Yesterday I had an incident at work and it unraveled all the frustration and dissatisfaction I’ve been suppressing. For context I work at a cultural center funded by a pretty powerful comercial art gallery. As with most cultural related jobs in this part of the world, we’re underpaid and overworked. It sucks but that’s not why I’m on the verge of quitting. Our office was recently repurposed as an exhibition room, so as of right now the whole team is working from a restaurant table (the cultural center has a restaurant). Yesterday one of my coworkers opened a can of sparkling water and it splashed on my laptop’s keyboard. The same laptop I bought myself to keep up with my responsibilities once they took away the one I was assigned and replaced it with a clunky unusable desktop. When I say unusable I really mean it. The thing took 20 minutes to turn on. I was blinded at the time and saw the purchase as an opportunity to buy myself a tool for writing, my true passion. Of course I can never get to that as I’m working all the time and when I’m not I’m too tired to be creative. So now my main work tool is drying up and I’m waiting to take it to a technician. I need the money (not really a good salary but better than nothing) but I just can’t deal with this anymore. I’m exhausted and using my own resources to feed this money hungry art machine. My friend says before quitting I should negotiate to get the computer refunded, but I don’t know how to go about that. We don’t have an HR, a legal department or anyone to take this up to other than my direct boss. On top of that, the practice of bringing your own computer is really normalized. I’m pretty young and this is my first grown up job, so any advice, similar experiences or thought love is appreciated.
TLDR: I’m overworked, underpaid and my main work tool, which I paid for myself, is probably ruined. Advice needed.