of mine was very powerful at the company she worked for and rose through the ranks quickly, but got fired when one day she made the receptionist cry. A center-piece of the company and a driving force behind its success and she was fired, while others around her sat on their asses all day long. Worse yet, the big boss’s reaction was to hire someone totally unqualified, inexperienced and incompetent. Go figure.

A just plain stupid guy I used to work with who was routinely criticized by all the staff and his direct manager for his laziness, lack of organization and incompetence, eventually got promoted – a move that shocked everyone concerned.

Sometimes I ask myself if there is any kind of secret code for bosses we all need to follow in order to avoid their silly games or even just to simply impress them. As of right now, I still don’t know what it is.  I decided a long time ago to simply come to work everyday, do my best to play it smart and  let the morons be morons. In the end, that’s all any of us can do.