Antiwork

I’m not entirely sure what I’m seeking in posting this. I’m severely depressed and just need some relief, some sense of community and understanding. I hope I can find it here. I’ll try to keep it brief: I’m your typical case of “gifted kid syndrome”. High achievements as a kid and teen then crashed somewhere in college. I was told that I could do and be anything and I skated by on the strength of being “gifted” without discipline, unfortunately. I crashed somewhere in my college years and had to fight through debilitating depression daily to graduate. My first job out of college was soul sucking to say the least, but paid decent. I fumbled it because of the burnout. My current job is that feeling multiplied and I want to quit everyday but I need a steady form of income to fund my “American Dream” that I can’t put…

My wife has worked for Visionworks for several years. She worked throughout the pandemic because selling glasses was deemed by their corporate suits to be a medical necessity — but don't worry, the corporate assholes worked from home. VW begrudgingly provided masks since they claimed their employees were essential workers. Employees are subjected to 3 blackout periods a year when they are not allowed to use their vacation time, late summer, march and December. Now they're saying that employees cannot have Monday, Friday or Saturday off. The store is closed on Sundays (for now, I'm sure that will fucking change) so no one will be getting 2 consecutive days off. That's the tip of the shitberg with this place. The bullshit that retail people have to ingest from their corporate overlords is criminal.

I'm sitting in on a routine training session for newly hired sales reps about how to claim the mileage they drive in their personal cars for work. It's an easy reimbursement calculation: $ = (Oe – Os)0.55 ; where Oe is the Odometer at end of workday and Os is the Odometer at start of workday (in km). HR was also sitting in for their first time and started commenting with unprecedented new rules, like “Let's say between sales calls you go to pick up something personal at the post office. You need to stop the odometer calculation first and start it up again when you're back on the job.” Every sales rep's head cocked sideways as they sensed the red flag. You could almost hear the trust shattering. It's one of the perks of working in the field that you get to run the occasional small errand while you're…

For context I work at a large company which has a vehicle yard and back-lot. As I got to work this morning and was getting ready I saw 3 yard workers walking down the road and one had a golf club. As I drove up I saw they had a bag of golf balls and a driver and they were setting up at the edge of the yard and out into our scrap field. I drove up slow and waited for them to hit off before cheering a guy on as he slammed one over the fence. Hell Yes. This is what I love. Guy just enjoying their day and playing golf on the Man's time.

TBH, I have it less awful than most. My coworker was struggling, though, and was probably going to get fired. We got our bonus today, and a soon as it hit her account, she emailed her resignation letter and just walked. I'm 100% sure she probably would have given 2 weeks notice, but was concerned they'd let he go before bonus was paid out, so she got her money and just walked.