So, obviously I've been silent for a good long while; figure it's time to talk about it.
As is more than apparent, the new job and my repaired computer has utterly failed to produce the increase in update rate that I so optimistically hoped for. And, there's a reason for that. Namely, my job is awful. The company is critically understaffed, with no institutional willingness to cut back responsibilities (which I kind of get, since, as a disability services company, our responsibilities are people, but), and the end result is that the employees have to take on a lot more duties to make ends meet. Add in the fact that our industry has been without unions of any serious scale or organization since at least the 80s, and you have a field with some extremely employer-friendly legislation offering a glorious cornucopia of exemptions to overtime and mandatory break laws.
Which all adds up to my 90-hour work week.
Yeah, 90. At first I was a 20- to 30-hour employee, then they handed me full-time duties, then some more, and then they asked me to take on another client, and then abruptly I blinked and realized that I was, as scheduled, at 89.5 hours a week. I mentioned to them that that was my limit, and they backed off, and over the next two months, I kept on hinting to a sympathetic administrator that I'd be open to handing off some of my shifts in order to get duties to new hires (because administration is afraid that their employees will get mad if admin takes hours away, despite my kind of workload being routine among the experienced staff). End result: two months of hinting later, I managed to pass off a 10-hour shift, getting down to an 80-hour week. This wasn't ideal over the long term, but it helped a lot over the short term.
Then a month later they fired two people and I had to take the shift back.
I have lasted since late March in this job. At first I figured I could handle it over the short term while they got their shit together, and I was right. Indeed, for a while there it looked like it was going to pan out exactly like that. But then everything I'd wheedled out of them over two months with an administrator sympathetic to me went poof overnight. And it's not just that! We're in an industry noted for its burnout rate, and when we had a state-mandated in-service day to train us and refresh us on new and old concepts, the admin presenting skimmed over half of the slide show on burnout completely without comment and then turned things over to another one so we could learn how to meditate. We finished an hour and a half early!
The churn rate, meanwhile, is stunning. In my third month working there, we hired four new people, which was great! Exactly what I was looking for, and exactly what the company needed. We ended the month with one less employee than we'd started with. One of them was middle management, and a years-long veteran. Her position went unfilled for three months because they were all out of staff with the requisite amount of experience. Then they decided to hand it to somebody who already had a house to manage, without divesting her of her other duties, while she was already shouldering a 120-hour work week. Their options were that bad.
They also refuse to hire enough people to make up for the constant gaping holes in their organization. They hire exclusively locals or personal acquaintances of existing staff. The latter is a terrible policy for obvious reasons. The former is a terrible policy because WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. The nearest even suburban center is half an hour away, and they have better companies there! Unsurprisingly, the labor pool they consider eligible is running dead dry.
My company's administration isn't malicious; they genuinely value the company and its workers, and want things to work out. But they are utterly incompetent, and I have finally come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing is going to change.
My shifts are long. As scheduled, I work a shift or am travelling to or between shifts continuously from early Friday afternoons to late Monday mornings.
My shifts are inconsistent. The schedule rarely works out that way, because one of my clients' parents keep pulling him home with, generously, half a day's notice, so I don't even know where I'll be most weekends until the day of. Sometimes they change the plans, multiple times, throughout the weekend. Then there are my clients who cause problems and get shifts handed to an admin so they can address behavioral problems, which come out of nowhere.
I am poorly paid. I make less, hourly, than a babysitter. I am responsible for medicine administration, emergency first aid, transportation, entertainment -- at my own expense, because I have to do whatever the clients want to do with them, and am not reimbursed! -- and caretaker duties. And that's for hours when they're awake. When they're asleep, my pay is barely above the state minimum wage.
My shift spacing is fucked. I get home late Monday morning and I'm off until late Tuesday night. That is my longest break from work. Most of the time, I'm not that lucky. My midweek is an endless procession of four- to five-hour breaks in between shifts -- maybe, once in a while, an eight-hour break that I will realistically spend sleeping. I am no sooner wound down from my shift than I have to get up and go to the next one. All of this when I have to commute an hour to work -- not, in and of itself, really a hardship to me personally, but it really slashes my effective time off. Driving time is not relaxation time.
That, ultimately, is why updates have slowed to a crawl lately. I'm riding the ragged edge of burnout, here. When I get home, I don't want to write. I want to slump into a chair, play some games, read, watch TV, fucking sleep -- I just want to unwind. Writing is fun for me, but it's also an investment of mental energy, and when you ask an introvert to spend 90 hours of their week in high-intensity socialization mode -- because dear god, interacting with clients demands your A game -- and space their shifts so that they go six days in a row without being able to fully wind down, they don't have much mental energy left to spare.
So, that's why. And, also, if I've been a jerk to any of you over the last few months, I'm genuinely sorry. I haven't really been tracking the progress of this stress very well, and it's snuck up on me.
You all should expect update rates to be sharply curtailed over the near future, because I'm in emergency mode right now. I need out.
Happily, I may have a solution there. My best friend in the world has found a position with another disabilities company. It has regular hours, overtime pay (oh yeah, my company is only just implementing overtime out of fears that their grey area may be getting less grey, and then only on waking hours), benefits, and it's admin, so the rate's higher. My friend has offered to walk my resume in the door, and I've submitted an application. I've probably got the best chance possible for this, and fingers are fully crossed.
That said, even if I don't get this, realistically it's time for me to jump ship. I've lost hope that things will improve at my company. The entire field is in the middle of a decades-long employment crunch, so my almost-a-year of experience and clean record probably makes me the perfect applicant. One way or another, I'm getting out.
It's just that, in the meantime, I can't keep up work on my quests. I'll be back soon -- again, there are some very easy ways out for me. But I am definitely, officially, going away for a while.
Sorry, folks. I'll be back to this soon.
