Welcome to 2020, my friends, relatives, family, colleagues, and dear readers.
Still no flying cars. But then again, I covered that previously.
So far, 2020 is what it is. I'm mostly unfazed by it.
In the past several weeks, we've come to the brink of war a few times, there's a new pandemic (the coronavirus, if you haven't been paying attention), our impeached president had his impeachment overturned because apparently rule of law doesn't matter anymore, I'm still working in my soul-sucking job on the same overnight schedule, and I still only have one tattoo.
I've been in the creative spirit the past few weeks, but...I just haven't had the energy for much of it, sadly. My weekends fly by and disappear -- they seem like they take forever to arrive, and then once they're here they just vanish. This weekend in particular was gone in the blink of an eye with nothing to show for it; oh sure, a few bills got paid and we got some groceries and watched some Netflix, but everything else...just gone. I want to be able to have time and energy to write, to get out of the house here and there, to go to the gym and to be a little social at least without feeling sick and exhausted. And for the most part, that's exactly how I feel all the time -- sick and exhausted.
"What are your New Year's Resolutions?" Daisy asked me shortly after the new year.
"I don't really have any," I said.
A day or two later I would revise this to "I finally want to sit down and watch all the stuff I added to my list on Netflix."
Because, really, that's all I want -- downtime.
No, I have not gotten the flu or whatever it was Daisy and most of the family had over the holidays -- but I don't feel great because I can never get enough rest and always have something else to do to where I can't get any real peace. Since the beginning of the year, this has been wearing on me more and more, to the point where I am now almost constantly burnt out and tired and have low-level anxiety about everything.
I told Daisy last week that for the time being, I'm giving up on the gym; it was not giving me any of the results I wanted, and it would just end up making me sore more than anything else, despite how frequently or infrequently I went. Our gym also replaced all of their machines with "new and improved" machines shortly before the Christmas season, and, well, I hate most of the new machines. They are not comfortable to use (some of them are downright uncomfortable or painful) and the machine I loved the most, one of their ab machines, they redesigned to where I cannot fit into it anymore with my wide shoulders/back.
When I went, I was not building any muscle or burning off any body fat -- I was just making myself more exhausted and pain-filled. After a while, I began to dread it, and began to dread the routine. After a few weeks of that, I started wanting to go less and less, because I knew the pain it would cause me for several days after. After that, I lost all will and energy to actually do it. I tried so hard for so many months and it just didn't do anything for me, and I made the decision that I couldn't keep sinking my valuable time and energy into something that left me in pain and unfulfilled -- I do that enough at my job; I refuse to do it in my off hours too.
Daisy, of course, was discouraged by this and still goes to the gym 3-4 times a week, generally after work before coming home. This means that she and I have less time together in the evenings before I have to go in to work myself.
I've started to withdraw into myself more and more over the winter months -- I don't adapt well to the cold, and the more time I spend around people, the less I like said people. My home office is my sanctuary, as I spend most of my waking (and a good chunk of my sleeping) hours there; I have my computer, access to my money, my phone, vape materials, TV/Roku, and my Switch there. I am depressed. I am frequently angry. And more than anything else, I am so, so tired.
Sunday nights I dread the most, as I know I have to return to work. I hate my job so much that using the word "hate" doesn't seem like strong enough of a term. I loathe it; I loathe what it has become and the person it has turned me into. I hate that I am constantly on edge and filled with anxiety because of it, I hate that I constantly have to keep my email open somewhere in the event that someone wants to yell at me, and I hate that for the first hour or two I'm home every morning I have to leave my phone's ringer on and within earshot for the same reason -- and if it happens it's generally over something that's not my fault anyway.
Make no mistake, I have received several well-deserved chewings-out in my almost six years working that job...and probably 20-30 over shit that was not my fault or I had nothing at all to do with. I'm averaging two or three a month at this point over simply stupid shit.
In all of the time I've worked there I've gotten maybe ten genuine "thank you" calls, emails, or verbalizations -- most of the time from people not even on my team, for doing the job someone on someone else's team should have done right in the first place but didn't give a shit about. The overnight team, myself included, is sorely overworked and underappreciated most of the time and tends to be the scapegoat for anything that goes wrong in our program. As the manager of that team, that burden/stress falls on me more often than not, and I become the whipping boy for everything our program does wrong -- and again, get very little (or zero) thanks for everything that, because of me, goes right.
And all I want to do is go to work, do my job, and go home peacefully at the scheduled end of my shift.
So yes, I'm depressed. But it's not just work doing it. It's the cold, it's a lack of truly restful sleep, it's the constant boredom and monotony of my life, the gray of winter, my hormones being all out of whack, and the inability for, it seems, much to actually change or get better.
I don't know if any picture has better summed up how I've felt for literal years now.
It would be different if that "gradual change through daily habits" was something that, y'know, happened. I've tried that where I can. It doesn't work. I've been told "if you can't change your situation, change your perspective" so many times that I might punch the next person who says it. Why? Because you can change your perspective all you want, but it doesn't change or fix the problem.
Against my better judgments, as I have a very hard time trusting anyone anymore, I let one of my friends at work know that I'm going through some depression and some other (purposely vague) personal issues right now. This friend has fought mental health issues his entire life, and is someone I reasonably feel that I can trust when it comes to this sort of thing. He gave me a referral to a therapist (his own therapist, actually) as well as to a nurse practitioner who works with said therapist for prescriptions for mental health medications.
Both are in the health insurance network I share with the wife, but going down this road is not cheap -- it's a $60 copay for each therapy visit.
Add to this that I do not want to be on any medications.
I am not anti-med or anything like that, in case you're wondering -- I am simply anti-med for me. I know what those pills do to me. I was on them for a brief time in college. I refuse to be turned into a zombie again, or to lose what small part of my original self that I feel I have left.
I told Daisy we'd table the discussion on therapy unless it gets really bad, as I am not going to quickly deplete our medical coverage FSA over the course of a few months without a damn good reason.
Throughout all of this I'm seeing another coworker go through the same thing, needing to take a leave of absence through FMLA to get treated for her own issues, and I silently wonder how long it will be before my demons overtake me, and/or what I will lose along the way if everything keeps spiraling downward. It's a horrific thought. I'm not suicidal -- far from it, in fact -- I want to see everything actually get better. You could say that means I have hope, I guess. But that doesn't mean I'm not in a dark place, because I am. I just have to fight it every day in order to stay alive and stay prepared. That "fight" is sometimes more exhausting than others.
To those ends, I have done what I can to stave it off; I have, for example, continued to apply for more jobs. While I've been rejected for many of these jobs outright with a terse email, this past week alone I had three different phone interviews and had a follow-up, in-person interview on Thursday morning for one of said jobs. I took Wednesday night in order to be able to rest up and be at my best and brightest for it, instead of just getting off work and being forced to run headlong into an interview when I'm tired and burnt out. This worked out well, even if it meant I sacrificed a night of PTO.
I'm also trying to see the positive things in daily life -- I mean, the Chiefs did win the Super Bowl, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are doing really well in the primaries, and the new Picard series is very interesting so far. Not everything is bad, and I have to teach myself to see silver linings in stuff like that.
But, I mean, there's a lot of bad going on too -- including some deaths.
One of my former bosses, back at WVU, had his wife die suddenly about three weeks ago; we didn't find out about it until the memorial service and the like was announced. My parents went; I did not get details. He has now outlived two wives, with his first having died of cancer close to twenty years ago now. I can't imagine how he feels -- Daisy is my world, and if I were to lose her I would be completely lost in life. It's an unbearable thought.
The second death happened at work the other night.
Well, okay, it didn't happen at work, but we found out about it at work.
One of our evening shift employees took a bunch of time off before the holidays -- and by that I mean "before the holidays began," meaning before Thanksgiving. He was out of office a lot and called in on our voicemail line several times to let us know he wouldn't be in, etc. I didn't think much of it; he didn't report up to me, and his own manager (one of my colleagues) was taking care of the PTO and the like for it. On one of his calls, he'd let us know that he'd been in the hospital but would return to work the following Monday...and he never showed up.
This was early-to-mid December; again, I didn't think much of it as he wasn't one of my own employees, but I did see the dude and work with him every day, so it was at the very least an ancillary cause for concern. Calls from management asking where he was went unreturned, as did (apparently) calls from HR. The holidays came and went, and around the New Year, when nobody had heard from him and he hadn't come back, the company processed his termination in absentia.
Note: this is not out of the ordinary -- I did the same with one of my employees about three months ago when she stopped showing up and did not turn in her requested FMLA paperwork (she was pregnant and had missed a lot of time due to complications), and she'd stopped responding to calls/emails/texts from any and all of us. The company simply processes the term, wipes the records, and moves on -- you'd be surprised how many employees just stop showing up, effectively ghosting the workplace, for one reason or another. It is extremely common, and we (as management) generally have to give them a few weeks of leeway before the company drops the hammer.
Yet, if I didn't show up for a few days without telling anyone, you bet your ass I'd be fired by the end of the week...
Anyway, I'm getting off-topic.
So, said employee was finally termed out around the beginning of the year, and everyone moved on with their lives. I asked his manager, my colleague, if he'd ever heard anything back from him either before or after the term, and the answer was no -- dude had just up and disappeared.
Our response to that was, sort of, "Oh well, can't really understand some people, I guess" and we let it go.
Until one night last week when my colleague got a very disturbing phone call...from said employee's sister...who let him know that our missing-in-action, now-former-employee had been found dead in his apartment that night -- only after they'd forced the landlord to break in to see if he was holed up in there. He was, all right -- and apparently had been in there for, ahem, some time.
"Like, the entire time since we last heard from him?" I asked my colleague, after he got off the phone.
"They don't know yet," he replied. "But by the way it sounded from her, that's possible."
He was termed at least six weeks ago.
I searched my records in my inbox and the last email from him that I'd been personally tagged on was on November 27. That was the night before Thanksgiving. The last we'd personally heard from him via phone, to my knowledge, was about a week and a half or so after that.
He was nine years older than me, and to my knowledge was not married and had no children. And while I write this, his body is about 200 yards from where I'm sitting, at the mortuary/crematorium literally across the street from my house.
Or what's left of his body, anyway. I shudder to think. They've probably processed him by now anyway.
After the call, we let a few coworkers and other management know, mainly because they were all sitting around us in our section of the office when my colleague got the phone call -- but apparently nobody bothered to tell our executive director, who called me at 9am the next morning to ask for any details about it that I had. Over the next few days several more people would reach out to me asking what I knew, as if I was the oracle on the subject -- I, of course, only knew what I'd been told after the call took place, I wasn't actually on the phone of course.
Arrangements are apparently pending, if anything will be done at all. The date of death listed in the obituary in the newspaper was the day he was found. Word spread throughout our program (especially us After Hours folks) over the next few days, but no official announcements were made at the management level, or anything like that. I mean, after all, the guy wasn't a current employee anymore. I wouldn't expect people to make grandiose announcements about my own passing if I kicked the bucket after I no longer worked there.
"Is it possible that he didn't return to work because he was dead?" A friend and former coworker who knew him had asked me.
"I mean, I guess," I replied via text. "I only know what you know at this point."
Apparently the team got some more details on Thursday or Friday about what had happened, but as I don't work those days I haven't yet gotten that information. It is what it is and doesn't change anything; dude is still dead. While some part of me is curious, a larger part of me so doesn't need to know any grisly details about it.
So I continually plod along, waiting for things to change or get better, sleeping when I can and feeling that I'm constantly under stress or pressure during my waking hours. It's a continual cycle.
I probably should talk some about the interview I had on Thursday morning, because it bears discussion. As all of you know, and I've not made it a secret here, I've been trying to move on from my current job for the better part of three years or so at this point. I don't have anything against most of the people I work with -- in fact, it could be said that those people are the primary reason I've stayed in my position as long as I have. Most of them are helpful, thoughtful people who are suffering through the same thing I am for the same reasons I am -- primarily because we get paid decent (not great, but decent) wages for what we do, despite the bullshit and stress involved. No, it's the company I want to leave. It's the overnight shift I want to leave. It's the job itself.
The secondary reason I've stayed at that job for as long as I have should be rather obvious at this point -- it's because no matter how many interviews I give via phone or in person, and no matter how well I believe those interviews go, everyone rejects me. Over the past year I've probably had over twenty phone interviews and at least ten, maybe more, in-person interviews for various positions at various companies. A few of them, at times, admittedly felt touch and go, but most of them went exceedingly well...and I still was not selected.
So I sat down on Thursday morning with the HR representative at a company I interviewed at before about six months ago (for a higher-level position at that time), for an entry-level position that pays as much as my current management position does at my current company, and we had a nice little chat.
While I try to remain optimistic in scenarios like this, I'm not sure I'll get the job this time around either. I've learned not to hold my breath in these situations at this point.
"I've never interviewed for a job I didn't get," I remember one of Daisy's coworkers telling me at the company holiday dinner a few months ago.
That's great, lady, I thought. Check your privilege please. Because for most real people in the real world, this does not happen.
The interview went fine -- at this point I've been through enough of them to where I believe I am good at them, and believe that I can tell employers what they want to hear while still being honest and forthright with them about my thoughts and expectations as well as my experience. However, this means almost nothing when it comes to actually getting hired, I've found.
The interview took about an hour, and when I was done I shook hands with the HR lady and she said she'd be in touch soon -- the next training class starts on March 2, which means in order for everyone they're hiring to be able to give a customary two-weeks' notice to their current jobs (read: something I'd need to do), they have to give the yesses or nos by, well, within the next 48 hours. I brought this up with her, and she was well aware of this fact.
It also means that if I'm offered this position and I accept it, there's none of that customary "downtime" between one job and the next -- I give my notice, I work up until my last day, and then the following Monday I'm in training at the new place. I was hoping that with any position I moved to, I'd be able to pad it out a little and get at least a week or so off in order to somewhat reset my sleeping schedule and to get a little breathing space, but this job won't allow that if I get it.
Best case scenario is that I get a yes within the next 48 hours, I accept, I announce to my leadership that day, and then I announce to my team in a meeting that night. Second-best-case: I do the same but only have enough time to give one week's notice. Worst case is that I don't get an offer and life continues as it has been with nobody having been the wiser.
I have another in-person interview on the books for another job sometime this next week; I'm currently waiting on the HR staff for that job to get back with me to schedule a time and day, after providing them with my available days/hours. I also applied for a third job this morning that I am sure to get an interview for (at least via phone) sometime soon. So I mean, there are options.
Any of these jobs will have to give me a bit of leeway on some time off as a condition of hire; I will be visiting my family back home in West Virginia this fall for about a week or so, and there's also an entire family trip to South Dakota tentatively scheduled for July or August, depending on everyone being able to get their schedules aligned. Both of those trips will require time and money. Plus, I mean, I'd like to get out to Colorado again soon as well. Some companies give more time off than others.
And so life goes on...
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