Antiwork

After teaching for about 10 years, most of which I was running a minimum of two side jobs with four being my max at one point, I decided to change gears. I found a position in Louisville, KY in tech support. Applied, drove out for an interview, and impressed them enough to pull out a hire in July of 2020. It was a pay increase over teaching, a new home, a new start…everything I wanted. Unfortunately, there was an on-call rotation, which should have been a red flag, but I was just desperate enough for a change not to care. I was learning the ropes fairly quickly, and had been prepping to take the lead on one of our projects – for the record, it was restaurant POS equipment and tech support. We sold, supported, and installed the front- and back-of-house equipment that allowed restaurants to take orders, display menus,…

When I was in my early 20's I worked in a call center for a gas/heating company. I was on the out of hours team, which involved doing nights and weekends. Nights were 6pm-6am. We would receive calls up until about 9m and were allowed to make outbound calls up until 8pm between receiving inbound. After that, we type up reports for supervisors to assess, this was the address of all jobs that couldn't be complete on first visit and what needed to be done. Then we would print out a few hundred letters and have to fold them, place them in envelopes and get them stamped, placed In boxes to be picked up. After about 1am, there was no work to be done, not a single thing. We basically just had to stay awake and answer the phone if there was a heating/ hot water emergency at 3am, which…

I recently quit my job for a better opportunity. It was a small local business, 9 employees. We did hard manual labor outside in all weather. Including 30 below zero. My boss referred to himself as “the king”. He would belittle his guys, call them stupid and so on. You could never accomplish enough in a day. We got our Christmas bonus last year and it was pretty light because the company “didn’t have the money”…his wife bought him a $100,000 piece of equipment for a Christmas gift, because they “needed to lose some money cause they made so much”….this is all stuff the owner told us. And THEN he would BRAG about having so much money to us. While we all live paycheck to paycheck. Can’t believe I did that for 3 years.

I worked in the film business for a number of years back in the late 90's/early aughts. As far as toxic work environments go, depending on the project, the film business can be right up there. Example – having a phone thrown across a production office, narrowly missing the person it was thrown at. One production manager in particular was a complete assbag. He even used the words “I lead by intimidation” to us on several occasions. In any event, he loved yelling at people, especially those of us who were really just starting out. It was irritating, but you took it because that was the cost of having that particular job. Needless to say, he did this more than once to me. Until he did it one too many times. After being yelled at on the phone by him, I had reached my end point. But I wasn't going…

I just got a call from a company and they requested an interview with me. I told them I work M-F until 4 (with the nature of my job, I can’t take off work short notice because I see patients). The lady told me the manager is unable to schedule things after 11am, so we can’t interview. I asked if a video call would work, and she said no. Okay lady, well why would I want to work for a company that won’t accommodate me at all?

Luckily I'm currently in a position where I'm scraping by at my job, if you can call that lucky. I'm trying to find a new job with a higher wage which is proving difficult in and of itself. However while doing so I am getting very frustrated so I've stopped applying when a few things happen. Jobs that don't list pay or salary. There's really no excuse for this. It's a waste of my and the companies time. Jobs that have unnecessary assessments. I'm not going to fill out your 30 question sales survey when I'm applying to be a delivery driver. Jobs that have an obnoxious amount of assessments. I don't have an hour to apply for your position. Unless this is a very high paying job I once again think this is disrespectful to my time. Especially when these questions can be asked in an interview. And everyone's…

I'm looking at job postings today, and came across this beautiful gem (listed under entry-level, no less): ​ Job posting claiming to take the work-life balance very seriously, with team members working 40-45 hour work weeks. Job itself is an entry-level listing looking for “an experienced full-stack software engineer and technical leader”.

So I used to work as a host at a local restaurant. I was there for about three years. Had a great working environment and a couple of managers that were some of the best people I’ve ever known. I still stay in touch with them, they’re that wonderful. Things could be stressful at times, but everyone genuinely cared about each other there. A little over a year ago, the general manager put in her two-week notice. She got a better job elsewhere. Not long after she left, the assistant manager also put in her two-week notice. Things were kinda turbulent at this time. The owners had to bring in a manager from another restaurant they owned out-of-state, as a “temporary manager” until they could find a replacement. That’s when things started going downhill. This temp manager started making changes, specifically to my area. She made me change the way…