Month: October 2022

I'm blessed to even have a job that is able to pay employees “Covid relief pay” if we are able to submit a positive test. They will pay 5-10 days worth of pay for this for any employee. Yesterday I took a Covid test with a positive result and submitted it to our HR department who assured me in writing that I would receive this pay and to not come into the office. I feel like absolute garbage and was so relieved by this. This morning, however, my manager reached out to me to ask if I'll work from home to make phone calls all week and essentially work on my coworkers problem files for them all week for the same exact pay that I'd be receiving for just recovering and doing no work. There's no possible way that I can be on the phones all week because even speaking…

I’ve received a few over the years. Personally I can’t think of a more desperate way to get people to be employed. I just delete the emails right as soon as I get them.

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I work for a help desk that is severely understaffed right now. Turn over rate isn't the worst in the world but it's not great. We are overworked every day. I currently don't have the numbers for how many people we have on staff, but I do know this: as of right now, we currently have: 1 director who oversees all of us 3 managers 3 leads …and the rest are help desk analysts. Today, our director announced the hire of a 4th manager. To make matters worse, this manager is an outside hire, i.e. someone who has never worked here before, and is going to be trained to be in charge of some of us that have been here for years. Instead of elevating someone internally. I already know this is not going well within our team, and it's causing a major morale issue, as if it wasn't bad…

Rewatching ” Mysteries of the Abandoned” on Discovery+. There's an abandoned town in Brazil that was called “Fordlandia.” Henry Ford built a rubber plantation and processing plant so he could have a source of rubber only for his company. He built a company town to go with the plantation so the workers had a place to live. There were rules though. No alcohol, no women, and no tobacco were enforced, among other things. Even had inspections of the houses to make sure. In 1930, the Brazilian workers were fed. They cut communications off and chased the managers into the jungle. Seeing everything in the news and on the subreddit reminds me of the old saying: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Just a thought I had today.

After three and a half years at my company, I am quitting due to a toxic workplace environment and lack of support from my employer. Without going into too much detail, the company grew from a mom and pop type business, to the largest in our industry and state in a little under two years during COVID. Exponential growth led to employee neglect from management yet the idea that “we’re a family” persisted. I left several weeks ago due to stress & medical leave, and now speaking with HR they are “not confident I will be successful upon my return.” They’re offering a package, and I’m gonna take it and run. It was fun while it lasted, but when it got bad, boy it was bad. All goes to say, I haven’t felt this peace in a long time.

I would appreciate any advice or thoughts on the situation — I'm a developer at a large “up and coming” tech company. The company is doing really well and stood out during the pandemic which put us in the position to receive a large series of funding (think hundreds of millions). At the beginning of shelter in place I was loaned two monitors as a full time office employee. In the intervening years I've moved to full time remote for health reasons. I was asked to return my monitors as the office needs the additional hardware to support the return to office. But then they offered to sell me the monitors if I didn't want to return them and the price they offered the monitors at is higher than the value they sell for used. I thought they needed the monitors to support the return to office? They have been…