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Entry tags:
quarterly report?
Still not king. Very far from being king, in fact.
I haven't posted here for a variety of tedious reasons, including: my laptop is barely creaking along, but I hate trying to type long posts on a phone; it was summer and the heat makes me miserable; not really feeling fannishly engaged and not wanting to bore you all with posts about my boring life; the general state of everything.
But all of you here are important to me, even when I go silent. So I'll keep trying not to go silent so much.
All right, first, the boring life stuff.
Health: I continue to Not Have Cancer. There was a final step after my last post, which was an endometrial biopsy that came back negative. But there are still some troubling things, like a lot of cysts and fibroids and assorted junk, and pretty frequent pelvic pain, and apparently my uterus is bigger than it should be? I'm supposed to get another ultrasound at some point soon to keep an eye on things. I'd like to get all of it taken out, but it's a major surgery with major recovery time and top surgery is still my priority while it's still legal.
MY FUCKING JOB: This all happened on Monday and I've been thinking about it for the last two days (my weekend) and I still don't feel okay because I'm never going to feel okay because they fucked me over.
So, the backstory: Before Covid, I was doing product and cooking demos at the store where I work. I kind of hated it and I was going to give it another few months before applying for a different job within the store. Then came Covid, and demos were no more.
I went to the store manager N. and said, "Can we start a curbside pickup program?" and she said "Sure, go ahead." So I did. This is a lot more complicated than it sounds, I promise you, especially given all the product shortages etc. I created a whole program from scratch, and it ran from March until late October 2020, when our online ordering system (which has been in the works for ages but was never prioritized) was finally ready. I then did basically everything, tech side excepted, for the new system: I got the product listings online, I found images for products that didn't have them, I helped elderly computer-phobic customers navigate placing an order, I shopped, I delivered orders, I sanitized the goddamn carts. (NB I had help with the actual shopping etc., but all the website-specific work was mostly just me and one guy from Marketing/IT. Occasional "help" came from above, like "to start with, let's just put our top 20 sellers on the site"--my good dude, our top 20 sellers are almost all single cans of fizzy water, let's rethink that.)
I did very good work and everyone acknowledged it. Our store manager fought to get me a decent raise and a better job title. (How hard she had to fight should have been my warning.)
That's what I've been doing ever since. There's less online ordering now, a downward trend that started with the first vaccinations, but the co-op decided it was a service we wanted to offer and it should continue even if it wasn't profitable in itself. I have taken on SO MANY projects to help make the site better, I've done so much last minute testing of the interface to make sure it wouldn't glitch when important things went live, I've uploaded so many fucking images and checked so many products to make sure they were really certified organic.
And then, late last year, came the reorganization. This was a co-op wide thing (my store is one of several) and created a new department to handle what amounts to most of ops. They started taking, or talking about taking, a lot of the online shopping work into their own little hands.
I wasn't super worried because my store is the biggest and busiest, and I'd been doing my job for over 5 years, and as mentioned, everyone acknowledged I'd done it well.
But it became clear how the winds were blowing, so when a job opened up in what I will call Central Ops, I applied for it. This was in July.
I was offered the job--at an 8% pay cut because, per HR, it was considered "entry level." That pay cut, by the way, would have put me almost at the bottom of the advertised pay range for the job, despite the fact that I was already doing a lot of the same work. Plus, from that 8% lower pay I would've needed to buy a car because of some required travel. And HR referred to it as a "demotion," which I didn't care for at all.
I turned it down, of course.
Fast forward to Monday, when I was called into a meeting with my department manager, and the assistant department manager, and the store manager. To be told that most of the work I've been doing for years was going to be taken over soon by Central Ops. All that'll be left is the one part I hate, of course. And since that isn't 40 hours worth of work, I'm going to have to start cashiering (or probably supervising, but that includes cashiering some of the time). I HATE CASHIERING.
I feel . . . furious, betrayed, utterly screwed over by the co-op which I foolishly trusted was a better employer than most. Angry at my managers for ganging up on me like that. Angry that when, although I did my best to stay calm, I was pretty clearly fucking devastated, not one of them offered a word of sympathy.
Oh, did I mention they're taking away my workspace and whenever I need to do computer tasks, I'll have to hot desk in a little side space? (I never had my own office or anything. It was a crowded shared space. But at least I mostly had my own desk.)
I want to quit, of course. But I'm in a kind of a golden handcuffs situation. The pay, while not outstanding, is better than I'm likely to get started over somewhere in a terrible job market. And the health insurance in fantastic. (Non-US folks may not fully understand how important this is, but trust me. It can make thousands of dollars worth of difference.) I get four weeks of PTO (not as generous as it sounds since it includes sick pay and we get no paid holidays, but still a lot more than is typical for retail). Even getting full time hours and benefits is not typical for retail.
My revenge plan for the moment is to use all the health care I can possibly use over the next 1-2 years, and then quit. I've wanted to move back to Minnesota ever since I left (15 years ago now, fuuuuuck), so maybe I'll do that.
But in the mean time I have to go back to work, and I don't know how I'm going to cope. I feel so angry at how I've been treated, and so trapped, and frankly so hurt. And on some level I can't help feeling ashamed, like I've failed and my failure will now be obvious to everyone as soon as I'm banished from the office and back on register.
I have one more day before I have to go back (see below for why), but I don't think I'm going to be ready.
Jury Duty: I got summoned again (last time was 2021, so I guess it's been a while) and this time I got placed on the jury. The trial, tomorrow, is only expected to last a day, but now I'm sort of regretting that it won't go on for weeks.
I'm really not in the mood for ethical qualms, even though I already feel them. And I'm hoping that some combination of instructions and decorum will prevent the other jurors from wanting to talk about the thing that happened today.
Fandom: Not much happening. I enjoyed the Murderbot TV show a lot and wrote a couple of short fics for it, but the fandom (on Tumblr) immediately started annoying the hell out of me.
I might do Yuletide, just to feel sort of fannishly connected.
Books: T. Kingfisher's latest, Hemlock and Silver, is pretty darn good. I've now read all of her books except the non-fantasy horror, which I'm just not feeling up to. Luckily she's releasing several more new books in upcoming months.
Other than that, I felt like I'd been reading a lot of popcorn books that I wasn't even enjoying, so I went to the other extreme and started Don Quixote, which I somehow have managed to not read despite having a Ph.D. in (English) Renaissance literature. So far I like it, but I'm not getting the greatness, if that makes sense? It's a mildly funny parody of chivalric romance. But I'm only about 100 pages in, so there's a lot to go and I'm presuming it gets more complicated. I did quite like the bit where the story veers into straightforward pastoral, with the shepherdess who makes the impassioned defense of her choice to remain single and her wish for men to leave her the hell alone.
My intermittent urgent to scrape the rust off my French has also returned, so I'm reading Camus's L'étranger for the first time since I was a college freshman. The Kindle app has a built-in French dictionary, which helps.
On the subject of popcorn books I didn't enjoy: I won't name names, but I read a romantasy that purported to take place in a midwestern university town in 1969, but somehow the atmosphere of the campus and the town felt very much like my time in grad school in the 1990s. There are many women professors and they're respected and treated as equals, people are writing dissertations on queer themes in medieval poetry, and the dive bar has stout on tap. Also, somehow, in a world where apparently there's no sexism, no racism, and little to no homophobia, with all the changed history such a state implies, the US is still waging war in Vietnam. Plus, it soon became apparent that only the first chapter had been properly revised and polished, because the prose got a lot worse after that. I finished reading it, but I'm annoyed about it.
TV: Watched the first episode of the 2014 British cop drama Happy Valley, which I'd heard was rough going. It was even more brutal than I expected, while simultaneously being ridiculously implausible, so I haven't watched more.
After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got defunded, I canceled my Netflix subscription and started recurring donations to my local NPR station and a PBS station (not my local one, but the one in northern Minnesota where I grew up, which probably literally changed my life as a teenager). This gives access to a ton of PBS shows, so I watched the Finnish drama Isolated, about a remote island that suddenly loses all electricity and communications, and all contact with the rest of the world. It too was a not-entirely-satisfying combination of bleak tone and ridiculous plot, but I enjoyed it enough to watch the whole thing.
Podcasts: I mostly listen to nonfiction, because my listening time is my commute and I can't give a narrative the level of attention I'd need to really enjoy it. I recently started If Books Could Kill, with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. It's about terrible bestselling (nonfiction) books, what they call airport books, that bring misinformation into the mainstream and cause actual social damage. I started from the beginning, and targets so far include Freakonomics, Outliers, The Game, and The Secret. Sometimes their analysis could go deeper (especially into the underlying ideological positions of these books), but it's pretty good at debunking stealthy bunk.
Other listening: The Mountain Goats have a new song out called "Armies of the Lord," from their forthcoming album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. I don't entirely love the song, but I think it may need to be heard in its context--the album is apparently a full-on "musical," as John Darnielle calls it, with a complex plot etc.
Other, or, we take hope where we can find it: New Taskmaster season starting soon! New Knives Out movie in November! I find it . . . helpful to have things to look forward to, in times like this. However trivial they are.
This is now very long, so I'm going to stop now. Apologies for any typos, but I'm feeling too lazy to go back and edit.
I haven't posted here for a variety of tedious reasons, including: my laptop is barely creaking along, but I hate trying to type long posts on a phone; it was summer and the heat makes me miserable; not really feeling fannishly engaged and not wanting to bore you all with posts about my boring life; the general state of everything.
But all of you here are important to me, even when I go silent. So I'll keep trying not to go silent so much.
All right, first, the boring life stuff.
Health: I continue to Not Have Cancer. There was a final step after my last post, which was an endometrial biopsy that came back negative. But there are still some troubling things, like a lot of cysts and fibroids and assorted junk, and pretty frequent pelvic pain, and apparently my uterus is bigger than it should be? I'm supposed to get another ultrasound at some point soon to keep an eye on things. I'd like to get all of it taken out, but it's a major surgery with major recovery time and top surgery is still my priority while it's still legal.
MY FUCKING JOB: This all happened on Monday and I've been thinking about it for the last two days (my weekend) and I still don't feel okay because I'm never going to feel okay because they fucked me over.
So, the backstory: Before Covid, I was doing product and cooking demos at the store where I work. I kind of hated it and I was going to give it another few months before applying for a different job within the store. Then came Covid, and demos were no more.
I went to the store manager N. and said, "Can we start a curbside pickup program?" and she said "Sure, go ahead." So I did. This is a lot more complicated than it sounds, I promise you, especially given all the product shortages etc. I created a whole program from scratch, and it ran from March until late October 2020, when our online ordering system (which has been in the works for ages but was never prioritized) was finally ready. I then did basically everything, tech side excepted, for the new system: I got the product listings online, I found images for products that didn't have them, I helped elderly computer-phobic customers navigate placing an order, I shopped, I delivered orders, I sanitized the goddamn carts. (NB I had help with the actual shopping etc., but all the website-specific work was mostly just me and one guy from Marketing/IT. Occasional "help" came from above, like "to start with, let's just put our top 20 sellers on the site"--my good dude, our top 20 sellers are almost all single cans of fizzy water, let's rethink that.)
I did very good work and everyone acknowledged it. Our store manager fought to get me a decent raise and a better job title. (How hard she had to fight should have been my warning.)
That's what I've been doing ever since. There's less online ordering now, a downward trend that started with the first vaccinations, but the co-op decided it was a service we wanted to offer and it should continue even if it wasn't profitable in itself. I have taken on SO MANY projects to help make the site better, I've done so much last minute testing of the interface to make sure it wouldn't glitch when important things went live, I've uploaded so many fucking images and checked so many products to make sure they were really certified organic.
And then, late last year, came the reorganization. This was a co-op wide thing (my store is one of several) and created a new department to handle what amounts to most of ops. They started taking, or talking about taking, a lot of the online shopping work into their own little hands.
I wasn't super worried because my store is the biggest and busiest, and I'd been doing my job for over 5 years, and as mentioned, everyone acknowledged I'd done it well.
But it became clear how the winds were blowing, so when a job opened up in what I will call Central Ops, I applied for it. This was in July.
I was offered the job--at an 8% pay cut because, per HR, it was considered "entry level." That pay cut, by the way, would have put me almost at the bottom of the advertised pay range for the job, despite the fact that I was already doing a lot of the same work. Plus, from that 8% lower pay I would've needed to buy a car because of some required travel. And HR referred to it as a "demotion," which I didn't care for at all.
I turned it down, of course.
Fast forward to Monday, when I was called into a meeting with my department manager, and the assistant department manager, and the store manager. To be told that most of the work I've been doing for years was going to be taken over soon by Central Ops. All that'll be left is the one part I hate, of course. And since that isn't 40 hours worth of work, I'm going to have to start cashiering (or probably supervising, but that includes cashiering some of the time). I HATE CASHIERING.
I feel . . . furious, betrayed, utterly screwed over by the co-op which I foolishly trusted was a better employer than most. Angry at my managers for ganging up on me like that. Angry that when, although I did my best to stay calm, I was pretty clearly fucking devastated, not one of them offered a word of sympathy.
Oh, did I mention they're taking away my workspace and whenever I need to do computer tasks, I'll have to hot desk in a little side space? (I never had my own office or anything. It was a crowded shared space. But at least I mostly had my own desk.)
I want to quit, of course. But I'm in a kind of a golden handcuffs situation. The pay, while not outstanding, is better than I'm likely to get started over somewhere in a terrible job market. And the health insurance in fantastic. (Non-US folks may not fully understand how important this is, but trust me. It can make thousands of dollars worth of difference.) I get four weeks of PTO (not as generous as it sounds since it includes sick pay and we get no paid holidays, but still a lot more than is typical for retail). Even getting full time hours and benefits is not typical for retail.
My revenge plan for the moment is to use all the health care I can possibly use over the next 1-2 years, and then quit. I've wanted to move back to Minnesota ever since I left (15 years ago now, fuuuuuck), so maybe I'll do that.
But in the mean time I have to go back to work, and I don't know how I'm going to cope. I feel so angry at how I've been treated, and so trapped, and frankly so hurt. And on some level I can't help feeling ashamed, like I've failed and my failure will now be obvious to everyone as soon as I'm banished from the office and back on register.
I have one more day before I have to go back (see below for why), but I don't think I'm going to be ready.
Jury Duty: I got summoned again (last time was 2021, so I guess it's been a while) and this time I got placed on the jury. The trial, tomorrow, is only expected to last a day, but now I'm sort of regretting that it won't go on for weeks.
I'm really not in the mood for ethical qualms, even though I already feel them. And I'm hoping that some combination of instructions and decorum will prevent the other jurors from wanting to talk about the thing that happened today.
Fandom: Not much happening. I enjoyed the Murderbot TV show a lot and wrote a couple of short fics for it, but the fandom (on Tumblr) immediately started annoying the hell out of me.
I might do Yuletide, just to feel sort of fannishly connected.
Books: T. Kingfisher's latest, Hemlock and Silver, is pretty darn good. I've now read all of her books except the non-fantasy horror, which I'm just not feeling up to. Luckily she's releasing several more new books in upcoming months.
Other than that, I felt like I'd been reading a lot of popcorn books that I wasn't even enjoying, so I went to the other extreme and started Don Quixote, which I somehow have managed to not read despite having a Ph.D. in (English) Renaissance literature. So far I like it, but I'm not getting the greatness, if that makes sense? It's a mildly funny parody of chivalric romance. But I'm only about 100 pages in, so there's a lot to go and I'm presuming it gets more complicated. I did quite like the bit where the story veers into straightforward pastoral, with the shepherdess who makes the impassioned defense of her choice to remain single and her wish for men to leave her the hell alone.
My intermittent urgent to scrape the rust off my French has also returned, so I'm reading Camus's L'étranger for the first time since I was a college freshman. The Kindle app has a built-in French dictionary, which helps.
On the subject of popcorn books I didn't enjoy: I won't name names, but I read a romantasy that purported to take place in a midwestern university town in 1969, but somehow the atmosphere of the campus and the town felt very much like my time in grad school in the 1990s. There are many women professors and they're respected and treated as equals, people are writing dissertations on queer themes in medieval poetry, and the dive bar has stout on tap. Also, somehow, in a world where apparently there's no sexism, no racism, and little to no homophobia, with all the changed history such a state implies, the US is still waging war in Vietnam. Plus, it soon became apparent that only the first chapter had been properly revised and polished, because the prose got a lot worse after that. I finished reading it, but I'm annoyed about it.
TV: Watched the first episode of the 2014 British cop drama Happy Valley, which I'd heard was rough going. It was even more brutal than I expected, while simultaneously being ridiculously implausible, so I haven't watched more.
After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got defunded, I canceled my Netflix subscription and started recurring donations to my local NPR station and a PBS station (not my local one, but the one in northern Minnesota where I grew up, which probably literally changed my life as a teenager). This gives access to a ton of PBS shows, so I watched the Finnish drama Isolated, about a remote island that suddenly loses all electricity and communications, and all contact with the rest of the world. It too was a not-entirely-satisfying combination of bleak tone and ridiculous plot, but I enjoyed it enough to watch the whole thing.
Podcasts: I mostly listen to nonfiction, because my listening time is my commute and I can't give a narrative the level of attention I'd need to really enjoy it. I recently started If Books Could Kill, with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. It's about terrible bestselling (nonfiction) books, what they call airport books, that bring misinformation into the mainstream and cause actual social damage. I started from the beginning, and targets so far include Freakonomics, Outliers, The Game, and The Secret. Sometimes their analysis could go deeper (especially into the underlying ideological positions of these books), but it's pretty good at debunking stealthy bunk.
Other listening: The Mountain Goats have a new song out called "Armies of the Lord," from their forthcoming album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. I don't entirely love the song, but I think it may need to be heard in its context--the album is apparently a full-on "musical," as John Darnielle calls it, with a complex plot etc.
Other, or, we take hope where we can find it: New Taskmaster season starting soon! New Knives Out movie in November! I find it . . . helpful to have things to look forward to, in times like this. However trivial they are.
This is now very long, so I'm going to stop now. Apologies for any typos, but I'm feeling too lazy to go back and edit.
no subject
It sounds very much like the failure of the co-op to me. Feh.
(I am glad you still don't have cancer. Please keep it up.)
*hugs*
no subject
no subject
That sucks with your job - do positions in Central Ops open up very often? It sounds like you were so successful that they didn't realise how much work you put into it.
no subject
And I'm so so sorry about your job. That feels so mean and unfair and more than just careless on their part. I wish I had any good advice but instead just all the vibes for!
And now I so want to know the romantasy book. LOL. But seriously, there's a type of anachronism about social issues that I enjoy, but most of the time it just feels like lack of research and unwillingness to engage with the past while wanting its trappings. (Regency romance being one of the biggest but clearly not the only offender!)