Antiwork

Well, seeing some of these made me decide I wanted to share my little 'horror' story. It really isn't that, but it was a bad experience, somewhat. Since July of last year (till recently) I was working at my local Papa John's. It wasn't great but I made good ish pay and it was the first job I've had that didn't drive me insane. I enjoy the road a lot. You basically get to take breaks as your job, sorta. The thing that sucks is working a tipped position in America. I made 11.40 in the store and 5.58 when checked out. Those are the most recent numbers, but MO minwage went up this year. It was probably more like 10.50 last year. Anyways. Recently I discovered through some internal digging that I wasn't making the money I thought I was. There was a page on our schedule website that…

They want you to believe that you have more in common with them than any other person because they know that you have more in common with an amount of people that can threaten their power. If power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And if money is what powers capitalism then those with the most capital are corrupt by definition and the system is broken from the start.

I work retail, grocery, front end. “Courtesy Clerk”, bottom of the food chain grunt work. Of course, like everywhere, we're understaffed, and it's a holiday weekend, and there's a big sale. So its been long, hard hours for the same crappy pay. But, towards the end of my shift, I asked my two other coworkers if they'd be fine with me taking an extra break- and they both just said they didn't give a shit. And ended up joining me in the break room. Our manager had left early, and no one noticed us gone, relaxing for a short ten minutes before going back to it… it really revitalized my energy for a little bit. A golden little moment of “disobedience” that didn't really hurt anything.

My first project was to modernize a codebase of about 9000 lines, which had been unmaintained for, I think, 2 years. I implemented every feature request, fixed every bug report, set up tests to make sure things kept working, and refactored the whole codebase to bring it up to current standards. I did this in 9 months with minimal supervision. So… yeah, actually I was kind of a rockstar. Then came Scrum. Working solo wasn't an option anymore. Work was like trying to drive with the parking brake on. For 4 years. In that time, I can't think of anything I accomplished. That's when my burnout started. It wasn't just managers. Actually my first two managers were awesome. But other developers were so insecure, so petty, and there was so much one-upmanship, toxic doesn't begin to describe it. Eventually the company got bought, management changed, and “not good enough” became…