I work in an IT support office, and we are so understaffed, undertrained, and the workload is unbearable. Most guys who regularly work at the office can’t find the time to take their scheduled breaks, and everyone apart from me works overtime almost every day. Our management staff is hardly ever at the office, our supervisor is fully remote and talks to us for 15 minutes a day to tell us to work on things we’re already working on, and we have 4 help desk technicians, and myself as a hardware tech responsible for servicing over 80 client offices.
I feel like I’ve been dumped into the meat grinder. I was given hardly any training to begin with, and was told to basically look at the documentation and figure it out myself. I thought it would get easier as I went, but it’s only gotten worse. My previous supervisor was the only one that regularly gave me any answers to questions I had, but he was quickly moved to another position once they had hired just enough people for a skeleton crew, and now is not supposed to interact with us at all.
Co-owners keep talking about upward growth, and expanding our reach. It seems like they want to get more people in the office just so they can move employees up the ladder into new positions as fast as they can. And they continuously set up onboarding meetings with new clients every other week. Meanwhile all of us doing the grunt work are drowning in tickets, so much that no one has the time to be upset about the current working conditions, or ask real questions to the management team.
At this point I can’t just let the stress of work go when I clock off. I think about what I will have to do the next day, all of the deadlines that are going to be past due, all the clients I have to call, and the things I have to remember to ask my boss if he happens to be in the office for more than 30 minutes. All of this for $18 an hour, barely a living wage.
It’s absolutely soul crushing, and I can feel it starting to take its toll on my overall health. I think the stress could actually take years off my life, not to mention most of the day I’m slouching in front of a screen. It’s the best paying job I’ve ever had, and I feel like leaving without something else lined up would set me back to square one, but I’m reaching the end of my rope. At this point I hope every day that something terrible would happen just so I wouldn’t have to go into work, and every time I hit a roadblock or get a word of criticism I just want to throw in the towel and quit on the spot.
This can’t be normal, and if it is I really don’t care to live on this planet anymore.