I've worked with the same professor for nearly five years now. I don't know how I did it considering that things have not changed. He has always had crappy managerial skills no matter how nice of a guy he is. He makes me not want to go to work. This is my first obstacle to get around on my way to learning to defeat whatever held be back before. After all, I need this job to make ends meet. More long term would probably be the need to develop some much needed tolerance skills.
The entire four and a half years that I worked for this professor, he kept the same patterns with his work files. I learnt them. He complained that I didn't do it right, but when he showed me how to do it, it was the same way I had been doing it. If one minor detail was off though, I had to listen to him talk and correct me for about a half hour, wasting my time, which would then lead to his complaining about my work performance and speed later. I didn't get enough done on the days he had to go through things with me again because of one little human error.
Alas! I graduated! I had a chance to leave here, and go on. Though, I'm back due to unforeseen circumstances. In the five months that I managed to escape, he changed things to the way that I wanted to do them originally because it made more sense. I didn't know this, of course, because he didn't actually tell me. When I came back, I looked around, things were somewhat the same, but with new people. When I started working, it was without directions because he was too busy to sit down with me, so I just went about putting things together in the same way as before, only to get the same familiar condescending talk of "pay attention and do it my way so you'll be better".
How am I really supposed to know what is expected, if he doesn't tell me to begin with? I really don't know. I'm not a mind reader, and I'm not sure I'd ever want the skills to do so. I'm pretty sure other people's thoughts would scare me. Instead, I take the method that non-readers take; I listen, take notes, and try to do better. Except, now we are back to the habits of the previous four years where if I make one mistake, it seems like the end of the world, and it "wastes time because I have to go back and correct it." Sadly, when he reviews my files, it is before I have double checked it or even finished it myself. Thus, his complaints are really premature.
Knowing fully well that I can't change another person, I have to figure out a way to get beyond this. Yes, I want my work to be better. I want to be more diligent, more insightful, and all that stuff. I already take notes on his ramblings that seem to be so repetitive, even if I never look at them. The act alone makes him feel better. I listen, even if halfway because I've heard this all before. I still take notes so I can pretend that I've not heard the same thing about how I should prepare an output file "just to make sure it is being done correctly".
I work... mostly diligently. I have to get on that part. The work itself is something that I'm not interested in. I holds no excitement for me other than a cushy job where I get to choose my hours and a decent pay of $9/hour. It is also a semi-intellectual job where I get to work with geological data, but really, I take what a different scientist has done and put it in a digital format. We have people that work here with no geology background that are doing the exact same thing. The real bonus is that it is is relatively good for my career. I can put this on my CV. See, every problem has its silver lining.
Other than training myself not to get distracted by the Internet while working, I can't think of too much else I can do. There has got to be something else that will help improve my abilities, work ethic, and lower my stress levels. Admittedly, this job makes me stressed because of the professor's perfectionist attitude. Hopefully I'll have learnt to deal with stress more efficiently as well as how to get better at work by the end of this term.
