So i'm Currently 29, and have been working my ass off a since i was 18, and before that i volunteered for a charity for about 5 years with a little bit of overlap. I was always taught that if you work hard then you will be rewarded and until a few years ago i believed it,
My first job was great, it was a card shop that was part of a bigger company and i enjoyed it, my confidence grew and within 4 years i was running the store as a supervisor, my pay was Ok and i liked the people i worked with. the trouble is that due to some price increases (That i was heavily against as we had competition literally across from us) we started making less money and we were the only store open eventually, re branded into a clearance store for the larger company. i didn't really mind this as my pay remained the same but my workload decreased slightly. The issue was that the lease was due to expire and this was the time COVID hit, lock down happened and since no money came in, the company decided not to renew the lease and we were all made redundant. I also found out later that my boss in the bigger company(who i had a lot of respect for) that had been there for around 40 years and had been running 3 stores for that company had his salary slashed by 2 grand a year(or month i don't remember which) and had decided that he'd had enough and quit. Needless to say i was disgusted by how they had done that to him.
Fast forward to later that year and i was working a temp Christmas job as a shelf stacker, It was alright, the pay was minimum wage but it was easy work and it kept me busy. The management there though…whilst the manager and her number 2 weren't terrible people they didn't exactly seem to be very active and the number 3 was the managers daughter… she had another daughter on staff too and it was easy to pick which one i had more respect for, the 1st was supposed to be on the shop floor, but spent almost all her time in the office seemingly doing nothing, whenever she did come down shed see people talking (while working i would add) and yell at them for talking instead of working. The place had a super high staff turnover and i was not surprised at all, being the person i am i stuck through it and was adamant that if they asked me i wouldn't take a permanent job offer from them, the week my contract was due to expire three people left and i was dreading being asked to stay. the last day arrived and the manager pulled me into the office and thanked me for being the only one of the temp staff to stay on through the whole season, but sorry we don't have a place for you to stay on permanently. now i wasn't angry about this, a little relieved actually but what irritated me was that there were a few other temp people that were hired a few months after me to replace those that left, and through talking to them some had been asked to stay, this meant that all the work and loyalty i had shown meant literally nothing (no surprise there i'm sure).
my most recent job was stressful, i liked the people i worked with even though one of them drove me mad sometimes, but the amount of stuff i needed to remember and work out manually lead to several mistakes which my manager(who was patient with me but i could tell it was getting to him) had to keep addressing, to top this off it was minimum wage and i needed to;
Serve customers, place orders, answer the phones, fulfill customer requests, cover the managers holiday, assist the tradesmen if they needed an extra pair of hands, take delivery(sometimes on my own) clean the shop and offices, run errands for the boss, book times for jobs in the diary,
half of which was not in my job description but i did it anyway.
The stress kept building and eventually i was contemplating the decision for the first time in my life to hand in my notice for my own (and in my opinion my managers) good as i was actually having trouble sleeping. About a week before i handed it in though, they walked up to me and said that they had asked the head of the company if i could get a pay rise as i had been there long enough, it was pretty minuscule to be honest but at the time it actually did make me question if it was worth staying, looking back now however it was pretty insulting for the amount of work i did for them. so a week later i handed my notice in and worked the notice through.
I have been unemployed since and living off my savings, I've been living with my family since i started working and don't spend much outside of rent to them, food and the very occasional indulgence so i have plenty saved up, but job hunting has been the literal worst thing ever.
i have been asked to do surveys, write essays, and even do “trial shifts” for a few hours. before even guaranteeing i get the job, to top it off every job that has turned me down has sent the same, pre-written, auto response email. REALLY!? i go through all that effort, literal hours, and you cant take 10 minutes out of your day to send a more personalized email thanking me for my time? i have been rather happy and stress free while unemployed but all this effort resulting in nothing is really getting to me and i'm starting to wonder if maybe i'm self sabotaging subconsciously or something. I want to work. not just for the money but to give me something else to do with my time, but job hunting is depressing the hell out of me.
I do want to mention one company that i was really really impressed with though(although the rules of the sub prevent me mentioning them directly), i applied and within a day they rang me up for a phone interview, in the interview they asked if had my own car(which i don't) and unfortunately public transport was a no go for them, i was disappointed but i thanked them for taking the time to ring me and they thanked me for my time and i thought that was the end of it, about an hour later though i received a well written email thanking me for my time, apologizing and stating the reasons why they couldn't take my application further. With all the other responses id received this blew me away, but it should be the minimum that you expect from an employer.
i also want to mention my father who recently passed away too. In the years leading up to his death he became a drastically more bitter person to the one that raised me, but i was recently reminded a moment when i was with him after his cancer diagnosis, i don't remember what the context was (but i believe it was pension related) some words he said have stuck with me vividly, “it just seems that I've been working all my life and now that I've put my hand out I've got nothing to show for it”. My dad was the one that instilled the work hard/honour your contract ethic i have today and for all his faults he worked damn hard since he was 17 and retired at 63 after his diagnosis. if it weren't for his short stint in the military he'd have been shafted much harder.
all this has culminated in me feeling like the effort isn't worth it anymore and the reason it sucks so much is because i'm conditioned to put in the effort anyway and it makes me too tired at this point to be angry about it, i just hope things change for the better soon and i almost don't care how