Anxiety disorder

I start my new job next week. I am filled to the brim with anxiety. I can feel it churning in my stomach. I feel like a washing machine. The reason for such anxiety is that I am a total dullard at picking organisations that are right for me. I always go for the cool job, the jobs that sound exciting, fun, interesting, that will offer oodles of glamorgeousness. I am the typical female protagonist in any trashy chick lit novel. I've worked in film and most recently in media publishing and at all times in some sort of advertising capacity.

As those novels suggest, these "creative" environments are completely competitive, super bitchy and have unreasonable expectations of the work life balance, whereby there is no life in the quadratic equation. The only difference between my life and that of these protagonists is that the fabulous Creative Director is not trying to give me a make-over with designer outfits.

Anyway - I start my new job on Monday. I hope the people are nice. I hope I don't have no-worker co-workers - a term coined by my favourite blogger, or more evil pr*cks, or evil b*ches.

I have had my fair share. Early in my career (which has scarred me for years) I worked with the craziest manager ever, who cheated, lied, stole ideas and made them her own, forget important information and slept with the general manager to keep her role. She blamed her team for her mistakes and treated us like naughty children, not young professionals. I learnt nothing from my time with her except how not to be a manager.

I had another job where the directors paid themselves too much money and their staff too little then sneered at the team when they found out their clothes came from Kmart and Sussan.

In another role I was subjected to racism, bullying, backstabbing, working 24 hours a day - 7 days a week and finding that wasn't quite good enough only to be turned into a crying, paranoid, butt protecting mess.

So, when I say I'm anxious, I mean it. If I make another bad choice again I might give up on this corporate life and move to the country.

My husband says that I will encounter evil people everywhere, which is true, of course. But there had to be an environment where the nice, relatively normal people outweigh the crazy people. I have had two normal jobs and liked them very much. The people were excellent and I continue to be friends with many of these colleagues. I am hoping to replicate these experiences with this new gig on Monday.

Please let these people be capable of doing their jobs effectively, please let the management team know how to make a decision and have reasonable expectations and please let my direct colleagues have a sense of humour.

Please don't let me be asking too much.