Would I lie to you?

I'm looking for another contract role, and I'd like it to be a good one for three reasons:

1. A higher rate will enable me to pay off my debts faster.

2. I really want to sharpen up my finance knowledge and mathematical skills - in case I end up getting into financial journalism, and my project skills because they'll inevitably be useful for any kind of development work I get into. Also I generally find this stuff quite interesting.

3. I perform much better, and in some ways enjoy work much more, when I'm way out of my depth.

So I'm trying to strike the balance between doing the easier-to-get & extremely lucrative but less challenging roles, and the more challenging ones that are a much longer shot, might take more time to find, and for which I might have to offer a lower rate. You'd think that more challenging roles would pay more, but the market is kinda screwed up right now. Credit Risk Change divisions have very inflated budgets.

More draining than this though, is being constantly lied to by recruitment agencies. This week I've had:

"They won't pay more than x"

when the guy's already agreed > x with the company and put this in writing to me

"I've also put your friend forward for this role but don't worry they're recruiting a couple of people for this position so this won't in any way jeapordise your chances. I wouldn't do that!"

when the interviewer specifically told me that he is recruiting just one person

"You told me you wanted me to put you forward for this role so I've already sent your CV over"

Well the part about him sending my CV was true, but the role was in my old department. I definitely hadn't seen it and would never have agreed to it.

Ahh the joys of job hunting.

Performing Below Par

With any luck I'm nearing the end of my time in this job. I've told my boss that I'm looking for other opportunities, and why, and he's being understanding and supportive, mostly by giving me a professional invisibility cloak - almost no work to do, no expectations, no reviews, no follow ups, no responses to my questions & meeting invitations. I should add that this is his natural management style, but considerably exaggerated with me right now.

I hit a point like this in my A-levels too where more than one of my teachers, including my head of year, had "given up", and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't much more liberating for me than it was sad that it had come to that stage.

This job has been a similar tale of underachievement. I hope one day I'll understand better what went wrong the way I now do with my A-levels. At the moment I could list the sequence of events: the he said, she said, I felt, I did, this happened, that happened kinda stuff. But I don't feel like I have a really good grasp on why I entered this repetitive pattern of screwing up here despite in many ways having it pretty good.

That's a little unfortunate because it would probably be useful info for my current job search. But just as it took a course where I performed well to understand why I performed badly on another, so maybe the lessons from this experience will become clear to me with time and other jobs.

At this stage the most positive thing I could take away from this is that depite generally being a lazy slacker (in any job), I have actually been really unhappy, demoralised and frustrated with how bad things have been here - with not performing, with not having had the self-control to do things I didn't like, with feeling unchallenged and unstimulated, with not having had the discipline or sense or motivation to turn it around. I never actually took any real pleasure in knowing that I was being paid relatively well to have such an easy life and to do such shoddy work.

I think, I hope, that being unhappy about that is a good thing.