Honestly, the title is the TL;DR. This is rambly and my grammar is bad. I am really sorry for how long this is.
I have no support system. I have no savings. I am taking care of someone who means a lot to me and needs help, but can't get it yet. The point is, I have already been under so much stress that my work's reaction to all of this is simply pushing me over the edge and I don't know who else to ask. Who to reach out to. I don't know if things are going to be okay.
I picked up this really awesome field tech position a few months ago. After a month, my boss was no longer with the company… and it turned out he didn't train me at all. I learned more on my own the two weeks after he was gone than any of the month he was “training” me.
And over the course of the 4 months since, I have worked my butt off to keep this region afloat because I am the ONLY tech here. None of the equipment is updated. Vulnerable devices need to be located and liquidated ASAP. Purchasing is taking 3 and a half eons to get equipment out to sites so I have to work with not enough equipment… as all the old existing equipment begins to fail. None of the internal knowledge about the region was recorded either, so I had to identify that as well (ie what equipment we do have, what we don't, what is available for issue, what needs to be yeeted out a window, etc). The region is 2-4 hr wide in terms of drive time, so on average I usually end the day almost – but not quite – 2 hr away from home. I have to time it that way in order to reach all my sites before they close (often having to skip lunch and breaks). As a result, most of my drive time is at the beginning and end of the day.
It sucked. It meant that if I wanted this region to survive, I needed to put in excessive hours. But I am salary, and as far as I was told by that point, normal work in my region didn't qualify for any extra effort bonuses.
Now before I start, I want to address the why. Why did I tolerate all of this without pay, essentially? Well, to start, because as much as I would like to MC the hell out of them when they first started to drop the ball and make them realize how much I do, the client I take care of does amazing work for people and their communities. To only do my 40 hr a week would mean letting them suffer and fall. It would mean people not getting the help they need. And the other field techs were constantly getting recognized for much more minor things. What reason did I have to think I was going to be any different?
Now I managed to keep up. I put in 50-60 hr a week on average. It got to a point where I was solving so many issues simultaneously that if it wasn't major enough, I just didn't even put a ticket for it because I just didn't have TIME. Like, oh, you need a new mouse? Here is a cheap wired one I was about to throw away, try that…. as I work on these 40 other issues. I am not going to take 5 minutes to fill out a whole ticket about it when I start working at 8 am and finish working at 9 pm. I want to watch YouTube. I want to doomscroll Reddit. I want to sleep. I don't want to stay up making 40 tickets about people who don't understand how the monitor also has a power button and is in fact not a desktop. They are wonderful, beautiful people, and those issues and questions are very valid, so I take them very seriously. These people need to focus on their jobs that are helping so many people, not on petty IT problems. However… wasn't worth the effort of a whole ticket. Especially when I wasn't getting any extra effort pay. I used to do them at first but got burnt out too fast. On average my timecard now shows around 8.5-10 hr a day, sometimes the full 12-13 hr.
Now, I was about to start PTSD treatment so a couple of weeks ago I reached out to my boss to explain the situation. I told him the state of my region and that I will not be able to keep up with this anymore, especially when they keep asking me to find and wipe these old vulnerable devices to such an excess and in such a time frame that it was a full-time job on its own. I still had normal tickets and issues I had to resolve as well. I couldn't do both and only work 40 hr a week. That was when I finally got told that if I simply recorded all of this, I could have been getting extra effort hours the whole time!!! No one just bothered to tell me. Apparently no one actually looks to see if you worked an excessive amount each week, just that you work at least 40 hr. Because for some reason, as salary, we are required to do 8 hr of work a day, and if we don't, then PTO gets deducted hourly. Make that make sense.
So my boss tells me that the workload should be decreasing soon once all the old equipment is pulled (at once), and that I had been doing a good job.
This gave me some hope. I thought, maybe, I might have some work-life balance. I just had to make it another month. And since he said I did a good job, maybe I might finally get some recognition! Sure, by that point, I have seen colleagues get recognized for much smaller things over and over while I got nothing, but hey, it just wasn't my time yet, I guess.
So last week was a test of if I will get extra effort pay. I will find out at the end of the month, although I feel like the odds are very low. That week was my calmest week yet. I only worked 10-12 hr a day every day! I was done working by almost 7 pm every day, it was great. I was still exhausted, but I got everything done. People had functioning devices to get their jobs done.
Last Wednesday, I made the mistake of mentioning how I was thankful for all my drive time counting since I lived more than 20 miles (the minimum distance needed for expensing mileage) from any site. You see, the travel policy for field techs said that the first and last travel of the day (so to and from home) didn't count towards your timesheet unless it was more than 20 miles (aka a “normal commute”) away. This was just how I had interpreted this rule the whole time and my original boss agreed because it just felt like common sense. However, it turns out, my brain placed a comma where there shouldn't have been and in fact, reading back, I interpreted it wrong. Apparently, first and last travel doesn't count at all unless it is outside your assigned region. My region was just big.
And that was all my boss seemed to care about. My first and last travel will never count. REGARDLESS of the distance. Sure, if I cross into the next state, he considered that excessive enough (so around 3-4 hr one way), but he specifically asked me for a list of sites over TWO HOURS AWAY ONE WAY. I am supposed to just give away 4 hr of my day for free? After everything I have done for thing company?
Nearly all of my sites are around 1 hr 30 min to just under 2 hr away from my home without traffic. My closest is about an hour away. I cannot efficiently stop by the closest site every time on the way home. It would mean adding an extra 30 min to an hour just to stop by my closest site. I think this first/last site policy was made for people who live like 30 min away from their closest site at most. I guess I was a type that was never accounted for.
This puts me in an impossible situation because it feels like I really have only three choices if I stay here and they don't change their policy in my case:
- Stop by my closest site on the way to work and on the way home everyday: I wouldn't even be doing any work at this site or able to get into the building since it would be after closing hours, so I worry about it being considered a sort of time fraud, like, you only went there to get extra money! You did nothing billable there, you should have just gone home! It would also add an extra 30 min to 1 hr everyday, just to have 2 hr of total drive time not count in the end. Driving an extra 30 min to 1 hr simply to make 30 to 1 hr of that 1.5 hr drive home count toward my time card feels so stupid. I would rather just go home at that point. “But what if you just work 30 min to 1 hr less then to make up for it,” I have too much work to do and I don't want to let down these people who need their technology to do the great work they do.
- I could lie and say I went to my closest site on the way to and from home: personal principle here. I avoid lying at all costs – like Buddhist-level dedication here, just minus the actual Buddhism. Also, I feel like they can just later decide to fire me for time fraud after I end up being just too much hassle to deal. They can't fire me now, but what if they hire me some “help” who ends up simply being a replacement.
- Plan my day to arrive at my first site by 8 am and leave at 5 pm for an 8 hr day: You see, ironically, in this case, my drive time will count… because traffic! Remember that 2 hr remark from my boss? When you add traffic, almost all my travel time doubles. I make an effort to avoid traffic conditions so I can spend more time… you know… working… Leaving during normal people times on normal people roads will mean I will be spending probably around 5-6 hr a day driving to and from home (my time driving between sites always counted so that isn't the issue). So I would regularly be getting 14+ hr days. This would be my only option where I get a lunch break though.
- Keep doing what I am doing: I will only have around 8-9 hr count everyday, if even sometimes. On average about 3-4 hr of drive time will not count. I will be able to keep up with my region, not need to work as much as the other options, but I will never get any recognition. I don't have time for lunch breaks. I will be working for free. I have no motivation. It just makes me want to cry… I am also scared because with my mental health deteriorating, I know I cannot keep this up. I already collapsed these last two days, I am just so lucky my office managers and receptionists have been looking after me when I have been on site because I have been a complete mess. All I can think of is why? It makes me so hopeless.
I am currently trying to get them to compromise and let me just deduct 30 min each way to and from home every day, but to be honest, at this point, they have lost my trust. This isn't the first time they dropped the ball. My very first bonus was supposed to represent 40 hr of extra work I did over a 3-week period. What did I get? If converted to an hourly rate, it would be considered below the federal minimum wage. It was insultingly low. Apparently, most of what I did didn't count somehow! I was devastated. My interim boss at the time tried arguing that mileage reimbursement WAS the bonus. I was still pissed and upset, so they decided to give me an extra couple hundred dollars. Which was barely anything after taxes.
I don't trust them anymore. I want to get out. I feel so unsafe. I have seen the worst in humanity when it comes to management and corporate, so I know exactly how bad it can get. I just have no support system. My lease is coming up for renewal at the end of this month and the landlords haven't gotten back to us. I can't afford to move. My credit score sucks right now. What if they just decide they don't want us to stay and don't tell us until the day the lease expires?
Now I am looking for a new job, but the work that I do I have done in a short period of time. My biggest hang-up is the length of my work experience, not the quality or skillset, simply because I am doing a job with less than 1 yr recent experience that most need 3-5 yr for. HR often times won't believe me. I had one phone screen but unfortunately, I don't have hands-on experience in configuring VMWare (my last job started training me in it before they went under) which was too important to not have. Which makes sense, they are looking for that type of skillset, and I don't have that specific experience.
I am just so tired. I don't know what to do. I know my company would bend over backward to remedy this because they cannot afford to lose this, but I worry about potential retaliation since it is so easy to hide in seemingly unrelated things. I worry about them trying to hire someone behind my back, and then because no one will believe me when I say I can do the things I do, I end up never getting hired again… then getting evicted… then my best friend loses his only safe space and chance to recover… I have so much to lose. I don't know what to do.
Oh, and I just found out my new work insurance doesn't cover therapy apparently, so I can't do my treatment anymore. I still have to find out a way to fork over the $400 I now owe which I didn't know I would be.
Has anyone been through anything like this before? What did you do?