I will start off by saying that for the most part I enjoy my job. The work is challenging, I am friendly with my coworkers and I am able to (barely) support myself. There are days when I want to pack up and move back home. There are days when I question what the hell I am doing here in the first place, but more often than not I see the importance of sticking with it. Yet no matter how optimistic my outlook, there are two days of the week I absolutely dread.

Two days out of the week, I go to work at 3 a.m to edit the morning show, which begins at five. Everyone in the television industry has worked every shift imaginable, so no one at work is too baffled by my situation. Friends outside the business question why I do it. I even question why I do it. I do it because I believe in sticking with an undesirable situation because it almost always leads to something better. It is very difficult to go to bed at 7 o'clock in the evening when it is still light out, but I know it is not permanent and it feels good to be able to pay my rent. But even when I justify it through financial means, I still dread those two days.

I would not dread them as much if the people I worked with did something other than complain throughout my entire shift. Now, let me be clear: I love complaining. A good majority of this diary is dedicated to complaining, but it is here in Internet obscurity where people are not involuntarily subjected to it. When I go to work and all I hear are my coworkers whining incessantly, it brings me down. It is bad enough that it is three in the morning, the world is asleep and editing the show is a mind-numbing task without the compounded misery of everyone else heaped on top. I have dubbed that morning shift the Misery Train. I board the Misery Train two days a week. When I first get on board it is pretty quiet; it is just the producer and me. She is from the Midwest and I have never heard her say a decent thing about anyone. She is the kind of person who could win the lottery but whine about how long it took to claim her ticket, or that the ticket itself was bent, or that the gas station where she bought it had a sticky floor. Somehow, her Midwest accent makes her all the more annoying. "Oh my Gad, did you see how dumb thayat was?"

She is quiet until the two morning anchors arrive; then the Misery Train surges full speed ahead on an express route to Bitch and Moan Town. The preferred topic: our boss. Apparently no one really likes our boss, but those who work during the normal hours must save their rants for Happy Hour because said boss is in the building. But the boss doesn't ride the Misery Train, so for the next four hours the conversation consists exclusively of how incompetent our boss is, how stupid his e-mails are, how ridiculous his shirt looked, how if he were on fire, they would keep on walking. I sit at my edit station, click, type, click, type, thinking that surely they'll run out of fodder, but that time never comes. Each day they rehash the same tired points of how much they loathe our boss, and it is although they read off a script; it is literally the same material every day. Sometimes the conversations leak out onto other reporters and who said what and when, most of which is exaggerated because these people are never actually awake when the people they talk about are awake.

I do not love my boss, but I do not absolutely hate him. I think he is a nice person but has no business being put into a management position. Unfortunately, he is our manager, and this constant talk of how our office is going to hell really makes me depressed. It is unlike anything I have ever experienced. At the grocery store, mostly everyone was miserable too, but even they joked around to make the time pass. When I ride the Misery Train, I know there will be no inquiries about how my day went. We won't discuss movies or guys or celebrities; we'll just drone on and on about how our boss is an idiot. I am sort of surprised that the rest of the morning crew hasn't grown tired of complaining; even I feel some sort of guilt when I gossip about someone for too long.

I stay quiet during my ride on the Train. Sometimes I'll break out the iPod or turn up the volume to the TV at my desk. But at four in the morning, an infomercial isn't the solace I need.

The two morning anchors aren't people I would normally be friends with, either. The male anchor likes to believe he is some sort of smooth player with a devil-may-care attitude who just happens to be totally awesome at his job. He is not. I find it hard to think highly of someone who openly cheats on his girlfriend while treating the rest of us like we should be honored to be in his presence. The female anchor is pregnant, and she makes sure we all know it. It is like she is some sort of hero for bringing a life into this world, like no one else has ever managed to work and be pregnant at the same time. Not a day goes by where she does not divulge some sort of aversion to food she is recently developed or go on about how she is not sure how she'll manage the bills. She just loves to tell the story of how her husband was scheduled to have a vasectomy the day she found out she was pregnant. Yeah, she really loves that tale. It makes her out to be some superwoman who is like so totally inconvenienced by her unborn child. If you didn't want a kid, maybe you should have gotten an abortion. Is that mean? Probably. I do not care.

Friday is always a relief because it is the longest possible time before I ride the Misery Train again. On my other days I shoot and edit stories, something that I like doing. During the day, people talk about more than our boss; they talk about parties, engagements, weddings, movies, shows and whatever else is deemed interesting. They do not fixate on how bad things are. It is just so much easier to get through the day.

This year, our Christmas party is being held on a Sunday, which basically means that the Misery Train will not be able to attend because theoretically they'll be asleep when the party is going on. I found this to be rather amusing. Of course, this was a topic on the Train. You'd think a group of people who absolutely hated their jobs would not even care about not attending a work party, but oh, they cared. They went on about how unfair it was, about how they were blatantly not invited, and my favorite was when the big macho male anchor said, "I wasn't gonna go anyway. I would not go if they paid me." Mmhmm. Which explains why you're so mad, right? Of course.

Sooner or later my schedule will change and I will not have to deal with these miserable folks. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the he-anchor has a countdown to his last day. Which is in over 2 years. Every morning he strides in and informs us that he has six hundred-and-some-odd days left, because he hates his job SO MUCH that it is necessary to keep an accurate countdown so we are all aware that he is going to blow this popsicle stand as soon as he can. I wish people came with a mute button.