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Heffling
No PicEverRegistered User regular
No PicEverRegistered User regular
So, I wanna talk a bit about what happened in my life last year. I hope folks don't mind, but this all does revolve around my job and job anxieties. For reference, I'm an engineering, I work with safety devices, and I've been working with our products for 15 years.
In February, I had 3 major life events occur. The first was that my boss who works out of our French factory was accepting a bubble assignment as the new factory manager while they found a permanent replacement (or promoted him, if that's what he wanted). We have a 4-person team at our factory in Texas, and he asked me to step up and be the manager for the other 3 and the engineering representative to the plant leadership and executives. Representing local leadership has always been a challenge because my boss is 7 hours different.
The second, a few days later, was that my wife had a partial rupture in her L4L5 spinal disc that caused her significant pain and pinched her sciatic nerve. So, while taking on a bunch of new responsibilities at work, suddenly my wife is unable to do most of our chores. We agreed when I was in college that I would work to support us, and she would stay home and handle the chores. She's loved this, and it worked for 17 years at this point, but it meant I was really unprepared for just how much housework there can be.
Then, one week to the day after I was asked to handle my own bubble assignment, I was told that we would be switching from Oracle to SAP, and as the engineering manager I was the data steward for over 130,000 part numbers. Oh, and instead of the normal 6 months to 12 months schedule, we were being given 4 months. Oh, and the first few are already passed. It's Feb 10th and we've got to be ready to flip over on May 7th.
So in a week my stress levels went from bored to excited to oh god I don't know if I can do this to *vomit sounds*. Over the next 3-1/2 months I missed 5 days because I would get so stressed out that I would puke. One issue I told leadership at the beginning was that they cut our part list down too much, as we only imported about 30k part numbers of the 130k in the system. So we get to May, and go live happens, and we're all panicking because we still barely know how to work in SAP. But we can enter, execute, and delivery shipments. And our customers could use our app to order parts from us. But we immediately got flooded with complaints that parts that were available under the old system weren't under the new. And it's because we still needed to load in about 35k more parts. So for me, this meant that my data cleaning that I had been doing for 3 months had to continue until all these newly identified parts are ready. All while learning SAP and taking on a lot of responsibilities that we didn't used to own or simply didn't exist in Oracle.
Thankfully, my wife could still drive for a few months, so she was able to handle her doctor's appointments. But over the next few months her health would degrade, and by May I had to take her to all appointments. Thankfully in May we were sent to an orthopedic surgeon specializing in her kind of bone degeneration and disc issues. So, on June 13th, she underwent laminectomy. They removed the burst portion of her disc and ground out parts of her spinal bones to keep the nerves from getting compressed.
And for a few days after the surgery, her recovery went well. Less pain and more mobility every day. But starting around day 6, she started to hurt more. You have to understand, my wife is a very tough woman. I've seen her take injuries that would have had me in tears with barely a shrug. So on Day 8, when she said she was hurting enough that the hydrocode they gave her made no difference, I took her to the hospital. This was in the evening, and I was with her until 2am. They had to give her dilaudid, which is super morphine, just to get her pain under control.
She had surgery at 10 am the following day, because she had a bad infection in her spine. The surgeon told me he removed enough pus to have filled a volume the size of my thumb. He also had to remove some of her bone and the rest of her disc because the infection had done a lot of damage. The plan now was to keep her at the hospital for 4 days so they can keep draining the surgery site and keep her on strong antibiotics. They had an Infectious Disease Doctor also attend to her. The wife and I were both nervous at meeting her the first time because she was very young, but we very quickly grew to like her a lot. She came in like a hurricane, yelling at the nurses for not following her instructions or keeping things to her satisfaction. And while she was visiting, the surgeon dropped in and he REALLY got an earful about how he had handled things.
So, this is late June. One blessing is that I work from home. My days are:
Get up. Feed dogs. Make sure dog who hates her pills gets her pills, and other dog who has diabetes gets her insulin.
Work from 8 am until 4:30 pm. I don't eat, I only take a break to pee or refill my sugar free kool-aid.
Drive to the hospital takes 45 minutes, it takes me about an hour because I would stop and get donuts or similar treats for the nurses. My sister is a nurse and works in the same unit at a different hospital.
I stay with the wife, usually until around 8 or 9 pm. Then I drive 45 minutes to home. I might grab a burger on the way.
I get home. Feed dogs. Make sure dog who hates her pills gets her pills, and other dog who has diabetes gets her insulin.
I go upstairs to my PC, which is the same chair and spot I sit in to do my work all day. I take a few bites of the burger, but I'm still super stressed out, my stomach can't handle it, but thankfully I don't puke.
It's 10:30 pm now, so I take my pills including an ambien (can't sleep without drugs). I asleep by 11:30 pm or 12:00 am.
With her back pains, we found it was best if she slept in our recliner rather than the bed. So I bought an electrically controlled bed frame that moves like a hospital bed. Now she can get everything positioned just how she needs to sleep pain free. But it means I am sleeping in the guest room so she can adjust without waking me up. Over the weekend, I feed the dogs, visit her for 8 hours, take apart our old solid wood bed frame, build the new frame, etc. Then I feed the dogs again and pass out. But by the time she's home, she has an adjustable bed she can sleep in comfortably. The only problem is, I can't sleep when suddenly the bed starts to fold me like a pretzel. So now I am sleeping on the recliner.
My wife is always in pain now, and has to take narcotics on a very strict schedule or she ends up in massive pain. The narcotics is managed through a Pain Management Specialist. In Texas they have cracked down hard on Opiates, and my wife was so scared that she was going to have to live with that pain without any help that she was in tears. They ended up giving her a very large amount of morphine pills.
While all this is going on, we've had to start taking her to an injection center where they show us how to administer her very strong antibiotics (Vancomycn) twice daily in a process that takes 75 min and later 150 min to accomplish. She has to be tested every 2 weeks to see if her white cell count and other readings are normal, indicating the infection is gone. And here's where we discover she had a staphylococcus
Work wise, HR directs me to fill out for FMLA and stresses that I can't use it for my health issues. I end missing several more days due to stress. And I want to point out that at the time, I didn't know I was stressed. I didn't have time to deal with stress, so I just kept going and doing because it was either that or fall apart, lose my job, and then lose my wife because we lost our healthcare. I couldn't stop to think about anything, because that might result in me thinking about my stress and I would just fall apart after that.
Now we're in late July. The executive in charge of the project is supposed to be focusing on the next plant they are converting, rather than still supporting us. But the Delta Load was a huge miss on his part, so he had to fix it. Of course, we were given a schedule of 3 months to clean up the Delta parts. We got 6 weeks. But it went live (end of July), and now I could work on getting into a new routine at work. Except that a process we told them was 100% critical to the operation of the engineering team be in place for us to work wasn't in place, and in fact hadn't been started. Rather than have a step-by-step process with proper handoffs, we work off of a report and an excel spreadsheet I wrote to find parts that should be active in our system but aren't. Thankfully in August our Senior Global CSR Manager was able to release a new Workflow Process for our part loading. And because I'm good with MS Excel, I got tasked with managing the workloads. I totally failed this because we immediately were swamped by more requests than we could ever handle. All this stress leads to more missed work.
Unfortunately in August, I had a meeting with my boss's boss. I had rescheduled a meeting we had because I was throwing up (at the time I thought it was something else...really anything else, other than stress).
On August 27th, I received my first and only written warning in my 15+ years. That was a wakeup call for me. I had to get the stress under control.
Coincidentally, my next door neighbor dropped by one afternoon so we could see all of the new storm windows they were putting in. She had a cig in her hand, and lit it up. I used to smoke, so didn't think anything of it. It wasn't until I realized why hanging out with her reminded me of college, it was the weed. I started buying and smoking weed (only after work, about a quarter per month) because I really needed help to not be a ball of stress.
In October, one of the engineers on our team was working on a long term program to build in critical dimension values into our reports so you can get an instant feedback. She was nearly finished, but started to have severe health issues. So she left on FMLA at the end of October and that is ongoing to current day. We're now down a person on an already tiny team.
@Athenor and I talk a lot here, and one discovery he had last year was that he was ADHD and it could be treated. Not only that, the treatment significantly improved his life.
I talked to my doctor, and he prescribed me Adderall. This was Octoberish. I tried it, but didn't like the quick raise and fast drop, so got moved to Adderall XR (Nov). This seems perfect for me, and really lets me focus. It's what I used to this day.
Ok so we're now through to early December. I'm taking the week off between Xmas and NwYr, My wife is scheduled to have her next back surgery in early December. It's with the same doctor for the last two. The doctor asked me why I'd use him again, and I told him very coldly, "Because, sir, should my wife suffer further at your hands, then at least she will be well taken care of by the malpractice lawsuit.
Her surgery is a flying success. The mount in some bolts and brackets and whatever to fuse her body, then give her a magnetic device meant to spur on bone growth. Within a day she can walk, within a week I constantly have to reminder her to slow down.
After all of this and more I haven't written {yet}, I had my annual review with both my old boss going back to his old roll and to the interim global engineering manager would go back to his role working on TRS. The review went amazing, best I've ever had. I filled out what I thought they wanted to see on the forms, and in the free section I wrote up a 4 page overview of the challenges I faced in the last year and how I overcame them or where I failed. And they loved it. I asked if there was an opportunity to keep my current roll rather than go back as planned. I am told that if they can make it a permanent position, it will be mine, and I should expect a significant pay bump. If they can't they will still find a way to have me be the site leader just having the employees report directly to Patrick but locally report to me unofficially. There's company policy that a manager must have at least 10 employees or the management should be delayered.
The 2nd proposal and the one I really like is that the local team will report to patrick but dotted line report to me, and I will be responsible for everything except reviews and salary (I will be able to give input).
So after a horrible year where I was almost fired, almost lost my wife, and could have been fired for just general incompetence or for excessive absences; I find myself going into the new year with renewed hope and optimism.
@Smolfsine I love you, my wife. And it is my dearest hope that we will have a much better year.
I am sure I will make edits to this, as I wrote it after taking my ambien for the day.
*edit* I so like use the word "so" so much. So I've gone in and deleted most and updated a few sentences to be more readable. I'm actually really happy with what I said, because I haven't been able to share this with anyone other than my wife, who couldn't really support me because she couldn't support herself.
I also updated the title.
In February, I had 3 major life events occur. The first was that my boss who works out of our French factory was accepting a bubble assignment as the new factory manager while they found a permanent replacement (or promoted him, if that's what he wanted). We have a 4-person team at our factory in Texas, and he asked me to step up and be the manager for the other 3 and the engineering representative to the plant leadership and executives. Representing local leadership has always been a challenge because my boss is 7 hours different.
The second, a few days later, was that my wife had a partial rupture in her L4L5 spinal disc that caused her significant pain and pinched her sciatic nerve. So, while taking on a bunch of new responsibilities at work, suddenly my wife is unable to do most of our chores. We agreed when I was in college that I would work to support us, and she would stay home and handle the chores. She's loved this, and it worked for 17 years at this point, but it meant I was really unprepared for just how much housework there can be.
Then, one week to the day after I was asked to handle my own bubble assignment, I was told that we would be switching from Oracle to SAP, and as the engineering manager I was the data steward for over 130,000 part numbers. Oh, and instead of the normal 6 months to 12 months schedule, we were being given 4 months. Oh, and the first few are already passed. It's Feb 10th and we've got to be ready to flip over on May 7th.
So in a week my stress levels went from bored to excited to oh god I don't know if I can do this to *vomit sounds*. Over the next 3-1/2 months I missed 5 days because I would get so stressed out that I would puke. One issue I told leadership at the beginning was that they cut our part list down too much, as we only imported about 30k part numbers of the 130k in the system. So we get to May, and go live happens, and we're all panicking because we still barely know how to work in SAP. But we can enter, execute, and delivery shipments. And our customers could use our app to order parts from us. But we immediately got flooded with complaints that parts that were available under the old system weren't under the new. And it's because we still needed to load in about 35k more parts. So for me, this meant that my data cleaning that I had been doing for 3 months had to continue until all these newly identified parts are ready. All while learning SAP and taking on a lot of responsibilities that we didn't used to own or simply didn't exist in Oracle.
Thankfully, my wife could still drive for a few months, so she was able to handle her doctor's appointments. But over the next few months her health would degrade, and by May I had to take her to all appointments. Thankfully in May we were sent to an orthopedic surgeon specializing in her kind of bone degeneration and disc issues. So, on June 13th, she underwent laminectomy. They removed the burst portion of her disc and ground out parts of her spinal bones to keep the nerves from getting compressed.
And for a few days after the surgery, her recovery went well. Less pain and more mobility every day. But starting around day 6, she started to hurt more. You have to understand, my wife is a very tough woman. I've seen her take injuries that would have had me in tears with barely a shrug. So on Day 8, when she said she was hurting enough that the hydrocode they gave her made no difference, I took her to the hospital. This was in the evening, and I was with her until 2am. They had to give her dilaudid, which is super morphine, just to get her pain under control.
She had surgery at 10 am the following day, because she had a bad infection in her spine. The surgeon told me he removed enough pus to have filled a volume the size of my thumb. He also had to remove some of her bone and the rest of her disc because the infection had done a lot of damage. The plan now was to keep her at the hospital for 4 days so they can keep draining the surgery site and keep her on strong antibiotics. They had an Infectious Disease Doctor also attend to her. The wife and I were both nervous at meeting her the first time because she was very young, but we very quickly grew to like her a lot. She came in like a hurricane, yelling at the nurses for not following her instructions or keeping things to her satisfaction. And while she was visiting, the surgeon dropped in and he REALLY got an earful about how he had handled things.
So, this is late June. One blessing is that I work from home. My days are:
Get up. Feed dogs. Make sure dog who hates her pills gets her pills, and other dog who has diabetes gets her insulin.
Work from 8 am until 4:30 pm. I don't eat, I only take a break to pee or refill my sugar free kool-aid.
Drive to the hospital takes 45 minutes, it takes me about an hour because I would stop and get donuts or similar treats for the nurses. My sister is a nurse and works in the same unit at a different hospital.
I stay with the wife, usually until around 8 or 9 pm. Then I drive 45 minutes to home. I might grab a burger on the way.
I get home. Feed dogs. Make sure dog who hates her pills gets her pills, and other dog who has diabetes gets her insulin.
I go upstairs to my PC, which is the same chair and spot I sit in to do my work all day. I take a few bites of the burger, but I'm still super stressed out, my stomach can't handle it, but thankfully I don't puke.
It's 10:30 pm now, so I take my pills including an ambien (can't sleep without drugs). I asleep by 11:30 pm or 12:00 am.
With her back pains, we found it was best if she slept in our recliner rather than the bed. So I bought an electrically controlled bed frame that moves like a hospital bed. Now she can get everything positioned just how she needs to sleep pain free. But it means I am sleeping in the guest room so she can adjust without waking me up. Over the weekend, I feed the dogs, visit her for 8 hours, take apart our old solid wood bed frame, build the new frame, etc. Then I feed the dogs again and pass out. But by the time she's home, she has an adjustable bed she can sleep in comfortably. The only problem is, I can't sleep when suddenly the bed starts to fold me like a pretzel. So now I am sleeping on the recliner.
My wife is always in pain now, and has to take narcotics on a very strict schedule or she ends up in massive pain. The narcotics is managed through a Pain Management Specialist. In Texas they have cracked down hard on Opiates, and my wife was so scared that she was going to have to live with that pain without any help that she was in tears. They ended up giving her a very large amount of morphine pills.
While all this is going on, we've had to start taking her to an injection center where they show us how to administer her very strong antibiotics (Vancomycn) twice daily in a process that takes 75 min and later 150 min to accomplish. She has to be tested every 2 weeks to see if her white cell count and other readings are normal, indicating the infection is gone. And here's where we discover she had a staphylococcus
Work wise, HR directs me to fill out for FMLA and stresses that I can't use it for my health issues. I end missing several more days due to stress. And I want to point out that at the time, I didn't know I was stressed. I didn't have time to deal with stress, so I just kept going and doing because it was either that or fall apart, lose my job, and then lose my wife because we lost our healthcare. I couldn't stop to think about anything, because that might result in me thinking about my stress and I would just fall apart after that.
Now we're in late July. The executive in charge of the project is supposed to be focusing on the next plant they are converting, rather than still supporting us. But the Delta Load was a huge miss on his part, so he had to fix it. Of course, we were given a schedule of 3 months to clean up the Delta parts. We got 6 weeks. But it went live (end of July), and now I could work on getting into a new routine at work. Except that a process we told them was 100% critical to the operation of the engineering team be in place for us to work wasn't in place, and in fact hadn't been started. Rather than have a step-by-step process with proper handoffs, we work off of a report and an excel spreadsheet I wrote to find parts that should be active in our system but aren't. Thankfully in August our Senior Global CSR Manager was able to release a new Workflow Process for our part loading. And because I'm good with MS Excel, I got tasked with managing the workloads. I totally failed this because we immediately were swamped by more requests than we could ever handle. All this stress leads to more missed work.
Unfortunately in August, I had a meeting with my boss's boss. I had rescheduled a meeting we had because I was throwing up (at the time I thought it was something else...really anything else, other than stress).
On August 27th, I received my first and only written warning in my 15+ years. That was a wakeup call for me. I had to get the stress under control.
Coincidentally, my next door neighbor dropped by one afternoon so we could see all of the new storm windows they were putting in. She had a cig in her hand, and lit it up. I used to smoke, so didn't think anything of it. It wasn't until I realized why hanging out with her reminded me of college, it was the weed. I started buying and smoking weed (only after work, about a quarter per month) because I really needed help to not be a ball of stress.
In October, one of the engineers on our team was working on a long term program to build in critical dimension values into our reports so you can get an instant feedback. She was nearly finished, but started to have severe health issues. So she left on FMLA at the end of October and that is ongoing to current day. We're now down a person on an already tiny team.
@Athenor and I talk a lot here, and one discovery he had last year was that he was ADHD and it could be treated. Not only that, the treatment significantly improved his life.
I talked to my doctor, and he prescribed me Adderall. This was Octoberish. I tried it, but didn't like the quick raise and fast drop, so got moved to Adderall XR (Nov). This seems perfect for me, and really lets me focus. It's what I used to this day.
Ok so we're now through to early December. I'm taking the week off between Xmas and NwYr, My wife is scheduled to have her next back surgery in early December. It's with the same doctor for the last two. The doctor asked me why I'd use him again, and I told him very coldly, "Because, sir, should my wife suffer further at your hands, then at least she will be well taken care of by the malpractice lawsuit.
Her surgery is a flying success. The mount in some bolts and brackets and whatever to fuse her body, then give her a magnetic device meant to spur on bone growth. Within a day she can walk, within a week I constantly have to reminder her to slow down.
After all of this and more I haven't written {yet}, I had my annual review with both my old boss going back to his old roll and to the interim global engineering manager would go back to his role working on TRS. The review went amazing, best I've ever had. I filled out what I thought they wanted to see on the forms, and in the free section I wrote up a 4 page overview of the challenges I faced in the last year and how I overcame them or where I failed. And they loved it. I asked if there was an opportunity to keep my current roll rather than go back as planned. I am told that if they can make it a permanent position, it will be mine, and I should expect a significant pay bump. If they can't they will still find a way to have me be the site leader just having the employees report directly to Patrick but locally report to me unofficially. There's company policy that a manager must have at least 10 employees or the management should be delayered.
The 2nd proposal and the one I really like is that the local team will report to patrick but dotted line report to me, and I will be responsible for everything except reviews and salary (I will be able to give input).
So after a horrible year where I was almost fired, almost lost my wife, and could have been fired for just general incompetence or for excessive absences; I find myself going into the new year with renewed hope and optimism.
@Smolfsine I love you, my wife. And it is my dearest hope that we will have a much better year.
I am sure I will make edits to this, as I wrote it after taking my ambien for the day.
*edit* I so like use the word "so" so much. So I've gone in and deleted most and updated a few sentences to be more readable. I'm actually really happy with what I said, because I haven't been able to share this with anyone other than my wife, who couldn't really support me because she couldn't support herself.
I also updated the title.
Sterica on
+70
This discussion has been closed.
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Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
In my own news all my reviews are done and my employees don't hate me! Also, despite pulling myself out of burnout the past year, I did pretty well.
@Just_Bri_Thanks -- just as I feared, a new thread was started after you posted. What field are you in? I've seen this place do wonders to help people network and find new work.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/a-bug-lurking-for-12-years-gives-attackers-root-on-every-major-linux-distro/
Time to check into work...
I have a jack of all trade smattering of job experience, but by far my history has been in logistics. I also have more than a little management experience.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
So last other Analyst put in his 4 weeks a few weeks ago. His main thing beyond threat hunter was Splunk, and I was told I was going to take that on on top of my other work. Lots of work and it sucks, but Splunk is super interesting and getting the chance to be the person in charge is a HUGE opportunity. So I spent a week doing training every day and reading stuff, and taking courses, putting the work in.
Co-Worker got jury duty last week. Had to spend 7 business days in court. So we set up training sessions for 6:30 AM. I usually work at 9, but its OK, I'm learning. Boss requested I record these, sure I was going to anyway so I can referencne them later. Do that for 4 days, spend the time between these training sessions and work doing more learning. I'm getting there, I'm learning a lot about the Splunk Back End, and think I'm ready to start assisting with our migration to the Cloud.
Well yesterday my boss said that actually this other Co-worker, our Engineer, wants to be the Splunk lead, and so he is letting her. Because, you see, according to the boss, he did this because he knows how much work doing the 6 other things I do on TOP of the training manuals for my new superiors. And SOMEONE has to do tickets and I already do the bulk of them, so she is now the project lead. She hasn't been at any of our training sessions, or cared enough to try, but thats why they had me record them. Today we had a meeting with our Splunk people and she was 20 minutes late and we had to poke her several times to get her in.
I feel like they are really trying to get me to not stay here. Instead of an opportunity to lean a new software and manage it, they instead want me to be the backup so when she takes vacation (like all of next week...when were in the middle of moving to Cloud?) or if she leaves I can take over again. I really just feel like they are letting the senior employee do this because she requested, but as a co-worker she has been...well I think I've spoken to her 3 times over the past 2 years and 2 of them she told me I was bothering her. No one knows what she does, and she refuses to share info, which makes me feel like being her secondary is going to be hard.
I dunno, I could be off base, but I'm pissed because the only thing I was excited about has been taken from me so I can focus on the stuff that already feels like a slap. "Your not experienced enough to do this thing, but get back to making training manuals for your future boss and superiors"
Okay! So what kind of things would you like to do? Don't sell yourself short. Logistics, to me, sounds like trucking, so if I'm off please let me know. There's a lot of high demand in that area right now, thanks to the supply shortages. Location's also a big deal, so maybe just region or state or whatever?
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
In other news, the last few weeks I've been listening to rSlash. And the last story of today's upload (which is the bulk of the episode, starting a couple minutes in) just resonates HARD with me.
Never, ever forget your value.
Definitely going to take a day or two off next month.
My buddy is saying they have quite a few openings at tenable, so if you see anything on there that looks interesting, let me know and he can whip up a referral link.
Pretty sure @Cambiata would do the same for splunk gig.
I'm glad you've gotten the position you're in, and the experience and pay bump were pretty great, but seems like a bunch of stuff is about to crash down, and it's clear they can't (won't) promote you and you're a bit of a dumping ground of responsibilities other people don't want to do. Just a thought.
Overall, it's probably still not a bad position. But I know stuff like that can be hard to swallow.
Yeah... you know I support you, Bucketman, as we're comrades in arms in this fucked up state. But dangling something as cool and as lucerative as Splunk on your lap, and then pulling it? That's... that's just low.
And make no mistake: your co-worker wants to be Splunk lead because it looks AMAZING on resumes. Like.. massive pay bump levels when they leave. Just ask our mutual rep for stories on that.
There is something highly dangerous in constantly, CONSTANTLY putting shit on your highest performing employees because they can just do it. It leads to burnout, which it sounds like you are experiencing.
... Gah. I wish our pay was better. We are having absolutely no luck finding a new cloud computer / automation system admin, and I'd love to work with you.
We had the have the pay discussion. SInce we are state funded, we have hard cap limits on how much certain positions can pay. So the upper management is going to meet with state people about maybe bumping the IT salaries up a bit, because not just my group, across the board people are leaving to go make 60k+ more a year elsewhere. I mean, the co-worker tthats leaving told me his new gig DOUBLED his pay to be their new Splunk guy. Just straight offered twice what he made here. I can't imagine that kind of offer.
Just going to do my work, keep my head down, and work on myself for a few months while I look elsewhere.
Get a cerrrrrrrrrrrtttt!
But also good plan!
I just got a free voucher for Microsoft Cloud, its a start, and I've been studying for my Security + for a few weeks now. My goal is both of those by June
Good plan.
Tell your upper management to get in touch with our upper management. It's fucking killing us too, and we're gonna be having the same argument (if we haven't already).
Thankful all the way to the guillotine, anyway.
As far as my thoughts going into these meetings, all I can come up with now is I am just. so. tired. I was mostly okay with pandemic school IT support until sometime this school year and now I'm just being ground into dust. I'm short tempered. I'm tired. Normal asks are starting to annoy the ever-loving shit out of me. I dread going to work and it's a relief to be going home.
I think it's all just burn out because pandemic. But there's really just no end in sight. Like, I've had a ticket open in my queue since October. Poster printer doing wacky things and can't be used. Normally this is a call to an outside vendor for repair. We're now in January and I'm still trying to get a technician in just to look at it. I can't ever get anything done anymore because the easy, basic, simple tasks are now drawn out into long affairs that need constant attention and I'm interrupted every 5 minutes because some kid didn't feel like bringing their computer to school today and wants to borrow one, but is gonna whine about handing over their phone for 10 minutes before ultimately walking away without a computer or handing over their phone. Or, you know, now I have to supervise classrooms a couple days a week on top of it.
It me!
"Yes, it was a very prosperous and successful period for China."
"Quid... Are you sure?"
"Yes. Definitely."
I really should not be allowed to be a student of anything anymore.
How well does sarcasm translate to Mandarin anyway?
I finally got a raise, $0.69
And we're getting a new position/hire on our team. They will be stationed at the other location, and who knows if the pay will be high enough to get it filled, but possible good news
Ha!
It doesn't.
We have a monthly briefing we do for our community (~300 people between two sessions), and for whatever reason it's been decided that there gets to be a live Q+A section, and I'm usually one of the only ones on the line that feels guilty enough when enough time has passed on a question to jump on the question. I DON'T LIKE IT!
USERS! Just submit your questions in the chat! Then I can research them and get back to you with a better answer!
What am I supposed to do during downtime now?
I joined it months ago and can't get in, no idea.
It was a segment with someone who goes to the sub and isn't media trained so they chewed them up. I'm assuming the sub is being trolled and they locked it down for a while so things cool down.
I'm using a pocket sized Lechtturm1917 I got somewhere that is all dots on the pages and I draw in my own lines and add dates to turn it into a planner. The weird nature of how our blocks are formatted makes printed planners not work super great. Got it all color coded with different pens too.
Dug out my old template for the cover labels. This one is a little weird since it is now labeled "Library Schedule: Spring 2020 & Spring 2022"
I partially wish I could find a digital calendar that would allow me to pre-program blocks of time and then select from them when entering new events, instead of having to manually punch in weird times for each block. But also I like the physicality of the current method.
Also specifically requested by Fox. That should have been reason alone to not do it.