I’m a little late, but I must respond with the Leo Getz line “they FUCK you at the drive through.”
Oh, and if anyone was wondering…
I called in and talked to our Store Director so I’ve taken the last two days off without pay and I should be OK re: keeping my job. (There is always the option to call the boss and negotiate, after all, which is a major motivation for me trying to be a model employee, it’s a better position to bargain from) Pretty sure, between the fever, chills, joint pain, headache, and crushing fatigue this is actually flu. On top of that, the asthma medication (because of course my lungs have to get into an uproar over any upper respiratory thing) is making me dizzy and shaky.
Poor birds - they’ve had to spend most of the last two days in their cage with only basic bird food and water, but it’s all I’ve felt up to doing for them. Woke up this morning with Griffin looking at me intently (their cage is in the bedroom) and saying over and over “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK.” Think they might be worried about me. At least Griffin seems to be. Never entirely sure about the other two.
This is the first time in 30 years I’ve been sick without anyone to fuss over me, hand me tissues, and remind me to keep drinking fluids. I feel very alone.
The good news is that the fever broke last night and I’m in less pain, so I seem to be starting a recovery. I’m feeling less bad than yesterday. Tomorrow is a scheduled day off for me, so I can continue to rest up and should be back to work on Friday.
I’m a widow, and I can relate to that. 
{{{HUGS}}}
Sometimes that’s got to do with one or more local managers. I’ve seen companies which had the same official worldwide policies for things such as “how to treat sick leave” (you could call in sick so long as it was 1 or 2 working days) but the actual policy varied depending on whether the person in charge of watching it was a human being or a jerk. I’ve had to drag my ass out of the house to get a doctor’s note saying “she’s sick as a dog with upper tract cold” and take it to the office in person, when my reason to not go in was simply that I sounded like I was dying. I wasn’t terribly sick, but I did sound as if I was and that isn’t good when you share an office with 12 others. Company policies allowed us to WFH “so long as manager approves it”; local HR manager was convinced that “WFH means no work” and freaked out whenever a manager authorized it; he hated a specific customer who’d actually suggested it when they asked to get service outside our regular hours. The idea of someone working from home on account of “I’m not horribly sick but I sound like I’m about to hork up a lung” was just incomprehensible to him.
The head of our IT department is like that. I spent several years working under his umbrella and have put in an application to return there. They’re still only allowed two days per week unless inclement weather or other hazards prevent workers from going in.
The umbrella I’m currently under is being automated and 100 employees at my level will be demoted. Going from the whole week to two days is better than risking a pay cut. I’m not even sure automation will help all that much given all the work that goes through here.
I’m sorry, Broomstick. Make sure to get plenty of rest and plenty of fluids!
I’ve been on short-term disability since my surgery this summer. Nobody, including myself, ever expected me to be out for this long, but the recovery has been arduous and complicated by several other things which never came into play before the surgery.
There’s a ton of paperwork, for one. The employee is responsible for it as well as the weekly phone calls to their short term disability examiner to make sure everything is in order. While I was on FMLA my current employer’s corporate benefits office sent out a packet to me every few weeks for my doctor to fill out after my latest appointment – it’s pages of everything imaginable concerning my disability, what my prognosis is, when will I be cleared for work, is there anything ADA-related we should be aware of? Once I passed the FMLA period and it was obvious I wouldn’t be returning before the holidays, those packets bypassed me and went right to my doctor.
The other thing are the checks. Short term disability pays 60% of your straight weekly pay. Every few weeks there’s an interruption because your doctor needs to update the paperwork and the short-term disability people won’t release it until they have it. The pay you missed during that interruption gets rolled into your next check. It makes budgeting an adventure, particularly since you have no idea when the next interruption will occur.
Once you exhaust the maximum amount of time for short term, you either return to your position or you’re let go. In some places this is when you’d go on long term disability. My employer doesn’t offer it to hourly workers.
This isn’t really a rant–unless it’s directed at myself–I just didn’t know where else to put it.
I’m appalled at how fucking lazy I’m becoming. The number of relatively easy things that I just plain don’t feel like doing is making me wonder about myself.
Sometimes I can’t be bothered to use the remote to change the TV station. I’m too lazy to make toast, so I spread peanut butter on plain white bread (which tastes fine, BTW, but c’mon). I’m too lazy to go in the closet and get out my big box of CDs from when I moved FIVE YEARS ago to find the one I really want to listen to. I was almost going to buy another one, so it would be delivered to my door. But then I’d have to unwrap it.
I mean, I DO do some things. I walk every day. I take care of my cats and dog. I go to The Home and do my mother’s laundry every Saturday. Today the sun came out for the first time in several days, and I put my pillows out in the sunshine and even draped my thick mattress pad on the roof of my car so it could get all full of sunshine, too. I washed all of my bed linens and blankets and put them back on the bed, ready for me to crawl into in a very short time from now. Sometimes I make something in my Instant Pot.
Maybe I should reframe this as slowing down instead of laziness… yeah… taking it easy, smelling the roses, etc. I am mostly without obligations of any kind. Pretty amazing. Virtually no one alive on this earth expects or wants anything from me. (Not sure about dead people.) Even my mother is sufficiently out of it that she probably wouldn’t notice for a while whether I came to do laundry or not. I am free to do things, but there’s just about nothing that I HAVE to do. And even things that need doing, I can pretty much do whenever I want to. Possibly this much latitude promotes laziness. Must ponder some more
Damn, that sounds pretty good! I’d bet it would to any busy person (at least the ones who don’t live for being busy).
With any luck, that’ll describe the first year of my retirement. After that, maybe I’ll get motivated and get some other gig(s) going. But for a while, I want to be Thelma…
(When I ponder this, my war cry will be “Thelma Loooooo!”)
I am with you ThelmaLou, Some days I just decide to not get dressed. Today I put on a hoodie, I went to put my cell phone in the pocket and realized it was on inside out, I didn’t change it, in fact I still have it on. Most days I get up early to feed the cats, they will not wait, but I go right back to bed. My little dogs are on my schedule for potty, so they don’t even come down stairs with me to feed the cats. They are good til noonish. If it wasn’t for the crock pot we probably wouldn’t eat around here. I am just a lazy pig. I am so ashamed (kinda). Excuse me while I write a check for the power company, it is so hard to hold this pen and write. I am gonna figure out how to pay online next year if I can find the time. Ugh!
I’ve developed a similar lassitude since I’ve been out from work. Ordinarily I’m the stressed out Energizer Bunny. This surgery has figuratively and literally forced me to sit on my arse more than I care to, but I have no choice unless I want to have more surgery.
One thing I’ve noticed is that energy begets energy. The more you do, the more you want to keep doing. If you have an anxiety issue the "doing"can become compulsive in the “If I don’t keep moving I’ll be dead” way of thinking.
OTOH I think for how long I’ve been that stressed out Energizer Bunny and it makes me want to curl into a ball and sleep.
I know there are things to do. When I was younger I lived for vacations and such so I could delve into my numerous projects. Nowadays I have trouble even thinking about what I’d like to do, never mind starting one. It’s like a piece of that mojo is gone and I don’t know where it went.
My greatest love nowadays is walking our dogs. I can only do it in small instances and with our older let’s-snuffle-everything boy. My husband has to take our younger, bouncier girl because she puts too much strain on my foot.
I now know why my mother dreaded retiring. She didn’t adapt to it very well and started showing signs of dementia within a year or two after. OTOH I’ve known plenty of retirees with ThelmaLou’s outlook and sometimes think I’d be better off cultivating a similar attitude.
I’m giving my son tough love for Christmas. By which I mean drug rehab he doesn’t want and isn’t ready for. He will also be homeless at the end of January, and I don’t think he has a job anymore either.
I’m so depressed it’s hard to move, and 20+ people are expected at my house on Monday. I’m just not thinking that far ahead right now.
Oh God, honey, you had me in stitches, then in tears! I love that you noticed your hoodie was on inside out and didn’t bother to change it. Yes, in my house, the cats will not wait for brekkies. One of them will walk menacingly along the headboard of my bed if I don’t get up in a (by her estimation) timely manner and put out food. Thankfully my dog Sweetie is on my schedule. And damn it! holding a pen IS hard. FINDING a pen is hard. I think I love you.
Being forced to slow down is a different thing, but it can be a good thing. As long as you convince yourself that you don’t have to be “productive” to be valuable. I feel that if I’m in the house not causing anyone any harm, that counts as productive, right? I could be out robbing banks or loudly cussing out the neighbors’ yard man who starts up the leaf blower at zero-dark-thirty.
I love the war cry–just don’t jump off that cliff with Butch & Sundance. Hell, the fall will kill ya. 
You people are the best. 
I’m so, so sorry. This is a very tough thing to deal with. I wish I could beam you over here to the House of Laziness and we’ll watch old sitcoms while we wait for the crockpot to make lunch. My heart is breaking for you. I hope… … … I just hope.
Oh, Dung, I am sorry to hear that. Good vibes for your son. I hope it goes well. Can you not enlist some help for Christmas day? Try to have good holiday anyway, I will be thinking of you.
Yea,guys let’s all have a ’ do nothing, can’t be bothered holiday’ It’s a Wonderful Life is calling my name. Deli turkey and canned cranberry sauce will do.
Seriously, people just put wwaaayyy too much stress on themselves for the holidays. It’s perfectly ridiculous.
I have a mini-rant that I’m using to distract me from a maxi-rant(??). So here it is:
I did something incredibly stupid and clicked on a “news” link a friend sent to me. It was one of those “look at them now!” types of articles about celebrities and how they used to be super attractive and now they look like shit.
And all that kept running through my head as I clicked through the link was, “damn, these people are aging better than I am,” or “yeah, but she’s - what? - 80 years old?” Also, most of the photos were of women, and that pissed me off, too.
My larger, maxi-rant is a “fuck cancer” rant.
My son’s friend’s dad, with whom we spend a lot of time (we go to concerts, the pool in the summer, etc.), has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 2 years to live, even with treatment. I ran over to say hi and drop off some Christmas cookies last night and he was in the middle of his first chemo treatment (he’s doing infusion at home). Anyway, we spent a few minutes talking around the issue because they haven’t yet told their son that he’s sick. His wife, a good friend of mine, has been having issues with panic attacks and depression lately - for good reason. I hate, hate, hate that they have to go through this.
So, fuck cancer. And fuck mental illness while we’re at it.
She’s YOUR mother. YOU do it.
That’s instantly relatable, no context necessary.
I’m relating a lot to what Thelma Lou and Breck and kiz are saying. I have had two years of not great health, one minor disaster after another, and it’s turned me into a kind of lump. I struggle a lot without imposed structure, so despite my incredibly objectively easy life (part time, flexible work, no kids) I’ve been just simmering above the misery line, not quite motivated enough to make any changes, constantly overwhelmed by competing priorities and a bunch of other stupid shit. But it’s like, what am I gonna say? “I’m unhappy with my easy, time-and-freedom-filled life”?
But on the flip side it’s forced me to appreciate things I wouldn’t have before. I have a robust social and creative life, I’m really pursuing my dream of being a professional fiction writer, and I get to see my husband happy for a change (he hated all 7 years of grad school and now he has a great job.) So even with the nagging sense of guilt, I found ways to appreciate things as they are. And somehow I learned to let go of the shame over limitations imposed by my health problems. Just, you know, fuck it. I’m not superwoman.
I’m really glad I’m now being forced to come into the office twice a week. I think it’s going to be one of the best things to happen to me in a while.
And Dung Beetle, I’m really sorry. It sounds like you’re doing the right thing. But that’s often not the easy thing.
Thanks for the support, you guys. It’s really meaningful to me (because you’re my best friends). :o
The boy (who is 21) has already checked himself out of rehab, but did sign up for further outpatient treatment. We repossessed his car (because it’s actually ours), so I had to take him to work this morning. Glory be, he still has a job!
The housing situation is still a big question mark, but by then we’ll know if the boy is really on an upward trend. Frankly, I’m pessimistic, but I think we can perform Christmas anyway.
This is either a terrible ending to a terrible year, or a fresh start for a better 2018. I guess it could be both.