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15 Ways to Ruin Your Own Professional Life

15 Ways to Ruin Your Own Professional Life October 4, 2007The Lighter Side0 Comments

Because self-sabotage can be fun.

1. Burn Bridges. Destroy all your relationships with your former co-workers/supervisors. Even better, return to your former place of employment and make fun of them, ie: “Ha! You are still at this dump? I’ve moved on to bigger and better things! Loser!”

2. Take a job you know you will hate, just for the money.

3. After no longer working at the job you hate, take another in the same field. This is called not learning from your mistakes.

4. Lie on your resume, and be discovered for it after starting your job. Omission of a three-month job (in which you were fired) from your resume isn’t a big deal. Omission of your status as a convicted felon is a huge deal.

5. Throw a stapler at your boss.

6. Go to a private, expensive, 4-year third-tier or lower liberal-arts college and major in linguistics, theater, Latin, Russian history, creative writing or some other field of study that has no application in the job market. (Note – if you go on to graduate school, this is potentially forgivable)

7. Work more than 60 hours a week for any period of time longer than 6 months. Human beings are not designed to work this much. Wonder where road rage and heart attacks come from? Not just traffic and bad diets. They also come from overworked and stressed out people, believe it or not.

8. Flirt with your supervisor’s significant other.

9. Constantly bring your kids to work and let them run wild all over the office, spill things, damage office equipment and run into people. Good times!

10. Become a chronic yes-man. This is probably worst professional thing you can ever do. All you will ever aspire to is someone who can follow orders, do what others tell you, and sit around and look pretty. Ultimately, no one will respect you. It’s nothing but a one-way ticket to never advancing in a company, never escaping from the rat race, and maybe most importantly, chronic self-denial. It is, however, a great way to attain a low self-esteem and become depressed.

11. Steal from your employer. And no, erasers, stamps and post-it-notes don’t count! We are talking hard-core, five-alarm theft. If you don’t get caught, you got very lucky. If you do, (and you probably will) you are in for some serious problems. Way to go. How is prison? Was it worth it?

12. Look at illicit websites at work. Most workplaces monitor employer internet activity now. No, this isn’t fair, but it happens.

13. Play office games on the job.

14. Ardently pursue a field that is about to go extinct. They say we will not need many data entry processors or mailmen in the future. Be careful of what you get into and bring your crystal ball on the job search.

15. Hang yourself above the copy machine. If you are going to go out, go out in a blaze of glory. Imagine the look on your boss’ face when he sees you there, dangling above his prized copier. And to think, he had several documents to duplicate! The nerve! Oh well, time to start the interview process again.

Note: In no way am I endorsing any of the above- mentioned activities. This entry is for entertainment purposes only. Doing any of the above-mentioned things is not actually advisable 🙂