It is legitimately Extremely Fucked Up. The working hours alone are insane, combined with that stress level (grad school has longer hours but less stress, and I can say so because I’ve done it); it’s the kind of regime which burns people out in no time. Even hungry fresh out of college junior consultants cannot withstand those hours for more than a couple of weeks at a time, and those kids would give blowjobs to three greater demons at the same time if they thought it meant job security.
My own household had decent structure and no systemic incompetence, but that combo triggers my “it’s not MS” just fine. I’d be surprised if there’s anybody who actively enjoys working or living in that kind of place.
You’re wiser than I am. It took me seven years to “just walk out”. Toxic bosses led to toxic relationships between the staff, on top of “Ummm, if you could bill 80 hours to clients next week we could make our deadlines, okay, that’d be great, don’t get sick…”
When a teaching gig opened up late August, I gave three days’ notice… and was so relieved! I recommend it, even if you quit to take a bartending job.
It’s nice if you have the option to just quit. Not everyone does, and honestly I’ve quit at times I really shouldn’t have since I had no fallback plan. The ideal solution would be figuring out a way to avoid getting to the point of feeling like literal life and death. I have no doubt it’s some emotion regulation problem on my end, because most people seem to be able to tolerate a lot more shit at work than I can. I’ve always considered myself weak in that way.
Maybe it’s a strength in a weird way because at one of the jobs I quit a few years ago, the other employee had been in therapy for years just trying to cope with that boss. She’s all, “But I need a reference for grad school” and I said fuck it, I’m out. But on the way out, I told the boss I was horrified by how she treated that girl and I was leaving to avoid that ever becoming me. I dunno if it ever sank in. God that woman was a bitch. I left that job years ago and my blood is boiling just remembering.
But I’ve had fantastic jobs I’ve excelled at, too, including my current job… Just a matter of finding the right mix of passion, structure, and people.
Technically, until February at the very earliest, I’m still a trainee with this company. I’ve been getting shit pay for the last two and a half years because I’m a trainee, and because at the end of it I get this nice shiny certificate that I can put on my resume. This means they pretty much can’t fire me, but it also means that I can’t walk out. Not now. And apparently the death march will continue through January. I don’t know how to deal with that. On the 2nd, HR comes back, and I’m going to have a nice long talk with the head of HR about my options. Because this is not okay. I realize my boss is completely fucking insane and apparently both willing and eager to put in 120 fucking hours of overtime in one month, so basically no matter how hard I work I am never going to get any sympathy from him on that count, so I’m going to have to bug someone else about it.
The CEO at my old org was an obsessive worker. He had no life outside of his job, no family, no friends, and at one point just moved a full sized bed into his office. It never affected my position much but the time demands on the other workers were insane and there was zero consideration from the CEO that other people had lives and families.
But what bugged me the most about him is that he was nitpicky and draconian as hell about grant applications but waited until the absolute last fucking minute to give me his edits. I wrote a million dollar government grant, I gave the draft of a 25 page narrative to him three weeks before deadline and he didn’t even look at it until the day before deadline, immediately freaked out because he misunderstood the application instructions, which required a large amount of wasted time getting him to understand that he was the one in the wrong. Then once we convinced him we knew what the fuck we were doing, he got the edits to me three hours before deadline.
That guy was so fucking bad at time management he once made an employee drive from NJ to DC to hand deliver a grant since it was too late to mail.
In retrospect it’s beyond bizarre how much I thrived at that job, but I do really well under pressure as long as I have structure. Plus I didn’t have to deal with him directly too often and my immediate supervisor was great. That grant was the one exception where I had to work with him a lot, and he was a fucking asshole the whole time. If I were Executive staff I’d have quit in a hot minute.
Ahhh, one of my fondest memories was the day I had to do this for my time-challenged boss. His last words were “I’ll cover your speeding tickets! Take my car! Just get to the Loop by five!!!” (It was almost three, we were in Wisconsin. Y’know, a whole different state? And a three hour drive with traffic…)
I had so much fun cruising at near light speed… every time I’d come up on a pack of cars, I’d say out loud “Okay, fans, take a look at this broken field running…”
(Btw, double-parked on Michigan Ave, made it up five flights of stairs and got the proposal on the gatekeeper’s desk by 4:57. And then got shooed out as they did indeed lock the office at 5:00:00.)
So I’m still job searching and have two “irons in the fire” as they say, and my current dysfunctional job is actually showing signs of improvement. However, I still feel like ranting. My complaint (this time) is that this job is so overwhelmingly complex that it makes me feel like the stupidest person in the world and I don’t know how they expect me to come up to speed. They seem to think highly of me but I can’t see how.
It’s a data warehouse and distribution company that supports the entire global airline industry. The industry itself is jaw-droppingly complex and no one person can know more than a tiny piece of it. But in this company you really have to know a LOT: how airlines work, how travel agencies work, how global distribution systems like Sabre and Amadeus work, how they collaborate and how they compete. I’ve never worked in the industry before this job so I’m really struggling. I’ve been here over four years now and it’s not getting any better in terms of my comfort level with the business domain.
I’m smart and learn quickly, but I’m finding the subject matter to be so complex it’s just frustrating to work with. I’ve worked in manufacturing, distribution, integrated circuit assembly, public safety, consumer warranties, defense contracting, and housing and none of those business domains have made me feel this ignorant several years into the job!
I’ve had three contacts from the same recruiting company for the same company/job. They want an experienced RPG programmer (yes, still, in this day and age).
Fine and dandy. But if they’d bothered to read my resume, they might have noticed that the only experience I have with RPG was a certificate from a technical school I earned in 1992. I’m looking for a job as a technical writer. I’ve asked the company to put “not a programmer” in their profile for me, but I still get email. ARGH.
The only other contact I’ve had was for a technical writer contract, but the offered rate is only $32/hour. Yes, they’re offering benefits, but that’s still not enough for someone with my experience and skill set.
I’m not even at work right now, and work is making me unhappy. I’m so very, very tired of people who don’t read emails, and then I have to ask them to do the same thing twice. Just read the damn email. Instead of watching something trashy on Netflix, I have to write emails on my tiny little phone about something that should already be done, but it’s not done because some idiot DIDN’T READ THE EMAIL. If it’s not done by tomorrow, I’m going to be really pissed.
Eh, don’t worry, your company likely doesn’t consider “business knowledge” to be of any value. Like virtually every company I’ve ever worked for, who think that they can dump the subject matter expert and hire someone for half the cost and keep the damn thing going.
Hell, I got called by NINE consulting firms about my former job. I haven’t heard a word yet about them filling it (from former co-workers, who keep in touch).
Back in the 90’s after I learned the early versions of Ab Initio, built a process using it and then quit over a complex matter of, oh, another employee making personal threats against my life without being fired or even disciplining them - I got calls from recruiters to go back there for over two years, with each one telling me the company had been unable to find anyone who could do the job. Morgyn, I get calls from recruiters all over the country asking me to move 1,000 miles and work with stuff I haven’t touched since the 1980’s. Usually on stupid assed 3-6 month contracts.
I have this daydream that someday I’ll be able to work for a company made up of all the cool people I’ve ever worked with. I’m not sure what the company would do, but it’d be a great place to work.
I don’t know if it’s some extra-misunderstood version of Agile or what, but lately I’m getting hooks for rollouts where there is no attempt at finding and fixing gaps beforehand: the job consists of “extract data from old systems, push into new systems, teach everybody how to log in and little more, then spend several months putting out fires and applying bandages.”
I have no idea in what planet does that make economic sense. It’s even worse than the Big Consulting Firm model of “give to the customer anything the customer asks for, the stupider the better: if they want their arm broken, we charge for breaking the arm, for the only-we-have-them X-rays and for using extra-expecial-exclusive xXx plaster* to fix the arm”; at least this one makes sense for the BCF.
I swear it’s a thing in IT nowadays. My husband gets the same exact kind of calls. As he put it, “WTF do I have to tell them to get them to stop? I’ve already said NO a thousand and one times already.”
reminds me of a Brian Regan bit where he said something about wishing he could give a confirmation code like “One, one, I, oh, zero, zero, oh, oh, I, one, oh, oh, zero, one, I, lower-case l.”
Yeah, it was a blast speeding down the Kennedy, but there was a lot of pressure to get downtown by 5. RFP’s (Request for Proposal) have unforgiving deadlines, and if you miss out on a big contract that you would’ve gotten otherwise, it can make a difference in making payroll next month.
With a time-addled boss, we were in that predicament too many times, and one unlucky employee who didn’t make it came back in tears (and took the next day off to try to wait for the boss to cool off).
My attitude was “Well, since it’s only remotely possible, I’m not going to sweat it.” I swear, making that on time was so unbelievable that beating a level or winning a soccer game hasn’t come close. Sorry to blow my own horn, but day-umm!
Oh, I’d forgotten… to celebrate, I stayed downtown (ostensibly to wait 'til rush hour was over), got a slice of deep dish pizza and saw a movie that had just come out: The Empire Strikes Back. (Why, yes, I have been in this business too long…)
I assume these are government grants? I’ve written a few government grants, mostly local (CDBG) and one state. One required 10 printed copies with dividers labeled and hand-delivered in two giant boxes… Naturally our printer broke in the middle of the copies. We had to push them into town on a big cart.
Currently I focus on corporate and foundation grants, it’s less tedious with formatting and delivery bullshit.
I have to go into work tomorrow and it was supposed to be my day off. I’m driving an hour to be at work for two hours, and then going to a doctor’s appointment I rather dread. I’m not much looking forward to Thursday.
