I'm coming up on 14 years of experience in my field, and I feel like because I like to have fun at work and joke around while we work, I don't get treated like an adult. I'm 37. I work circles around some people and I feel like I leave it all on the field every day. I help everyone, I do just about anything they ask, I help get new people up to speed, I come in early often, I don't come in high.. you get the picture.
So my manager has like a year of on the job experience and is just about the worst manager I've ever had. Nothing is ever good enough and I'm always "wrong". I've tried standing up for myself, and I've tried letting it roll off my back. Neither approach solves any of my problems.
Today, my manager waylaid my team member on a break and asked her what I do back there. I'm never not doing stuff and everyone but my manager sees it and knows it. I'm the type of worker that you don't have to worry about.
So I text the manager after she left and asked if she had a problem with my work. Of course not! I'm gods gift to bread! Blah blah blah...
She calls my teammate after hours and discusses why I have a problem.. doesn't ask me why I am upset. Instead I'm the asshole for standing up for myself.
There's a guy I work with that is basically checked out and refuses to make decisions or small talk. He's a good worker though. He told me one day that I should just turn off my brain and do what management says no matter how stupid and just let the pieces fall where they may. I'm trying. I really am. But the leftist in me is screaming at me to stand up and try to fix it. It's against my nature to prostrate myself to people like this. My new strategy is to turn my brain off and just be a soulless husk of a man at work who just keeps his head down and isn't friendly toward anyone. I'm only going to talk about work and work related stuff.
It's hard to do and it's so lonely! I have to listen to the same garbage music every day hear the same "working hard or hardly working" jokes every day and eat the same bowl of shit every day because the management doesn't pay any attention to the yahoos they pull off the street to do this job that should realistically have some training. It's a daily shit show and me and a couple of people have to "deep state" fix everything behind managements back while they chortle at the wine bar and take credit for all the fires we put out.
I should just quit, right?
My job is recession proof, it pays pretty well and on a good day, I enjoy it. I'm also hitting that age where I'm slowing down a bit and I don't know how to do anything else. I live at least 25 minutes from towns where jobs are, and they all would be a significant pay cut. I'm scared of the trump economy and rolling the dice on a different job.
I'm often in the mega venting about work. I get where you're coming from. My situation in similar. Most everyone I work with likes working with me because I do my best to solve problems (and there's a lot thanks to the way things are structured) and I do what I can to help people. Maybe its the people-pleaser in me, but I also go out of my way to accomodate for my co-workers scheduling needs, whether or not it'd be for things the company would deem "worthy" of giving time off or switching shift and what not.
The biggest problem we have is lack of staffing. Aside the fact that for the 5 years that we've been at this we've had work volume that should warranty at least one extra employee, the margin between being "sufficiently" staffed and severely understaffed is razor thin. Turn over is high because pay is shit (more on that later) and any time someone leaves I end up working 6 days for 50+ hours. And its tiring. At one point we did have that extra employee, but when they left they were never replaced. When there was a discussion about adding an extra employee about 6 months after, and yet more turnover, I made my case for adding another one, not just to handle the volume of work we had, but also so that we'd have sufficient staff if turnover remained high and so that we could comfortably take time off without having to have everyone else work 6 days. It fell on deaf ears. For a couple months my manager, who works from home btw, kept saying that it was being discussed internally between our company and the client company we were working with and nothing ever came out of that. We're currently in a bit of a crisis because another location lost most of its staff (turnover or on leave) and we still haven't heard anything about adding more staff, even though it was discussed once again due to a huge spike in work volume earlier in the year.
Speaking of my manager, they have a propensity to try and wave off my employees needs. One of my best employees had been with the company previously before transferring to work with me and his pay was reduced to match the starting pay for my location. When he sent an email to my manager asking for his pay to be raised to was it was in his previous location so that he can keep up with the increase in the cost of living my manager says "that's the case for everyone". It wasn't until I went and got his pay history that he changed his tune and even then it took way too much convincing to get it done.
Also recently I had one of my employees go take some time off to travel. When they got back they contacted me (with sufficient time) to ask if they could take an extra day off to recover from their travels. When it came up in a conversation with my manager they said "oh, I've traveled and gone back to work the next day." I didn't fucking ask and I'm that person's direct manager. If I was ok with it I don't need to fucking know that you would have just come back to work.
And its this flippant attitude towards others' needs that really has me thinking if I should stay. The job itself isn't too bad. Admittedly my current staff isn't great at the job and I've been patiently coaching them, hoping for an improvement in their work with little results to show for it. Having to make up for their short comings and the increased demand from the company is wearing me out. I really don't think my manager cares enough to rectify the situation. I'm starting to look for a new job and I know its going to suck for all of my coworkers because if I do leave whoever comes in probably isn't going to be as patient and flexible as I am. And I legit care about a lot of the people that I work with and it hurts just thinking about moving on, but I have to.
Wow. I could have wrote this and it would have been 90% accurate to my situation. The flippant attitude toward some people's needs while letting others get away with murder, the stringing along on raises and promotions... It's all too familiar. We pay pretty well and we still can't keep a staff because of overworking new people, micromanaging while simultaneously throwing them in the deep end, some people taking a mile when we give them an inch..
We just had a dude who worked with us for about a month and he would randomly disappear for long amounts of time. He was slow as fuck and wouldn't take direction. The manager was like "well, let's keep giving him more responsibility and maybe he will snap out of it". He didn't. In fact, he went home one weekend and beat up some girl he was seeing, stole her car and died in a police chase. Employee of the month, ladies and gentlemen!
People like that keep getting all the chances in the world, but yeah, let's make sure I'm doing my job, and the job of two other people. That's the real problem