The Work Thread

Yeah that dettol advert is vom. It's just wrong on so many levels, how could they possibly have thought it was a good idea? It's a grim sight anywhere but putting it up on the tube of all places.

In happier news, for me anyway, Health and Safety reviewed my app and want to make it a best practice across the University. Hopeful I can leverage this into an actual contract rather than the zero hours temp one I'm on now.

Well we've got Mince Pies and Selection Boxes on sale.

Of course.  It's just started to get chilly after Summer, so ROLL OUT THE FESTIVE BANDWAGON!!!

Muss wrote:

In happier news, for me anyway, Health and Safety reviewed my app and want to make it a best practice across the University. Hopeful I can leverage this into an actual contract rather than the zero hours temp one I'm on now.

Very much happier news!

My return to work went so arse over tit that I'm here posting on the GNamer Forum at 10:33 on a Wednesday morning.

Yikes. Just dull, or worse? (I limit myself to browsing the GNamer Forum at 1033 on a Wednesday morning. And at 1035. And at 1036...)

Continuing a conversation from the Christmas thread.

Jimbob wrote:

I think he's quite young; I've found a common pattern (therefore this might just be prejudice) of some of the younger team members who perhaps haven't had a long permanent full-time job before, and are used to working in e.g. retail where they are treated as disposable resources, therefore feel no more loyalty to a company while working for them as they would as a customer choosing one place over the other.

This is actually something I've really struggled with. Prior to my current job, all of my long-term jobs had been for big multi-national corporations either in retail or hospitality. These big companies are straight-up evil and working for them is barely sustainable wage slavery designed to dehumanise and crush the spirit. I hated the company and I hated management (less so in wagamama, which I think does make a deliberate effort) and it powerfully radicalised me to socialism. I always worked hard, but that was because I had a vested interest in being given extra hours, and I didn't want to screw over my colleagues. I never felt I owed the company anything, and I'd have burned the whole thing to the ground in a heartbeat if I thought there was something in it for me . . . or even if I could get away with it.

Fast forward to now. I'm working a job I legitimately like and in which I feel worthwhile and appreciated, in a country where companies generally do take care of staff - the wage gap is way smaller in Japan. On the other hand, stuff like hours and sick days and overtime and vacation is way worse in Japan.

Still, sometimes my colleagues will tell me they took care of something on their day off and my first instinct is "why are you giving your free time to the man? Own your own productivity, invest free time in your own projects!" even though he might be actively making my and his life better by solving this issue.

I'm slowly coming around to an attitude of . . . picking my battles. I still envisage a world where one's ability to survive is not tied to serving the profits of someone else who works less. But I will admit that there are bad companies and companies whose only crime is existing.





Which is bad enough.

Yeah, as someone that works retail for a rather big company in Wal-Mart technically it's can be not great especially top management and ideas of the company being daft which might change when sold off.

Yet with things been this year, I'm still in full time work and working, now some jobs might have been able to do at home like some of you then some may have been made redundant or furloughed or whatever from that point of view has been good.

Then the management above me has some great people with a few I would maybe socialize with outside of work and been great in regard to my Dad where I've needed to have a day off last week to take him to hospital in Bristol, swapping to a late next week instead of an early for instance and my own mental health with this, that I could even take time off if I wish.

That are positives in all that, I've also managed to save via work enough for a flat deposit which I should have done a long time ago instead of saving getting to X amount and going to buy a car but doing it via work and not being able to touch it has been a real help.

But my pay is okay like it was more than my Dad thought when he was applying for Universal Credit but from especially this year how the public treats you is it enough not really, that's without going back to what is expected from you from top management and the company.

Things might change when/if sold, but I doubt it, then for me I mention the flat that's the cycle can't get out of as the job allowed me to save to get flat (waiting for Dad to get better / a pay out in the summer to when I buy) and once I bought I know it will pay enough for me to pay my mortgage, bills and still have money left over to get that PS5.

Buskalilly wrote:

Continuing a conversation from the Christmas thread.

... I always worked hard, but that was because I had a vested interest in being given extra hours, and I didn't want to screw over my colleagues. I never felt I owed the company anything, and I'd have burned the whole thing to the ground in a heartbeat if I thought there was something in it for me . . . or even if I could get away with it.

It's been a weird ride for me recently. I'm paid quite well, at least, relative to anything I've earned before. Still not exactly major league bucks, but enough to provide for me and my partner. Which is, of course, great. There are also aspects of the job I like; I like being an ideas guy who also builds apps or who gets to make and edit videos.

What I didn't like was being on a zero hours contract. I hated knowing that my employer could off me without recourse; hated that they wouldn't give straight answers on furlough. I was never meant to be on a zero hours contract long term. I was drafted into a Systems & Accreditation Team inside the Business School on a 3 month deal prior to the pandemic, and the team already had approval to get an extra hand on a longer term, real, contract. But of course then we had a pandemic. I was lucky to be kept on, truly. I know people who have gone through far worse than me. And you tell yourself, you need to keep on keeping on, try hard, make things that prove the value of your labour so they'll keep you. And I have been kept. I mean sort of. I kept getting 3 month extensions on the zero hours gig until I had to interview for my own job after someone in the team on a real contract was given a secondment elsewhere, and I'm now on a 6 month fixed-term contract to cover the secondment...

...or at least I should be from January. HR haven't approved it yet. They will but there will be a debate about whether I'm entitled to the pay I was on as a zero hours agency worker or the base pay of someone on my pay scale. (Basically zero hours staff get a proportional bonus per hour worked such they can take the same amount of time off as a worker properly employed by the uni without losing pay - you're not paid for holiday, but the bonus is to cover taking holiday). But of course, with Covid and Brexit and max contracts of 3 months long, I've not taken a day off for a year, save enforced closure dates. How can you on contracts that unstable? So I put down my salary as if I didn't get any time off on the job application (and that's what's been put forward to HR), and that's what the interviewers have put forward to HR... but they'll almost certainly end up cutting it back to the entry level for the pay-scale, e.g., I lose approx. 2K over a year     

But still, sort of good. A longer term deal, and I count as an actual employee and not a temp.

The thing is, a lot of the work I do is to do with a multi-million (over £100 million spent on it and counting...) database that's the single biggest piece of shit you could possibly imagine. You don't want to take out any frustrations on the little guys, but it's hard to stay motivated, patching over the cracks of this giant turd of a database, on a zero hours deal. A database with origins in efficiency savings and enhancing the student experience but was never anything more than a colossal waste of resources and excuse to dump staff.

The things I'm really good at, that nobody else in my department apart from our programmer (who is two pay scales above me and who is also not related to the big shit database, the db is via a third party company), can do, is building apps or creating new automated processes, many of which have to do with the turd db. So I have this shitty homunculus to thank for being seen as particularly valuable [I don't know of any other zero hours folk who were kept on beyond their first 3 months!]. I'm still not valuable enough to warrant an actual long term contract though. And that's the thing that eats you up inside. I know the stuff I'm doing is the stuff that would cost the employer bank otherwise; I know that I'm far more capable than a lot of people further up the food chain than me. I know that I'm literally doing work that, if on the pay scale fairly, would see me earning a substantial amount more [and that's not just me being jealous, I've been told what level my work is really at].

And that all puts me in a weird place psychologically. You have to keep going, keep proving that you are valuable despite knowing that you're being significantly underpaid and that your value stems largely from a massive corporate fuck up that's made the place a much worse place to work and cost many people their jobs. There are things on the horizon which might pan out in my favour, longer term, but you know, can't take anything for granted at the moment. And it's hard to stay motivated when it feels like it's all stick and no carrot. It does dangerous things to your head, starts making you sour about how good you think other people have things.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. Those words have never rung truer. But man, does the game ever make it hard not to hate the other players sometimes!

The sooner we have Universal Basic Income, the sooner everyone is entitled to a living wage by default, the better!

The problem is, the players winning the game are the ones writing the rules.

It's like when I was at the beach with my pals and Matty was trying to make a game with a beach ball and a donut called Donatsuball and kept creating new ways he could score points.

The analogy kind of holds.

Yeah that's totally true mate. I'm never working with the people so far up the food chain that they have the power to ruin lives. But at that point, it's hard to see them as players!

Beech Boy Matty sounds a lot like a Yu Gi Oh character; always with the perfect trap up his sleeve

I now want to play that Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist which is meant to be decent

I mean, I hate both the player and the game a lot of the time. That said, I work for a private company, The Lady works for the NHS, and she has to put in much more overtime than I do. Different Man, but The Man gets a lot more of her time than he does of mine.

Good luck with the role Muss, that sounds really grindy-downy. Hope you can keep your head straight despite all the sticks.

I feel your pain Muss, I'm at a Business School and as much as they want to be up there with Harvard, I doubt Harvard have a student database made by one guy thirty years ago, and until he retires/leaves we are completely dependent on him. From working in Higher Education, I've learnt that IT systems are always low-priority, which always baffles me when the students are there learning how to use the new tech and software, whilst the staff are struggling amongst duplicate records and dated systems that aren't fit for purpose.

I keep coming back to this to start typing something and removing it - never know who will stumble across things! But I go back to a point I sort-of-made:
I'm very fortunate to work for a small business where the hierarchy is shallow enough to make everyone feel part of the team. It took me a while to get out of the "retail cog" mentality when I joined, but I realised I was lucky. The problem I have at the moment, being a more senior person now, is I'm not sure I'm conveying this successfully to the younger newer peeps under my supervision. I also found out that my boss (who I really rely on to get the manage-y bits across) is leaving in the next week. However, my MD actually phoned me to ask how I felt - I feel like I've been there long enough to be honest about what I'm good and bad at doing, and he made a point of saying that I was a valued member of the team. I know that not everyone gets that opportunity, and I am lucky - that's why, even if I consider my options, I would hope that just leaving would be the absolute worst case scenario.

Rewinding a year ago, I went into 2020 being scunnered with a lot of things. I was still out on my own on the other side of the country, and I was becoming physically and mentally exhausted with the demands that were being put on me at my job in a secondary school. Granted, I couldn't ever compare it to anybody's workload in the Health & Medicine sector or anything like that, but in the Advisory Services (which I work in) and dare-I-say even in Teaching & Classroom support, I was really, really overclocked by any comparison. 

I was given a new member of staff for support me in my job and to ease my individual workload, but in truth I ended up giving him more support than he gave me. With this, I wasn’t getting a good work/life balance and I was fast reaching the point where I’d had enough. That carried on until mid-March, until the schools closed. Due to various changes with the government’s COVID guidelines and protection levels, I wound up working from home for nearly seven months. Being honest, that improved my work situation massively. While I was very anxious about the pandemic, I kept a low profile and didn’t do anything stupid. I had to go back eventually though, and things basically went back to the way they were - which was pretty rubbish.

Happily, a job came up in the town next to where I’m from. I went for it with an open mind, not overly expecting anything and just seeing where my application took me. I did well, I ended up getting that job. Basically, after six-and-a-bit years of “getting experience” I’m back home and working in the job and location I want to be. I moved back here for good about three weeks ago, and I started last Tuesday. Who knows what'll happen next, but this is probably the best I've felt about my work since the mid 2010s. 

Nice! Hope it delivers what you're looking for.

Very nice. I'm not surprised that working in education has made you feel burned out, given the degree to which the government's messed the sector around. Hopefully this new job revitalises you a bit!

Happy to hear it's worked out well so far for you Cappa! Now shuffle back off to the shitey west coast with you.

I'm back at work now after an extended absence for mental health reasons. Feeling much more positive at this stage of the year than at any point of 2020, so I'm just looking to maintain that moving forwards now.

Physically at work, or can it all be done from home?

JayMoyles wrote:

I'm back at work now after an extended absence for mental health reasons. Feeling much more positive at this stage of the year than at any point of 2020, so I'm just looking to maintain that moving forwards now.

Top news.

Buskalilly wrote:

Physically at work, or can it all be done from home?

Working from home. There was a discussion around if I wanted to go back into the office as there might be a benefit to seeing people from a mental health perspective, but considering the majority of folks aren't in the office any longer I think it'd just feel weird. Plus, y'know, COVID and all.

Fair enough. I've had jobs in which seeing people would be good for my mental health . . . and jobs where it wouldn't.

Since I've been off, my team's got a lot better at chatting remotely whereas prior to my absence I felt cut off from everyone, so I guess that's helped matters this time!

I got called into the manager's office yesterday for a meeting with my department manager and the company president.

Long story short, they love me and they confirmed that I'm getting a big promotion next week with a title and a middle management position and a $250 payrise.

It's been on the cards for a while as over the past six months, as people have been leaving, joining or going off sick, I've pretty firmly established myself as one of the main safe pairs of hands in our department. I've been making materials and lesson plans, training new staff, teaching for crazy hours and being a positive presence the whole time. Our manager is retiring at the end of April so my pal Rob is taking her place as manager and I'll be getting his job as sub-leader.

Guys . . . I'm like a grown-up. I have a real job with career prospects where I wear a suit and get paid, like, a living wage. It's mental.

I should probably learn Japanese . . .

Semi work related as ASDA was sold by Walmart or in the process of being sold.

So my saving scheme is coming out early, I should be a grown-up and add to my current savings to have a big deposit on a place but I've been looking at cars.