Category: Antiwork

Face it. Since the pandemic a lot of us want more time. Time with partners, loved ones, and friends. Time with children and furry children. With aging parents. More time for learning, reading, discovering, and traveling. In the United States, we're only #1 when it comes to defense spending, incarceration, gun ownership, religious zealots, and believing the lie of the American Dream. In much of the (first) world, such as most of Europe, pay may remain an issue for most but at least their labor parties fought for decades to gift their constituents the benefit of time. What if a US presidential candidate (and Congressional candidates) had the guts to run on the issue of giving Americans more time? Such as… Across the board, universal… 30 fully paid vacation days per year. 15 fully paid sick days per year. 90 days fully paid maternity and paternity leave. Why can't Americans…

Customer Service Rant: I love how customers with past due/unpaid gather the audacity to argue or insult me. “Asshole you aren't paying and you want me to fucking be a dancing seal and entertain your broke ass with conversation. While doing accounts payable paperwork?!?!” Then while walking out gives me a diatribe on how my attitude shouldn't effect how I interact with customers blah, blah, blah.

So I've just started a new job (about a month and half ago) the company was looking for a senior position but couldn't find anyone. I applied they negotiated that I be junior due to my lack of experience. I accepted. Today my boss brought us in to announce they have hired the senior position. The whole time he is just looking at me. Felt more like he was telling me than the team. Am I about to get squeezed out? Feels like they got me in, hired over me and might turn around and be like “Well we wanted someone to fill this position and now we have it”.

I’m not a people manager at the moment but as a product manager I am in a position to inspire and rally my team at a company with an unusually good reputation. What are things that have raised your own morale that you wish was more best practice and industry standard?

Facts: 1) this institution is a hospital who doesn’t sign my paycheck. I get paid by a university and am a “contractor” graduate student 2) they were supposed to issue me a $2.5k reimbursement for a hotel I paid for 3) in email multiple times I asked them not to mail the check because I had mail stolen repeatedly from my apartment. This is reasonable deniability I received it 4) the sent the check to my admin’s desk and I picked it up there 5) today, lo and behold, is another $2.5k check in the mail 6) the hospital is a huge institution with strict bureaucrats running accounting. Somehow this got past them. 7) They don’t pay me a living wage. But I want to keep my job. What should I do?

Years ago in my country we had the 'pupil worker scheme'. Students as young as 16 (we call it 6th form – I think it is high school in the USA) had to work during the summer and we were paid tiny wages. My first job in a bank was in a very high security facility where we counted money all day. It was incredibly boring but we had to watch out lest we made a mistake. Some of the other students started to compete with each other to see who could work hardest. I tried to tell them that if they, let's say counted 100,000 notes a day, they would be pushed to increase their output to double the amount. That is what happened.

I put in my two weeks at work a week ago. I have been checked out for a while, but my impulse control and ability to temper my opinions has really decreased over the last week. I’ve been very vocal about my feelings to my coworkers, who all agree with my feelings about the place. Today I was called in to a meeting with my supervisors where they confronted me about the things I’ve been saying since I resigned. It’s ironic, because a big part of my problem is the constant eavesdropping and spying from management, but they couldn’t have possibly known I was talking shit unless they were constantly eavesdropping and spying. They said if I wanted to keep working there for the next week I needed to be “professional and positive”. They said if I couldn’t do that, I could accept the following offer, which they presented as…

Basically what the title says. My grandpa is on life support right now and the plan is to take him off everything tomorrow and just help him pass comfortably. I told my boss today that I wouldn't be in tomorrow so I could be with him and he threatened to hire a second person to do my position part time so the store “doesn't have to put up with this bullshit.” Uhh excuse me? That bullshit is the fact that I'm losing someone near and dear to me. It's not my fault you're a divorced bitter old man who pushes away every member of his family. I'm so pissed right now and hate that our society places such a high value on just showing up and doing bullshit tasks rather than being with family.