plague journaling
May. 21st, 2020 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksPutting this one under a cut for extensive day job discussion.
There has been An Incident. Again. A coworker took me along while raiding other parts of the building for office supplies. This is apparently standard practice, and someone else ought to know where to hunt, hence my inclusion. This was not meant to be an extensive process since we only needed a few things.
We were gone from the production floor for over two hours. We got a talking to when we got back, though it was pretty chill, all things considered. That's because we are so slow right now, even once we got back the boss didn't have any work for us to do specifically. Just...go keep yourselves busy.
(They suggested yesterday we might get to leave today after six hours. This morning, they suggested we might get to leave after four. Then we heard nothing and reluctantly took our lunch breaks to await further instruction. We came back to find out no one would be leaving early at all, because it "would look bad right before a holiday weekend." I cannot fathom the logic of that. I basically spent three hours doing actual work today and the other seven just absolutely fucking off.)
This is because we encountered one of the office people. She's in charge of inventory orders. She's also, it seems, profoundly lonely and possibly a little traumatized. Because we had a two-hour conversation that would, for long stretches, be about supply availability and feedback about quality and other work-related if not exactly relevant things, only to veer wildly into personal details. These gloves have a weird reaction to a particular substance, bring me an example so I can contact the supplier, I had two relatives die this week.
I--whut.
I need to--um.
Okay?
That's.
*teakettle noises*
It just. Kept. Going. I mean, how do you exit out of a conversation when every natural stopping point gets suddenly overrun by someone telling you about another personal tragedy? Like how she spent a week throwing up every day because she couldn't source PPE for us. I mean, I get it. I do. But that's a conversation to have with your loved ones or your therapist. Not two coworkers who just came looking for the small paperclips.
Did I mention I've never met this person before? First conversation ever, and the vomiting story was the first of the personal details to come out.
(Also, coworker and I are both socially awkward and agreeable to a fault, so we were particularly unable to extract ourselves from the Bottomless Pit of Conversation.)
We're debating whether we need to say something to HR, to the effect of "hey, this person is possibly Not Okay, you might want to reach out." I mean, I'm hoping I don't have to hear anything about it again and can just pretend it was all a horrible dream. If, on the other hand, I come in Tuesday and get chewed out once again for this asinine situation, I will resort to throwing other people under the bus. I'm not above that. I'm not proud.
I'm sick of the weird drama lately--this is just the latest in what has been at least two weeks of people being fucking extra about everything at work. All I want is to put my head down and run my machines. But there's not enough work, so they won't let me, and then I catch hell for random shit.
We're essential workers, except very few of our customers are still actively buying our stuff. We are running out of work to do. No one wants to acknowledge that, though, because they don't want to shut down production. But they don't have anything else for us to do instead. And we get in trouble if we just lollygag about. Tempers are running high and the petty in-fighting is starting to tick up again. This is the shit that makes me never want to go back to work again. They're doing alternate week furloughs for the engineers and office staff, apparently, and I wish they would just start doing the same for us. We're pulling in jobs that aren't due for months, so it's not like we can't afford to slow down for a while.
In closing, I feel like my day was just a 10+ hour recitation of Alice's Restaurant, except not nearly as funny. Here. We all need this. It's almost 20 minutes, but you know, I think we've got the time to spare these days.
There has been An Incident. Again. A coworker took me along while raiding other parts of the building for office supplies. This is apparently standard practice, and someone else ought to know where to hunt, hence my inclusion. This was not meant to be an extensive process since we only needed a few things.
We were gone from the production floor for over two hours. We got a talking to when we got back, though it was pretty chill, all things considered. That's because we are so slow right now, even once we got back the boss didn't have any work for us to do specifically. Just...go keep yourselves busy.
(They suggested yesterday we might get to leave today after six hours. This morning, they suggested we might get to leave after four. Then we heard nothing and reluctantly took our lunch breaks to await further instruction. We came back to find out no one would be leaving early at all, because it "would look bad right before a holiday weekend." I cannot fathom the logic of that. I basically spent three hours doing actual work today and the other seven just absolutely fucking off.)
This is because we encountered one of the office people. She's in charge of inventory orders. She's also, it seems, profoundly lonely and possibly a little traumatized. Because we had a two-hour conversation that would, for long stretches, be about supply availability and feedback about quality and other work-related if not exactly relevant things, only to veer wildly into personal details. These gloves have a weird reaction to a particular substance, bring me an example so I can contact the supplier, I had two relatives die this week.
I--whut.
I need to--um.
Okay?
That's.
*teakettle noises*
It just. Kept. Going. I mean, how do you exit out of a conversation when every natural stopping point gets suddenly overrun by someone telling you about another personal tragedy? Like how she spent a week throwing up every day because she couldn't source PPE for us. I mean, I get it. I do. But that's a conversation to have with your loved ones or your therapist. Not two coworkers who just came looking for the small paperclips.
Did I mention I've never met this person before? First conversation ever, and the vomiting story was the first of the personal details to come out.
(Also, coworker and I are both socially awkward and agreeable to a fault, so we were particularly unable to extract ourselves from the Bottomless Pit of Conversation.)
We're debating whether we need to say something to HR, to the effect of "hey, this person is possibly Not Okay, you might want to reach out." I mean, I'm hoping I don't have to hear anything about it again and can just pretend it was all a horrible dream. If, on the other hand, I come in Tuesday and get chewed out once again for this asinine situation, I will resort to throwing other people under the bus. I'm not above that. I'm not proud.
I'm sick of the weird drama lately--this is just the latest in what has been at least two weeks of people being fucking extra about everything at work. All I want is to put my head down and run my machines. But there's not enough work, so they won't let me, and then I catch hell for random shit.
We're essential workers, except very few of our customers are still actively buying our stuff. We are running out of work to do. No one wants to acknowledge that, though, because they don't want to shut down production. But they don't have anything else for us to do instead. And we get in trouble if we just lollygag about. Tempers are running high and the petty in-fighting is starting to tick up again. This is the shit that makes me never want to go back to work again. They're doing alternate week furloughs for the engineers and office staff, apparently, and I wish they would just start doing the same for us. We're pulling in jobs that aren't due for months, so it's not like we can't afford to slow down for a while.
In closing, I feel like my day was just a 10+ hour recitation of Alice's Restaurant, except not nearly as funny. Here. We all need this. It's almost 20 minutes, but you know, I think we've got the time to spare these days.
