Comments by "DefaultFlame" (@DefaultFlame) on "Luke Smith"
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Until recently I worked in a dead-end job doing manual labor for my municipal government. The work I did wasn't critical but it was meaningful, it helped people, and some parts of it made the municipality look nicer, and some even made it function better, even if in small ways. When people in the public saw me out and about doing my job sometimes they'd stop me just to tell me how much they appreciated the work I was doing.
It wasn't the best, but it was good enough. I didn't love it, but I certainly didn't hate it.
Then my boss of over a decade got old. He's 67. Started forgetting things. Stopped planning out work tasks thoroughly which resulted in issues. His previous intolerance for anything that sounded like criticism of anything he had worked on, even something as simple as a schedule that was incorrect, went from being a problem you could work around to being an active detriment to getting things done. He went from being willing to talk to people to telling people to be quiet if he asked them a question and didn't like the answer, and threatening to send them home if they kept trying to answer his question.
This took place over years.
That's not mentioning his casual "just kidding" brand of bullying of most of the employees going from an occasional annoyance to a constant daily thing.
Until last spring when I suffered a nervous breakdown due the hostile work environment. Then another two later in the year. Then a fourth at the start of this year that he actually saw and then I got suspended and sent to do drug testing for benzodiazepine because of my "mood swings". Because the other people at work told him that I was sometimes "euphorically happy." Which just happened to coincide with whenever he was vacationing in the tropics or otherwise not at work for an extended period.
My second to last breakdown occurred because he was supposed to be off work for an entire month due to eye surgery, and then he showed up and messed with our schedule on his free time. Running into him there, right before the end of work when he wasn't supposed to be there and I was supposed to be free of him, if only temporarily, broke me. I kept it together until I got home and then spent hours crying in the shower and wanting to kill myself just to make it stop.
Anyway, at the same time as the drug testing I got to talk with a shrink who concluded that I was suffering from anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The drug test came back, and surprise, surprise there was no benzodiazepine in my piss. I got to see a doctor, got prescribed anti-depressants, and got put on medical leave for a load of months.
My doctor referred me to psychiatric care, but the shrinks denied it as they "couldn't see a reason for evaluation".
My boss didn't get fired because he hadn't done anything specific. They couldn't find me another place to work that wasn't at the same place as him because the municipal government had centralized a lot of things in the same location a few years back. In the end we made a deal where I would "go back to work" and get paid for three months without having to actually come in and do any work in exchange for me resigning.
At this point I'm pretty sure I got screwed and shouldn't have accepted that, but at the time my head was not in the right place and I just wanted it to be over.
I am now officially unemployed since a month ago. I'm trying to get the unemployment benefits I am owed, but the bureaucracy is hell, the website I'm supposed to use for it is so badly programmed that I couldn't actually send in my application and had to call them, and for days all I got was an automated message saying that they couldn't answer my call before the damned machine hung up on me. This was after several days after using the messaging service on the website that was supposed to be "faster" and getting no response. Once I actually got through they had to send me a paper application since the web one didn't work.
Then they wanted more crap from me, some of which it turns out is impossible to get because the reason for the deal I made apparently never got written down by the municipal government and the HR boss I made it with has since retired. I'm also waiting for papers from my doctor that I was supposed to pick up two days ago but the receptionist told me that he "hadn't had the time to write them," and "we could send them to you in the mail as soon as he can get around to it." Not blaming my doctor, great guy, but it's fucking infuriating.
I'm currently trying to get a job as fast as possible just so I can give up on trying to get the unemployment benefits I am owed. They can keep my money if it means I don't have to deal with them any more.
My only solace currently is that I sometimes get to hear about how it's gone there since I left.
I might have been a cog, but I was an important cog that made sure things were working smoothly, that things got done in time, that things got planned out and prepared, and motivated the lazy people at work to do their jobs (in an "alright, let's get some work done lads" kind of way). I didn't get paid for this mind you, I did it because of work ethic and the small amount of pride I had in my job.
Now I hear through the grapevine that nothing gets done, that people just aren't doing their jobs, that everything's a mess, and that the boss is screaming at people every single day.
After just 6 months of me being gone.
And I just feel schadenfreude.
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