I’m at a tipping point now.
Our team has returned to answering the phones full time. Oh Joy!
Our team was set up to fail from the beginning.
We warned the supervisor, and she chose not to listen. She actively deluded herself into believing that everyone was her friend.
Now she’s terrified that she’s going to lose her job.
That little tidbit is something I’m going to get a lot of milage out of. I have been and will continue to use that the give her a taste of what her inaction has done to all of us.
She refused to stand for anything and has demonstrated graphically, Those who don’t stand for something, stand for nothing, She didn’t stand up for us or her team, instead she was off in her own little world. We, her team, did all the heavy lifting and we got raped for it.
Now we’re being used and abused by anyone and everyone.
She’s weak, and once it became obvious that she had no clue about any aspect of what we did, questions were asked. Shortly thereafter there was blood in the water and her friends started taking bites out of her.
It sounds like I’m describing sharks…
Comparing the management at my company to sharks is an insult to sharks.
Perhaps Jackals is a better comparison.
Now, I’m enjoying playing Loki. The right word in the wrong ear, and chaos rains down. I’m enjoying watching these jackals trying to figure out who they should attack. What’s happening is that they can’t identify their enemies and are unsure of past alliances.
The supervisors are dividing and isolating themselves. They’re having a taste of what they’ve done to their employees over the past few years.
The two brightest of my colleagues figured out what I’ve been doing and they’re as amused as I am. Where there was one – now there are three… They’ve joined in.
At the same time all of us have stepped up our job searches. We sniffed something in the air and it’s since been revealed the upper management is doing two things that are not unexpected, but are tell-tails of where this is all heading.
They’re moving the mahogany row offices to towers in the sky, only a short 15 minute ride away. It also appears that a new office that replicates all our functions is being established in another country.
This means an already checked out and clueless management will move further away from the wage slaves they’re supposed to be “connected” with and they will become more removed from the actual work being done.
“What was it that management said about not closing our facility? Did former President Obama ‘if you like your health care you can keep your health care’ join the board of directors?”
Well Mr. President, I liked my healthcare and lost it in the first wave of changes. Due to the confusion created by the sweeping healthcare changes, I also paid for more than a year of healthcare insurance for which I received no benefits and subsequently filed
and WON
a suit against the insurance provider. Truly a case of winning the battle and losing the war. So as the costs mounted, was it any surprise that insurance companies started bailing on ACA?
I digress.
I’m listening a lot more to the talk of my coworkers.
The bottom line is that none of them are happy or care about doing things the right way anymore. It’s not that there is a right or a wrong way to do things (There is) but in what we do there are shades of gray. Most everyone is not even worrying about situations where they’ve missed the mark entirely. After all the client will call back and bitch about it later anyway, to someone else.
Burnout is evident everywhere. I think of it as repetitive stress in your brain.
We deal with people on medicare. They’re the worst. Don’t get me wrong it’s not about agism, after all I’m almost there too. It’s about so very many of them being technologically ignorant. They’re not dumb or stupid, they’re just fighting through a system that is stacked against them. Icons that don’t convey the entire message, equipment that is difficult to read for aged eyes, and instructions that are unclear.
By the time these people call in, they’re pretty frustrated and pissed off. There are a number of them that completely miss the point of the devices we support and do things that make no sense.
These people take time to address and sort out. Often you can’t answer the question from a technological standpoint, you’ve got to make the information relatable to the person. This takes more time.
These days, it’s time we don’t have. We’re constantly asked why a particular call is taking so long. This of course makes us try to hurry the process along and often results in miscommunication. Which leads to additional calls from the same person because now they’re expecting the equipment to behave in a particular way and it’s not.
The medicare person’s frustration is compounded by fear, confusion, and long telephone hold times. Lots of my younger coworkers will say just about anything to get a medicare person off the phone, it not that they truly don’t care, it’s that we’re in a toxic environment and the priority is to get to the next call.
This has devolved into a strictly numbers situation. The employee is only as valuable as the number of calls they answer, not whether the client hung up the phone knowing what they needed to know and how to actually use the equipment.
So in addition to the frustration of working in a truly shitty environment, we’re all dealing with the truly shitty job of finding another place of employment.
President Trump talks about fake news, he’d totally lose his shit if he had to deal with fake job leads.
While it sounds racist, I’ve gotten to the point that if I get an email from someone who is obviously Indian (Dot, not feather) the email goes straight to the SPAM folder. 90% of the time these are emails completely unrelated to qualifications spelled out in my resume.
I really love the emails that start by telling me the sender has spent hours choosing me for a position that is nothing like what my resume says. Those assholes are immediately deleted. My next favorite email type, are the ones where the city, state, or job title is completely misspelled and also on the other side of the country. Uh yeah… you did a lot of research to make sure that you presented a professional appearance.
I’m changing the job search paradigm. Blindly sending resumes to positions posted on job search sites isn’t working. I’m looking for companies that are interesting and checking their “careers” sections. I’m applying directly rather than on sites like Dice, Monster, LinkedIn, and the rest.
Thus far the results aren’t any better in terms of interviews, but at least I’m cutting out the middle men.
I’m also trying to build connections with other people. That’s a lot harder than it sounds. Where do you go to meet people these days? Social media is right out! No one on social media is what they claim to be. Besides, I hate social media!
Anyhow, if I’m not writing very much or only posting sporadically it’s nothing personal. I’m just preoccupied with more immediate issues.
Hope that as we head into the holiday season you’re all doing great.