As per usual, work was interesting today, and the day isn’t even over yet. There is always something different going on here. Every single day is some kind of different disaster that needs diffusing one way or another.
Today it was a coworker’s keypad door lock no longer working. In fact, the battery had died and given out with no warning whatsoever. And, of course, in order to change said battery, you had to be on the other side of the door. He was locked out of his own office with no way in. I’m sure you’re thinking, “Surely he had a spare key, right?” The answer, dear reader, is no. No, he did not. His predecessor never thought to make a spare key for the keypad lock and never let anyone know where the original key was.
After trying everything we could imagine to get it off, we resorted to channeling our inner anger about our jobs, lives, and the damn lock to smash it off with a hammer and screwdriver. Say what you will, but it did work out… Eventually.
Queue: A trip to Home Depot. We drove all the way there and back just to find how complicated it was for whatever reason to actually install the new keypad lock on the door itself. Because of this, we thought, “Nah. That’s an after lunch problem,” to which we drove to a scheduled lunch date to send off a coworker who is moving out of town and transferring to another of our sites a few hours away from us.
After frantically leaving, thinking we would be late and the last ones to arrive, we hurried downtown to the restaurant to find that we were the first ones there. We grabbed a table for all of us and waited. And waited. And waited some more until we finally figured we were there, and would be for the foreseeable future, so we ordered drinks. On our lunch break. From work. Where we later had to return to.
The level of stress myself and my coworkers reach daily should be concerning to everyone around us at all times. Unfortunately, it’s become more of the norm.
We got back to the office to try to set up the godforsaken lock on the door, which turned into a whole event, in which in the middle I had to dip out because I got a bad tummy ache — Which wasn’t shocking to anyone I have ever met. I’ve been sick for a couple days and overall unwell. Anyways, after a quick break, I came back to find a meltdown occurring because, as suspected, the new keypad was harder to install than we thought. The instructions were absolutely useless, nothing seemed to fit the way it said it was supposed to, and it was overall a bad time. After a small and necessary mental breakdown, we managed to get it up and working properly. Only a few tools were thrown across the office in the process. No coworkers were injured in this endeavor, at least not physically.
From there, I hid away in someone else’s office to avoid being found and to get more work done, which I do pretty frequently when I work in the office. Being here three days a week feels like too much most of the time. I’m almost always drowning in some problem that someone else caused that I need to fix because no one else will. Ironically, this is how most people here feel, which probably equates to only a handful of the in-person staff here actually being helpful to others. Pretty sad when you think about it.
The longer I stay in this position, the worse I feel. I just can’t make myself make the dive, despite applying for (and being rejected from) many, many other jobs in the area and closer to home. I’m either not qualified enough or too qualified. There is no happy medium for me in my industry or any other, apparently. I have some semblance of hope for a job I applied for the most recently, but at the same time, I also feel really really lucky to be here, which is so contradictory and confusing.
I love my job, I love my coworkers, and I love our company. The problem is the majority of the people in our building, outside of the few coworkers I enjoy, are less than useful on the regular. Nearly every day I am here, something happens that just makes me think, “How did I even get here?” I am constantly reminding myself that I stay here because I love what our company stands for and I love the people that I work closely with. Other than that, it gets to be too much. I’m actually pretty positive I’m developing some kind of ulcer from stress, which I should get checked out, but probably won’t have the time to. I can barely make time to spend time with friends, read, feed myself, take care of myself or my family. It’s so draining. But, then again, everything is draining lately. And not just because my mom died. The past few years have been some of the hardest of my life for a number of reasons, that was just the cherry on the cake of crap.
I’m really hoping all of this oversharing will be helpful to me in some ways. Sometimes I hope no one will read this, and sometimes I do. What if it helps someone to know how hard it is? With the loss and grief or with just existing outright. Who knows. Only time will tell, because time heals all, right? Let’s hope.
Xo,
K
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