Antiwork

It’s 9:07pm. There’s a woman taking a business call, drunk, on the train. Slurring her way through how an investor pulled out. You’re drunk. You’re off the clock. Why the fuck you taking that call?

I’m a paramedic currently working in an urban hospital system. I quit my job with another hospital system March 2021. I enjoyed the work from the previous job, but received a meager income. At my current job, I have the opposite problem; I don’t enjoy my work, but I’m being compensated very well. I received an email from a TA Sourcing Consultant offering an interview for a job with the old hospital system. When I originally accepted the old job in March 2020, I recall in the interview being told they “have no flexibility with pay, but have very good benefits”. Soon after working there, I discovered this was false, as there were pay/experience discrepancies throughout the department, and the benefits were either made more expensive or removed entirely claiming social distancing as the excuse and never replacing them. So I have an interview tomorrow with the old company, and…

Lately my emotions at work have been really negative and hard to handle. I work a horrible retail job, of course, in a very dry and boring store, it's just starting to get to me. I will spend my entire shift switching between extremely angry, or trapped, or fantasizing about suicide over and over again in my head. Working is (unfortunately) a large chunk of my life so it's really unproductive to be feeling this way. Any advice would help. I would like to find a new job but I have a transportation issue that makes this job “ideal.”

So, I currently work in data & evaluation for a nonprofit and have been at this role for just shy of a year. Overall, I really enjoy it! My team of 3 is small and we get along very well. We all live in different parts of the country & were remote, up until recent. Our CEO mandated a return to office in July. Where I am located, none of my colleagues I work with live in the same state. I made the ballsy/dumb/bold (you can call whatever you like lol) move of ignoring this & continued to WFH. I went months without anyone noticing until my boss’s boss came to my city and someone told him I wasn’t coming in to the office. This prompted my boss to casually shoot me a Slack message telling me and giving me a ‘heads up’ and that I should start going into…