You're Over-Qualified

It's one of the classic unfair reasons for not hiring someone, and to the best of my knowledge it is - unlike "it's a man's job" or "you're too old" - entirely legal.

God, how I wish they'd said that to me when I applied for my new job. I've been here for over a month now, and so far the only challenges I've had have been job-related, not work-related. That is, I've had the challenge of finding the wiring closets for the college Library, or figuring out who's responsible for creating network accounts for adjunct faculty, or getting them to give me keys to the department office.

The closest I've come to a technological challenge - something related to the work I was hired to do - has been distributing software updates to lab workstations using the system the people here use. But that's really more of a training issue. The rest of my work here has been b-o-r-i-n-g crap that a kid just out of college with proper training could do.

In fact, one of my co-workers, hired a few weeks before me, is a kid just out of college. Community College. My 16 years of professional experience and 7.75 academic years of college education are of no real value to me here. And in fact, the kid is actually way ahead of me in many areas, because he's been a student here at the college, knows his way around, and is already pretty familiar with the specific software they use.

Just being bored isn't the only reason I hate this job. Being frustrated at the lack of training and orientation I've received (which makes me effectively incompetent at so many things), and the dept "culture" of focusing more on "we don't do that" than on finding ways to solve people's problems (while claiming that "customer service" is of prime importance), are a big part of why I hate this job. But if they'd just had the kindness to say "no, thanks" when I applied, I could have spent the last two months just joylessly job hunting instead of getting my hopes up and then having them shat upon like this.