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Antiwork

Reaching a breaking point.

This is a rant, and kind of long, so apologies forcthat Physically and metaphorically I'm getting close to my limit. Without too many details, I work as a plumbing wholesale delivery driver. Things like toilets, water heaters, cast iron pipe, if water goes through it in a building, I lug it around town. This is hard labor and I bear the brunt of most of it. Our warehouse guy gets the luxury of a forklift, I get to take these things off the truck by hand unless the customer happens to have heavy machinery. Now, I'm a strong guy, I don't go to a gym or anything but, I can outperform most of the people I interact with in terms of how much I can lift and move around. The issue is that I made to mistake of letting people know that I am stronger than they are, so now…


This is a rant, and kind of long, so apologies forcthat

Physically and metaphorically I'm getting close to my limit. Without too many details, I work as a plumbing wholesale delivery driver. Things like toilets, water heaters, cast iron pipe, if water goes through it in a building, I lug it around town. This is hard labor and I bear the brunt of most of it. Our warehouse guy gets the luxury of a forklift, I get to take these things off the truck by hand unless the customer happens to have heavy machinery. Now, I'm a strong guy, I don't go to a gym or anything but, I can outperform most of the people I interact with in terms of how much I can lift and move around. The issue is that I made to mistake of letting people know that I am stronger than they are, so now it's just expected that the heavy things will fall on my shoulders (literallyin most cases). I'm young, mid-twenties, but I get home at the end of the day so sore that I'm left wishing that a meteor collapses my apartment while I'm asleep so I don't have to go into work the next morning. The company I work for has less than 15 employees and we did over $10 million in sales last year and while I don't have any concrete numbers for it, I'd be willing to bet that no less than $2 million of that was delivered a job site by me with an upper estimate between $3 or $4 million. I made $50,000 last year for all my efforts. For destroying my body and leaving myself wondering if life is even worth living, I can barely make ends meet. I know that I make more than some, but I am the sole earner in my home of two people and I am breaking myself to provide all while feeling like I'm not doing enough. The worst part is that it isn't even my boss that's the issue, he actually cares about the people that work for him, it's the corporate entity above him. They skim off more than half of what we make despite the fact that all they do is sit at a desk and tell the people below them on the ladder that they aren't doing enough. My company has an annual profit sharing incentive, not sure how it's set up, but at the end of the year, the boss gets to take up to 60% of that pool just for being the boss and then distribute the rest to employees as they see fit. My boss didn't do that. He barely took any so that he could distribute as much as possible to us and corporate rejected his plan and told him he had to take more. Before anyone tries to say anything like he was just saying that to look good, this man can't lie to save his life and he was pissed about this. Corporate forced him to take the money he wanted to give to us just so he could buy stock in the company. This company forces the people running each branch to own a certain amount of stock in the company so that their whole life is invested in the company. If that branch fails, they would have nothing left. Is this all I have to look forward to for the rest of my life? I thought I had found a decent place to work, but the corporate element is forcing my boss to run things in a way that he knows if frustrating us employees. Even with a boss that genuinely cares about each of us, this job sucks. I'm very rapidly reaching a point of just not caring and letting everything go. Fade into obscurity and kick the bucket in some dirty alleyway behind a dumpster. It would just be easier. Of course I can't do that, I still have family and I wouldn't put the stress of having to bury me on them, but it's honestly even more sad that the only thing keeping me from going over the edge is a reluctance to inconvenience my family like that. That and I've got two cats to take care of. So I will carry on with this and probably be bedridden by my late thirties, but hey, at least the company gets to make profit from my suffering.

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