I work 30ish h/week in fast food and do full-time university. School was all online for my first few years at this job, now I’m trying to adjust to juggling in-person classes with work and it’s been a struggle just to get a gauge on how well I can handle X classes + X days of work. This is my first year cutting back from full-time to 4 days a week and as of this month I changed my availability to 3 days because it just wasn’t going well.
The thing is, though, they kept giving me 5 days instead of 4 all through last month, even though I saw with my own eyes that my file in the system had the correct availability input. And then my form to change it to 3 days ‘got lost’ and surprise surprise, first week of October’s schedule came out — 5 days. Zero shot at getting any shifts picked up because a lot of people have been overscheduled and nobody was free to take the specific hours I needed to give away. So I call in on Tuesday and try to explain the situation, the phone line is cutting out and it’s hard to hear, I think the manager just ended up writing that I called in sick. Now it’s Thursday and again I’ve waited as long as possible for anyone to get back to me about coverage but it’s a dead dream. This is probably call-in number 5 or 6 in the past month or less because of this scheduling issue plus one instance where I was in fact sick.
When I called in just now it felt AWFUL. I hate putting my coworkers (a group of people I mostly really like and respect, towards whom I have a sort of ‘we’re all in this BS situation together so the more we can help eachother out the better’ attitude) in a pinch and leaving them understaffed. Part of the nature of the job working with a lot of young people is that there can be almost cliquey high-school type vibes and I hate to think that anyone’s opinion of me is going to tank because I’m not there to explain myself and it probably just looks like I’ve been calling in and making up excuses left and right for fun. I have some significant issues around tying my self-worth to productivity so the whole thing has me very down on myself that way too.
It just makes me blood-red mad that this guilt and anxiety has been overwhelming me recently because I’m doing everything by the book yet being put into positions where I have to choose between missing a class I’m paying a thousand dollars to attend OR appearing to coworkers and managers as unreliable, lazy, dishonest etc. by calling in and missing shifts. I shouldn’t be having my schedule disrespected and I shouldn’t already be in such a late stage of capitalism brain rot that I believe it’s some fault of my own — not least of all because this job pays me pennies. I do good work and I always have, I show up to offer as much as I can in helping my crew and giving good service, and it just doesn’t make a difference. I don’t get taken seriously in return nor can I rely on anyone having my back no matter how hard they’ve seen me grind.
And I will put myself in this position and push myself to prove my worth and let myself be nauseated with guilt when I screw up, time and time again. It feels incredibly bleak to experience this and recognize its inanity yet not be able to amend it. And this is FAST FOOD, and I’m 20 years old so it shouldn’t be this bad already. These are the days that make me terrified of getting a more ‘real adult’ job, higher stakes and more responsibility and a more personal connection with the other people in the workplace, because I think I’m going to run myself into the ground. Screwed for life by the system we live in and I’m left preoccupied feeling guilty because of one month going kinda poorly in 3.5 years of a job, which came from a careless mistake by someone higher up on the totem pole anyhow.
Useless rant, I guess. Needed it off my chest and sometimes it helps to write down the facts (i.e I have genuinely done nothing bad in this situation) if I need to talk myself off a ledge of all this stress. I hope there are unsealable cracks in the foundation that fosters the nasty type of ‘work ethic’ I’ve stumbled into, and I hope I see it crumble in my lifetime.