The downside is, of course, that you will never be considered for promotion, do not have the respect of the supervisors since you're not "dedicated" and I basically have no real friends there. My co-workers are more like very friendly acquaintances rather than friends. And to me, it seems a really big waste of one's life - you will the spend the majority of your life at work - and it seems a shame to dislike it so much.
I suppose that's one way of looking at it. I guess in a way it is wasting your life, but I look at it as a necessary evil. I need money to pay the bills. They pay me for my time. The office where I am now I've been with them nearly two years now, and I've tried being friendly and chatting, I've tried explaining how my health problems affect me, I've even tried explaining why I turn up for work wearing a cowboy hat, and I've tried ignoring their childish little games. It's a clique though, and I don't fit in. I'm not prepared to just sit there and keep quiet. There's one who's taken charge of collecting the tea money and making sure time-sheets are in order at the end of the week etc. which is fine by me - one less thing for me to worry about. She's always been "queen bee" and I'm not about to upset the apple-cart, but if there's something work related I know more about, I'll speak up and say what I think. Last year I had a few ideas about how we could improve some of our systems and procedures to make less work for us, and save resources, so I took my ideas to my manager, who agreed with me and the new ideas got introduced. The others don't like it though because it's "not the way we've always done it". Not my problem.
We're not even very friendly acquiantances - conversations with them are very one-sided. I've only got one real friend left at work who I know I can trust - everyone else with any initiative and free thinking has bailed out over the past five years. I'm stuck there partly because of my sickness record because filling in application forms for other jobs, when it asks on the form how many days sickness absence you've had in the last three years, it doesn't look good when you cross out "days" and write in 'months'!
It's convenient in many ways, and I know within reason they're supportive of my health problems (though it does help that I have friends "upstairs" - a legacy from when I was first there and full time and ran our section before we were restructured). Sometimes I think it's a case of "better the devil you know".
In my favour though (at least for the sake of my sanity) I'm only part time. When I first went back to work on a phased return I'd intended to work my way back up to full time hours, but my body's just not up to it. I've actually just reduced my hours again slightly because my health's not good at the moment and I've been struggling with the 18.5 I was doing, so now I'm down to 16.5. When I'm not there I do web design part time. It's quite a long story how I got into it, but it was something totally unexpected, but something I've fallen in love with, and at least with the web design I get paid for something I love doing.
At the moment I'm doing mainly freebies still to build up my portfolio, though I've got a couple of paid projects at the moment. Long term ideally my aim would be to go full time with the web design, but how things are with my health I don't think that's going to be possible - at least with my other job I get sick pay when I can't work (though they're getting a little antsy at the moment about my sickness record) whereas self-employed I'd be on my own, and it's a risk I can't take at the moment.