My first job out of college, I was an office worker inside a movie studio near Hollywood, and as a 22-year-old who had just weeks before been a student at Indiana University, I was as excited as I could be. That said, my job was nothing particularly special or interesting. A chimpanzee could have done it -- or a chimpanzee with a driver's license, anyway. I drove to a few houses around Los Angeles, dropping off television scripts that I kept wishing I had written, but mostly, I did a lot of filing.

That is, for about a week. Then, when I had cleaned the office and organized the filing cabinet, it became clear that there wasn't a lot for me to do. I sharpened my boss's pencils and watered his plants. I washed out his coffee mug. It was 1992, and I had no computer to hide behind, and so I just wandered the office, trying to straighten things up. But everything was immaculate, and with the phone almost silent, I rarely even needed to answer the phone.

I was polishing a picture frame on the wall when my boss -- an assistant to one of the owners of the television production company, and so I was an assistant to an assistant -- came up to me and delivered the bad news: I was out of a job. Not because I was a bad employee. I simply wasn't a busy employee.

For those of you still employed and secure in your jobs, congratulations! You may be getting a raise next year. A survey by two compensation consulting firms revealed that businesses intend to increase employee pay by an average of 3.5 percent in 2009. But with good news comes bad news these days, of course, and the flip side is that these same employers are still intent on cutting jobs -- 26 percent of them plan layoffs next year.

If you're feeling secure, there's even more good news: Your raise will go farther. That's because economists believe the rate of inflation for 2009 will be just 1.5 percent. Still, you're not completely off the hook. A quarter of surveyed companies plan to raise contributions for health care. Overall, Big Business will be reducing benefits, and many don't intend to give bonuses.

Even if you're not on the receiving end of those raises, take some comfort. With this move, businesses are signaling their long-term confidence in the economy, believing that, hey, maybe the country won't fall into depression and Obama might actually do a good job. They're doing their part to get people shopping again and encourage lenders to reopen their coffers. Of course, that's faint consolation now if you've been axed or nearing the chopping block. But at least The Man is showing some mercy by not cutting back on everything.

It truly will be just champagne wishes and caviar dreams for most employees at their holiday parties. Big corporations like Viacom, Hearst and ABC News, which used to book Hiltons and serve booze galore, have either canceled or scaled back party plans.

Now small businesses are following suit in scaling back on festivities, says the Associated Press. It's not primarily due to limited cash flow; some feel it's just not appropriate to party when pink slips are fast and furious.

According to a survey done by Battalia Winston Amrop, an executive search firm in New York, only 81% of businesses will have some type of holiday party this year, the lowest level in 20 years. Also, 37% say their party has been cancelled or scaled back, double the 19% of companies affected last year.

How much would it take for you to quit your job and just "enjoy life"? For Andrew Lahde, hedge fund manager extraordinaire, it was somewhere in the "eight figures" but still "small" compared to the aspiration of his financially-high-flying compatriots. But his message speaks to everyone (even me, whose fortune runs to three figures ... at least for today).

After having amassed amazing returns in his one-year-old hedge fund, Lahde abruptly quit and handed the fund to a partner to liquidate and return to his investors. In a goodbye letter, Lahde wrote, "I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life."

While you and I aren't working toward nine-figure fortunes, it's likely your life is something like this. How much time do you spend on your work? Is it too much? Do you spend the whole of your vacation tied to your smartphone? Are you neglecting your family and your health in order to make your boss or your shareholders happy, or to create some sort of business "legacy"? I took a look at myself over the past few months and had to think: who am I doing this for?

I, too, stopped working so hard, trading a full-time job for a smattering of freelance work I can do during preschool and after my kids go to bed. I probably won't be enjoying life Lahde style, but I think his advice is worth reading and resonates deeply with me. What do you think of it?

I've had a few boring jobs in my day, but the most depressing one was my first job out of college. I was bored stiff, and I didn't want to be.

It was an exciting job for a then-22-year-old. I had landed a job as an office production assistant, working at the studios of 20th Century Fox. One of my corny highlights was looking out a window into a parking lot one afternoon and seeing Sean Connery get out of the car. I had arrived, sort of.

But while the office needed help, it turned out that they didn't need all that much help. Within a few days, I had organized the filing cabinets, ran several errands and helped get this television production office running smoothly. But I was an assistant of an assistant, and after about a week there, it started to become apparent that there was no longer much for me to do. Every day became more and more boring, and I became more and more desperate to look busy. I think it worked too well. When I resorted to polishing the picture frames on the wall, the assistant came over to me and said, "I think we both know what has to happen..."

So I was "let go," but given two week's severance pay, which was really very decent of them. And then I promptly found a job where I was even more bored, and the location -- an office building miles and miles from Hollywood -- wasn't exciting either.

I won't bore everyone by going through my history of every boring job I've ever had, but I've been thinking about my earlier stabs at gainful employment because of a fun story in The Orlando Sentinel earlier this week about "boreout," a condition coined by Swiss authors and business consultants, Phillippe Rothlin and Peter Werder.

A recent Forbes.com article about bullies in the workplace reads like a primer for Office Space, that fine cult comedy that anyone who's ever set foot in a cube farm can relate to. With that in mind, here are some signs of bullying to watch out for, translated into some of the movie's best-loved catch phrases:

• A case of the Mondays: You often feel physically ill at the start of each new work week.

• Your TPS report needs a cover sheet: Your work is constantly criticized, and your mistakes are repeatedly brought up.

• That's my stapler: Your boss is isolating you, going as far as to move your desk.

• Yeah, I'll need you to come in this Saturday: Your boss always schedules last-minute after-hours meetings.

• Not enough flair: Your supervisor finds nit-picky ways to ensure you'll fail at your job.

If you barely cared that the clock sprung forward over the weekend, there's a good reason.

Unless you're someone who really, really cherishes your sleep, daylight savings, or any daylight, doesn't dictate how we structure our work days as much as another factor: television. (Frankly, I think we all knew this intuitively, but it's nice to have it confirmed.)

You always suspected that social butterfly two cubicles away was slowing you down -- and now you have the research to back it up.

New research by Dr. Tim Welsh, who teaches at the University of Calgary, has written a paper that concludes what we all already knew: people in your work environment are holding you back. In fact, even if your co-workers are quiet, if they're within your field of vision, that can be enough to slow down your performance.

It's all in Welsh's paper, titled, "Seeing vs. believing: Is believing sufficient to activate the processes of response co-representation?"

Words matter. Politicians know it. Lawyers who draw up contracts know it. And people writing classified ads, know it.

A few friends of mine are looking for jobs, and so I've been thinking lately about how rough a world it is in the land of classified ads. Obviously, even though the consensus among many experts seems to be that the best jobs come from referrals and networking, there are occasionally gems in the newspaper want ads and online job sites. But at the same time, there are a lot of words that sound good, until you decipher the double meaning behind them. So in the interest of any career hunters out there, especially if you're new to the job market, I thought I'd provide a public service and offer my handy-dandy list of watchwords that should make any job seeker wary.

Self starter: Be willing to start with nothing but amaze us, anyway; and for money that the rest of the staff and your employer would never work for.