A Difference of Philosophies

Hi folks! I’m still not ready to get back in full swing when it comes to posting, but there is something that I wanted to reflect on. I don’t know it this story will help anyone, but I wanted to get it off my chest.

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Apologies for Being MIA

I haven’t been able to keep up with my blog the last couple of months; the main reason is I don’t have internet at home and I’ve been too busy and tired to go to coffee shops and the like to use their wifi. The main reason I’m tired is because of work. Work is very stressful right now for what are frankly BS reasons that I have no control over. I don’t want to turn this into a work bashing post, but that unfortunately plays a huge role in why I haven’t had the energy to write.

In my defense, there were maggots. Labor Day weekend was especially difficult and I ended up lashing out in a note to another employee, my manager found the note and I got in trouble. It’s purely coincidental that the same day I got chewed out for my note we do a deep clean of the department at closing time (at my urging, since it’s what was stressing me out) and we find maggots in the wooden shelf that our register sits on.

The meeting I had with my boss earlier that day basically amounted to me being chewed out for being unprofessional, but in retrospect I have no regrets. We’re a food establishment. It’s not enough to only be spotless when the health inspector comes around. We need to be safe and sanitary. It’s my job to keep the place safe and sanitary and when I literally can’t do my job because we’re understaffed, don’t have enough labor hours, and the place was built incorrectly to begin with and nobody knows how to follow up on problems. I was just stressing about how dirty the floor was after we’d “finished” closing duties, but in the meeting my boss was like, “Oh, but we have all these other problems you’ve obviously overlooked because you’re focusing on the negative. You need to look on the bright side.” Bad paraphrasing I know, but no, I don’t have to look at the positive of anything. It’s been ten days since we found the maggots under the wood and nothing has been done other than us, the employees, dousing the floor with heavy duty cleaning chemicals so the best case scenario is there’s a bunch of dead maggots under the register. I am literally disgusted and going out of my mind with stress.

My boss is on vacation this week and I’m supposed to have a follow up meeting with him and his boss eventually, but I’m just so done with everything. I applied to another position in the same company and it’s looking promising. I’ve already done the interview, background check, and drug test. My mom wasn’t exactly supportive of me applying for a new job. She said I was being emotional and acting rashly and I should have waited until I had a cooler head and honestly all that really hurt my feelings. She was throwing Stoicism in my face. Her view is I should have kept a stiff upper lip and rode out the bad stuff at work; My view is I saw my chance and I took it and I’ll be fine whatever the results are. If I get the new job, great, a change will be healthy for me. If not I’m not going to be any worse off than I currently am and my boss will know that I’m not playing games.

My saving grace is twice a week I have my one calculus class. That’s right, I go to calculus class to decompress and just have a moment that’s all about me and what I think. My boss gave me an info card with the company’s mental health services on it and I haven’t contacted them because my queer status automatically makes me very leery of corporate sponsored mental health care and I’m terrified that they actually can’t help me because I might not actually be the problem. We’re very understaffed because working at my job sucks. People who have been there for years finally go fed up and left. New people coming in just wait the 90 days and then transfer out. The corporate office doesn’t care at best and at worst is stupidly incompetent. It’s been ten days and nothing has been done about the maggots.

So, that’s the gist of it. Happy belated Labor Day everyone. I can’t promise to write more consistently since all of my writing projects are currently on hold until the work situation stabilizes, but I did want to at least give an update on why I’ve been absent for a few months. I really miss doing the Carnivals, but I couldn’t even find the energy to do that and decided to focus on my mental health which is complicated right now, but overall getting better compared to ten days ago so I’m very happy about that at least. I hope to get back into writing soon, but I won’t be too hard on myself if I need a little extra time to pull myself back together. I really am enjoying my calculus class and look forward to hopefully passing this time and finally start calc 2.