What do I talk about today?
I think about loyalty a lot, sometimes. I work for a nationwide corporation. So, not a mom-and-pop shop. What that means is that loyalty doesn't exist. Sure, they value it, and they want it, and they do their best to cultivate it, but they never reward it.
They use it. They take as much of it as someone will give, and then they kick you to the curb the moment you dare to ask for better pay.
I do stuff outside of my duties to help people. Beyond the utilitarian "quid pro quo" philosophy, I think it helps build a rapport with the other departments. In theory, this should make my job easier. But the more I do this stuff, the more I realize my job is actually not easier. Now, you don't always see what you prevent. Maybe me helping someone is what led to them convincing corporate to not drop a bunch of extra work on us or freeze hiring. You can never know for sure, and that's why we've got concepts like Karma to help us try and make sense of the chaos. But anyways, I'm starting to question if my devotion means anything.
Not to the company, god no. Fuck the company. Six ways, even. I do this for the people I work alongside in the desperate attempt to make our jobs just a bit more bearable. But when the men upstairs want to keep cutting costs and making you do more with less...well, it just gets a little demoralizing.
My boss went to jail for multiple felonies, so I became the boss. But they are dragging their feet on hiring. Normally there's an expected level of bureaucracy when it comes to dealing with HR, but this is starting to seem a little too long. I want the extra pay. I'm already doing the extra work. I feel like I'm just cucking myself into a position where the company can make me do more with less. I only have so much gas in the tank, and I've only got so much meat on the bone.
But I feel stuck in between a rock and a hard place. If, like some complacent union stooge, I decide to just cross my arms and object to all but the work that strictly relates to whatever job the company has me down for, then I paint a target on my back. I could potentially be up on the chopping block if staff gets cut. My job is absolutely safe from AI and outsourcing, but there is a very real possibility that my department could get dissolved and the workload moved to other departments. They won't give me a transfer opportunity. They'll just straight up lay me off.
And because this is a corporation with a thick layer of bland and gray middle management, I get to deal with the funnest thing of all: politics. People stepping on the backs of others while raining veiled venemous platitudes down on them. Favors strictly for favors. Shifting allegiances. Catty women (yeah, I said it).
It sucks. I hate politics in general, and I hate office politics even more. At least U.S. Senators have had the decency to graduate high school. Some of the psychos I work couldn't even get through high school. It's like all their emotional maturing just stopped and they carried that high school mindset with them into the workplace.
It. sucks.
So yeah. Do I rock the boat and risk getting fired? Or do I keep trying to make this idea of a better, easier workplace work for me? I don't know. I'm gonna give it a few days and then I'm gonna press them like olives over giving me that pay raise. All I see when I look at them is two-faced incompetent puppets.
Sorry. That got a little real.
When I was fresh out of dropping out of college, I picked up my first job in a casino under a man with known connections to the Italian mafia. One of his many little tricks was unpaid overtime for hourly work. He and his stooges all convinced me that the correct thing to do was to clock out at the 8-hour mark and then finish my work. And like a dumb idiot, I went along with it, because I was young and poor and I was honestly just happy to have a paycheck.
That is so illegal. Not the paycheck thing, the "clocking out and continuing to work" thing. So yeah, don't do that. I was lucky not to have a particularly laborious job, but if you're grinding bones against joints for your job, do not work if you are not getting paid. This isn't some bullshit about "principles," this is about standing up for yourself and treating yourself like a human being. They want to destroy a person and throw them into the grinder so badly? Let them do it to anyone else. Not you.
I was going somewhere with that anecdoe, but I can't remember. I guess I'm just shocked at the different ways people will squeeze you. It gets hard to trust people, especially when your own ass is on the line. I want to assume the best in people, but how can I do that when there are maniacs and psychotics wearing the skin of saints? Not even that, people who are just in the same spot as me, just trying to make a living and trying to do increasingly more with increasingly less.
But that's life. We all wear suits and ties, but we wield spears and hatchets all the same.