Can you bring your wife in to one of your counselling sessions and try to get through to her that your job is so bad that it is seriously damaging your mental (and physical) health? Maybe the counsellor could help the two of you figure out how to communicate so you both feel like you’re being heard, too.
And your skills seem very transferable; every industry needs database administrators with your excellent skill set.
One more vote for “very transferrable skills; need new sector.” Best of luck to ya.
I know I have posted about this before, but it always comes up.
Dear conference attendees: I am your notetaker. I have been hired (at considerable expense to your organization) to record whatever pearls of wisdom you dispense at this national meeting. Please note the following:
Ho-lee crap. You should put that into a document format, and negotiate with your clients to have about a thousand business-card-sized copies printed up for you to distribute.
Also, poster-sized versions to hang on and around your work table.
I feel your pain. I used to scrutineer dance competitions (back before it was done by computers). It is a brutal job - I once worked for seventeen hours straight with one bathroom break. My responses to people coming and asking me stupid questions are probably still legend in the Boston dance community, and it’s been almost 10 years.
For a recent Convention, we dealt with this situation by posting 2 Sergeants-at-arms (big, tough-looking construction union guys) next to our captioner, with the instructions ‘keep people from bothering her’. It worked real well, and was a cheap way to make sure the expense of hiring her was not wasted.
Dude, I don’t care how you generate this Excel you send me: when I type
=A1&B1&C1
in cell D1, it should be able to concatenate stuff in the first cells of the previous three columns, not give me a value of 0
He’s probably not going to be the most irritating programmer I’ll ever deal with, but God, I want to grab him by the neck and shake him until he gets a permanent stutter.
Ugh. I just had a massive panic attack/near breakdown here over constant interruptions (despite having door closed and phone off hook) when I was trying desperately to concentrate on database issues. Two hours before our sector meeting too, great timing. And I just found I’ll have to work over Thanksgiving break owing to a moved-up vendor deadline.
On the verge of walking out of here and not coming back. I’m starting to wonder whether my bipolar is under control enough to function in an office environment. I feel like I had so much potential.
Cognoscant: Long ago in the dark days, I got “talked to” (thankfully not a full blown warning) when I was so busy with something and so tired of interruptions and so stressed out that I took my phone off the hook and put a post-it on my back (toward anyone who would approach) that said “Piss Off”.
It’s not you; it’s them. If you were working at another job where you were respected and valued and worked only 40 hours a week, I think you’d be feeling A LOT better.
I agree; I have no idea where a database admin would be expected to work only a 40-hour week, but I can try looking.
But I think I need to get my mental health under control before I do anything else. During the sector meeting I felt particularly manic, making jokes and laughing at odd times. (Of course the sector meeting kicked the discrimination/harassment case can further down the road; now it will be “after Thanksgiving” when we’ll even hear about a next step let alone a conclusion.) I realized afterwards that my bipolar disorder was cycling again, having gone from rage to tears to laughter to manic behavior to severe depression in the space of a few hours. This is no way to live, let alone handle a job that is getting more stressful daily. Although I only had two people today call me in a panic about things I had nothing to do with and could not help with, so I suppose that is an improvement. On the other hand I have 45 minutes to learn an entirely new software package tomorrow which I have not even seen yet and which I’ll be administering the data for in less than two months, followed by a mad scramble to get to a meeting with two people from two other offices who miscommunicated over an account transfer made by a third person six months ago and obviously decided that I was at fault over it and had to fix it, and where I’ll be asked to recount the exact details of a transaction I didn’t make.
Tomorrow also I’m meeting with my doctor, who is extremely close to going to HR himself and filling out an indefinite leave of absence form. Which means I’m either going to have to lie about the need to work a significant chunk of Thanksgiving break to work on a project for the VP, or find some way of telling my family Christmas is on hold unless I can find a job. Guess the other part of Thanksgiving break is going to be spent brushing up my resume and LinkedIn.
I’ve known them; my current client’s admins work 40h weeks most weeks, and when they work more it doesn’t go above 50. There are even places where comp hours are actually used, rather than so much corporate blab.
If you look at how many hours you spend doing “database admin” stuff, it’s likely to be 40 or less; you’re working three jobs while getting paid for one. And given how much this kind of stress would affect anybody’s mental health and that it is systemic at your current job, “fixing the health problems before starting the search” will simply not work.
Best of luck.
Bizarre discovery earlier today.
When I moved back here, I applied for (and was rejected) a job at a well-known department store. I realized during the initial interview, which was with a group of about 10 other people, that I really didn’t want to work there, but the “You Suck Letter” still stung, especially because most of the other people in the room didn’t even bring important things with them, like the addresses of former employers and their Social Security cards. :dubious:
So, earlier today, there was a story on the news and in the paper, both print and online, about a local attorney whose license was suspended last year due to some unethical and downright criminal behavior. Today, that license was revoked, and he really should be in prison.
Guess where he now works - as a cashier. :eek: :smack: :rolleyes:
You need a company large enough to have an on call rotation so either a large company or a service provider. We’re pretty fanatical here about our techs only working 37.5 hrs per week and being on call primary no more than 10 weeks/yr. It’s a major issue for us right now in one group because they lost a couple of key members recently and so we’re going to trash both those numbers for the next 6 weeks while they go through the hiring process. Those affected will be compensated of course but the fact that this is so rare and was addressed immediately is one of the things I like about this company.
We do retail support so off hours work happens but it’s rotated and as much as possible time off is given immediately.
When you’re job hunting talk to people who work there. Linkedin usually has some corporate groups - don’t post anything in them but you can troll them for names and find a contact that way.
I keep getting locked out of my own login account, and nobody can figure out why. I just have to keep calling the service desk and having them unlock me. Again. And again. It’s to the point that I’ve had to call them within 15 minutes of having to call for an unlock.
Plus, since I never know when it’s going to happen, I’ve lost work because I was locked out while in the middle of fixing something and then my changes don’t get saved. Very frustrating, yanno?
When we had this at our office, it was because there was another computer that had my username in it. The idiot sitting down at it couldn’t understand that they had to put their OWN name in to make it work correctly. They kept trying their password with my username, which would lock my account out after three incorrect tries.
We run into people who get locked out on a regular basis because they have MSAccess or some other program running scripts using their ID, and they ‘forgot’ to change every bloody one of them when their password changes. But of course, they scream at us because “someone else” us locking up their account :rolleyes:. Nope, I can tell you that you ran an MSAccess script at this date and time, and yes, it was run from your computer and network logon, and it locked up your ID.
What is fun is when we tell them that it’s one of their co-workers running the old script, and point out that letting someone else using their logon is a violation of company security policy and can get their access revoked.
You’re doing it because they haven’t been granted access yet? So you’re admitting to violating Corporate Security by giving access to someone not approved for that access? Interesting. I’ll pass that along to the people who approve that access.
As a temp, if I didn’t work under other peoples’ access/logon info, I’d never work. This is standard at just about every company; they’re desperate for workers to help them, but when I show up on site, they never have access for me. Every frickin’ time.
I did tell you about this company where people’s computers weren’t requested until after the new worker had joined, didn’t I? And printing documents out was forbidden, bringing in your own computer was forbidden, letting another person sit at your computer so they could do some reading while you were in a meeting was forbidden, doing the same with you right there was forbidden, and a new worker’s computer took a month to set up? Oh, and you weren’t supposed to bring something to read - since you were at work, you were expected to be working, only don’t ask me how or on what.
Yeah, I thought I had. Might have been the most boring month of my life.
I’ve had to explain quite a few times to users of The Big Blue Database that “giving your password to your backup when you go on vacation is a fireable offense, what you have to do is ask for them to get the same accesses you have. Actually, giving your password to your backup, or your subordinates, or your mom, at any time, is a fireable offense. Just don’t.” FFS, your signon shouldn’t be showing up in the system on Saturday at 3am when we all know you weren’t even in the country!
Apparently when they set up my new computer something wasn’t done properly. So I’m limping along on my slow-ass old computer (which has been living under my desk because a) maybe something important was saved on it, and b) nobody else wanted it) for the time being while newer/faster computer is re-re-confoobled.
Aaaaaaand I just heard from a co-worker that the tech who’s doing that work has, and I quote, a raging case of pinkeye. “She looks like she was possessed by the devil,” apparently, and I have been warned that when I get it back, I should completely sanitize it.
If I post back here next week that I got pinkeye, I’m going to have to start a “Help purplehorseshoe find a place to hide a body” thread.