Burnout Rant

Image: Stressed call center agent

Call center work is burning me out. For the past year I’ve been working in a strictly sales position (and I am not a salesperson by profession) with no break in my work routine. There is also no work-life balance to speak of and it’s wearing me down.

Several times throughout my tenure there I have tried to go into other positions to get out of the aggressive and often dirty sales tactics we’re forced to use. Twice I’ve applied for a position in Quality Assurance and been denied, another time I applied for just customer service and they wanted me for that however before I was able to make the move, they shut down that department! The only position for me to go into at this point would be a downgrade, both in position and pay, which I just can’t afford.

My shift, which I have no say in, takes up the portion of the day where I don’t have time before or after work to get anything done. As I’m leaving for work, things have just opened and after work, most things are already closed. I get home usually around 9pm, try to decompress from the day, eat, and pass out for a bit, then I’m awake for several hours because it’s screwed up my sleep schedule so bad. I try to be asleep again by 2am so I can be up by 9:30 to do it all again.

My health is legitimately suffering. My mental health is deteriorating. My stress levels are through the roof. Management is on us constantly, pushing us for more and bigger results at everyone’s expense. With the exception of the rare nice and civil person who calls in, most of the people on the other end of the phone are utter asshats who feel they can be abusive to a stranger with zero accountability. I take it from all angles. My anxiety over walking in on Monday mornings begins in my stomach on Sunday and I dread thinking of what I’ll be walking into. On the drive in, a 45 minute commute, I get heart palpitations that terrify me because often I feel like I’m going to pass out at the wheel while driving. That Monday morning meeting is always about how terrible we’ve done and how much harder we have to push. Stop pushing me!

So, for the almighty dollar, I keep plugging. I go in every morning only to hear how bad I am at my job, to get pushed harder and watched under the microscope, afraid to stop to breathe. I’ve had medical issues this year between COVID and heart issues brought on by the stress so I don’t have time off to use for a break. Plus, we are heading into the busy season where all time off requests are in the blackout period for most of the rest of the year. I need to be in therapy for C-PTSD and stress but I have no PTO with which to schedule it. I need 2 weeks off to breathe and reset but I can’t get to a doctor to recommend a short-term for mental health. I can’t afford to just leave because I’m already living paycheck to paycheck and I am the only income in my family. This job is gonna kill me.

Gym-spiration – I Need Some

Two years ago I joined Planet Fitness, determined to get out of my funk of being overweight and exhausted. I had a goal of getting my body back to where it was in my twenties. Now being in my 40s, I realize that was quite a lofty goal, nonetheless I worked hard at it. Because of certain health issues that I have, including COPD and asthma, it does make it hard to keep up with workouts the way healthier people would. I was actually proud of myself because I was going to the gym 5 days a week without fail and continuously upping my workouts to beat my personal bests. I did end up losing about 20 lbs, gaining a lot of strength but not a lot of tone. I still had quite a few inches of fat to lose.


Then the pandemic hit. In March and April, all of our gyms started closing down. Membership fees were frozen until an unknown reopening date. I went ahead and canceled mine because I didn’t want to be surprised with a membership fee when they decided to reopen. During that time of being stuck at home, no longer able to go to the gym which was directly between home and my office, which had also shut down, my motivation went to shit. Now I was waking up to walk 20 steps to my desk where I sat for 10 to 11 hours everyday only to walk 20 steps back to bed at the end of my shift. Working at home redefined a sedentary lifestyle. The pounds came back quickly. The energy left quickly.


Now that the gyms are open again, I have been trying to get back on the path albeit slowly. My lack of energy makes it difficult, as does no longer passing by the gym on the way to the office and back home. Now instead of ending my shift at 8:00 p.m. and going to bed, it means actually getting dressed for the gym, driving down there, wearing myself out, and driving back home. When you haven’t really left the house for 8 months, that’s a heck of a chore. I know that one option would be to wake up a couple hours early and go work out before I start my shift but I’m always leery of doing that because anything could happen to make me late for work. I am no stranger to flat tires and dead batteries. I’m also no stranger to back injuries which lay me up for a few days at a time. One wrong move and my scoliosis reminds me it’s there.


I desperately want to get back to my 5-day a week workout routine. The trouble is finding the energy and motivation to do so. I suppose I do have the motivation in being sick and tired of looking the way I do. I know that the more weight I lose the more energy I will have. So what’s my problem? I think once I got into the gym habit it was easy to go. It was my personal time, my alone time, and I looked forward to it. The lockdown broke that habit however and now it is extremely difficult trying to get back into it.


For those of you who continue to go to the gym, I would love to hear what inspires you to keep at it. Let me know in the comment section below what motivates you to be your best self.

Work At Home Bliss

Happy Monday! I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving weekend, whether in person or virtually. Just remember to cherish every moment and remember this won’t last forever.


As we both work in a medical industry by proxy of their third party call centers and are therefore considered essential employees, my roommate K and I began working from home in March. Florida went largely into lockdown and those who wanted to work on site for whatever reason did so at their own risk. By April, among those who remained in the office, we already had at least one positive covid case reported. That drove the rest of us home.


Recently, K was offered the chance to return to working at her office and after weighig the options, decided to continue working from home. I also had the same opportunity (different company, same field), and considered going back, if only for the air conditioning. My pros and cons list ended up overwhelmingly skewed toward staying at home. Take a look:


PROS:
• No commute / savings on gas
• Not having to socialize
• More self-directed work
• Vape at my desk
• Much better mood
• 2 seconds from the bathroom
• Dressing comfortably
• More time to handle personal business on lunch
• Can eat at my desk
• Only contact with supervisors is through chat / email
• No loud coworkers
• My cats lower my stress
• Naps / showers on lunch (self-care, man)


CONS:
• No AC in the summer (house just doesn’t have it)
• Inconsiderate neighbors


So yes, much happier being at home and running my own show than having to deal with the drudgery of actually having to go in.


What about you? Has your work environment changed? Are you working from home when you used to work in an office? Do you still work on site and are you concerned about your safety in having to go in? Please share your experiences in the comments!

F-Bombs

Have you ever had a memo come out at work as a “friendly reminder” about what is not to be done? Reiterating some obvious rule from the company code of conduct or a recent meeting topic that hasn’t had a chance to make it into the books yet? Every time one comes out, which is a couple times a month for us at Call Center X, we can’t help but wonder who did something so gastly that the rule beared repeating.


We get the usual:


“Please do not take food from the break room that isn’t yours.”
“Please do not bring your cell phone onto the call floor.”
“Please remember all cups must have lids.”


We get the unusual:


“Please do not deposit feces in the bathroom trash cans.”
“Please refrain from engaging in public intimacy.”
“Please do not approach, feed, or touch the alligators.” (That was me.)


Another one that was me:


“Please refrain from using foul language in the group chat.”


Yep, it happened. Give me a break guys, I was having a stressful day and it slipped. All the systems were crashing, it was impossible to work, and someone asked if it was just them. I said nope, all my systems are completely fuckered. The silence after I hit Send was so deafening you could hear the collective gasp from workstations throughout the tri-county area. Oops. It was at that moment I realized how many managers I actually answer to. They all immediately appeared in my private messages.


I apologized dozens of times, after which I got tired of trying to make amends and just landed in the, “you know what, fuck it, I’m only human and we all have bad days” mindset. That afternoon, the memo came out. Everyone knew who the impetus was for this one. They were all there. I didn’t hear any more about it though I’m certain it will be in my annual review. All I can do is move forward and maybe take a little more CBD before I log in for the day. It does make me a nicer person 😉

Couch Surfing Grandmas

I’m not entirely sure what’s happening but every year when I look at my earnings over the years, I find myself making less than I did a decade ago, even as a teenager. Doing relatively the same work, I earned more in my 20s then I do in my 40s. This mystery drives even deeper when I do the math and realize that at my current wage, there is no way to afford my own place whereas before 2012, I’d lived on my own since I was 17. I also was reminded of this when I heard from a friend who let me know that she would be staying with one of our other friends until she could find a place to live. 

We are both mature adults with a long career history. I have a grown child, she has grandchildren. What has happened that neither of us, nor many others we know, are unable to afford basic shelter on our own? Where has the income gone? The LIVABLE income that we used to make? Rents have tripled in the past 10 years but pay rates have gone down. The company we work for does not give annual merit pay increases. Some folks have been at the company 10+ years and are still at their starting pay, stuck because of the lack of work available elsewhere in the area. Middle class is now low income. Here we are, with college degrees and solid work histories, with children and grandchildren, and we are living off food pantries and friends’ couches. Something is very wrong here.

In the recent election, florida voters went all in to approve a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. It will happen gradually over the next few years. In 2025 myself and many others will be back to making what we did 20 years ago. But now what is that going to do to rent prices and other necessities like food and utilities? If the cost of living increases even slightly, we’ll be right back where we are now, struggling, savings depleted just to cover a few months of hardship. Something’s got to give. 

When the Rules Get Ridiculous

Working for any company, regardless of size, rules are going to be there. In my experience, smaller companies have fewer rules and the larger ones like to have these massive handbooks of things by which we must abide. The Employee Handbook. The bible of how one is expected to conduct themselves. Most of it honestly comes down to common sense. Conflicts of interest: don’t. Sexual harassment: don’t. Insider trading: don’t. When they start edging the rules into your personal space however, that’s when I start to take issue.


This particular one gets under my skin to the extent that I’ve vehemently spoken and acted against it: no smoking or vaping in your vehicle while on company property. I beg your pardon? I quit smoking nearly 3 years ago but I do still vape. How do you get off telling me I cannot vape in my own vehicle? If this were coming from some type of business like a hospital, I might understand. But let’s be honest. I work for a call center. This is not a business that deals in person with medical practices, we do not have customers coming in and out. The building does not have a smoking section nearby. It’s a 10 minute round trip walk – breaks are 15 minutes – to the edge of the property, at the edge of a pond (alligators included), with no shelter from rain or sun. There is no separate vaping section for those of us who have quit smoking and now cannot stand to be around it.


When I worked on-site, I would retreat to my vehicle on lunch and breaks, not only to get a break from people (call center work is very high stress) but to seek shelter from 90+ temperatures, pouring rain, etc. And I would vape. I was not bothering anyone. No one had to smell my horrible strawberries and cream or cheesecake clouds. There were no ashes, no cigarette butts, just me and my nicotine Zen. To tell me that I am going to be written up (and to actually do so) for vaping in my own vehicle is far overstepping the bounds of realistic and practical rule-making. I feel like it punishes me for quitting smoking and wanting my privacy and quiet time.


Thankfully due to Florida’s stay at home orders issued in March I was able to start telecommuting to work and no longer need to deal with such nonsense. I was only reminded of this when a mass email was distributed this week reiterating this ridiculous rule because apparently others who still work from the office are still breaking it. Good on you, my peers! Keep breaking those rules that stifle your personal freedoms in the few minutes you get to yourself each day to decompress in the privacy of your own car.

Catching Up (PerBlog 2017-06-17)

What a whirl of a week this has been. Summer is in full swing and with it, the heat and the storms that I so love about Florida. Even living a stone’s throw from the beach, I still haven’t had the opportunity to get out much. When I can, I enjoy every second of the scent of the salt water, the wind, and the sounds that make Vitamin-Sea such a vital part of a healthy spirit.

Photo on Hutchinson Island, Florida, credit: Heather Noel (LifeInPawPrints).

Summer plans have gotten off to a slow start, mainly due to finances and unstable hours at work. It’s the slow season so where I was hoping for overtime, there hasn’t been any and there’s always a chance of being volunteered to go home early, so that make it hard to plan some things, not knowing how much a paycheck will be when it’s all said and done. BUT… I’m working on other financial fixes, they’re just being stalled by a very slow legal process which is driving me mad. I always found it ironic that it costs SO MUCH to fix money problems. Perfect example: Bankruptcy. Hundreds of dollars to file, yet if you’re truly bankrupt, you don’t have hundreds of dollars to file, or you wouldn’t be bankrupt. The legal system is twisted and distorted to work against the people, not for the people, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant altogether.

My daughter had wanted to get a job this summer at Publix but even after applying and following up, she was not not called back. They will hire at 14 but she may have a better chance when she turns 15 in a couple weeks. She’s already worked there unofficially, bagging for her grandmother who worked as a cashier, so one store’s staff already knows her. That’s always a plus. But until something comes through for her on employment, she is enjoying the first weeks of summer with me and my partner, his mother and sister. We keep her busy with the art studio, the gym, DIY projects… there’s always something to do. Plus, she gets to sleep in to her heart’s content 🙂

Projects for me include getting some flowers planted (though I’m a couple months late in doing so!) and building a container garden that won’t fall apart like the last attempt. Aside from the seaside, gardening is good medicine for my often bitter spirit. It takes me out of the world and back into the basics of life. I like sowing, I like producing, and I like the idea of making something useful out of nothing. Growing things does that for me. Trouble is finding a place to grow where all the animals won’t destroy my work. Chickens and raccoons are great at getting onto and into places they shouldn’t be!

Suppose that’s it for now. This heat is making me grouchy. Normally I love this house (basically an open-air wood cabin type historic house – no AC – central or window shakers) but summers are a real bitch. There’s no escaping the heat. Even the shade is brutal.

The Future of Cybersecurity is Virtual Reality

The Future of Cybersecurity is Virtual Reality

Cybersecurity professionals may soon add a new level of telecommuting to their work description. Thanks to a company called ProtectWise, a cutting-edge startup company based in Colorado, a new type of software would allow cybersecurity personnel to roam through networks in a 3-D, virtual reality setting. Think of real-world applications for scenes from the Matrix. Their Immersive Grid tool could utterly change the way security gets done.

ProtectWise Co-Founder and CEO Scott Chasin imagines a major corporation or government entity – any large organization – employing a room full of security analysts who wear augmented reality or VR headsets to traverse networks that closely resemble a metropolis. Every physical asset connected to the network, whether it is a server, desktop computer, laptop, mobile phone, etc., would show up “in-world” as a building. Each building could be customized and designed with distinguishable features, making it easy to identify what type of asset it is. They could then be zoned just like a real city, with blocks of assets making their own neighborhoods, cities, etc. The organizational possibilities are endless.

Visualizing the Immersive Grid

The way the Grid is currently designed, each building’s shape (round, square, and so forth) would identify the type of device on the network. The taller the building, the more network traffic is happening at that given moment. The width of a building is indicative of how much bandwidth the device is currently using. To make visualizing potential problems easier, buildings (devices) that turn orange or red would let an analyst know there is a high or unexpected risk level with that device or that it is engaging in unusual activity.

ProtectWise hopes this visualization technology will make cybersecurity professionals more productive and hopes it helps them identify and contain problems quicker and easier than ever before. The company wants to aim the Grid’s usage at younger professionals who may not have extensive experience in python or shell-script as this generation will be the majority user.

Further, younger security analysts will tend to have more useful experience with the mechanics of virtual game worlds than the older set does. The Grid will come more naturally, they think, to the younger professionals. Moreover, human beings are naturally 3-D thinkers and information processors. The scenarios envisioned for the Immersive Grid will tap into these natural abilities and greatly accelerate our ability to manage the real world in virtual space.

Working Sick: Where’s the Line?

​Recently (meaning a couple months ago), NPR did a report featuring workers who go to work sick. For the majority, it was mainly older employees who tended to stay home while the younger workers were more apt to push through their illness to not miss work.

The major difference between these two groups were the ones who tended to stay home were those who had tenure and got paid sick time off or would otherwise not be punished for taking time off. This was the older set. Of those interviewed in the younger set, they told the reporter they almost always went to work sick because they did not have paid (or even unpaid) sick time that they were allowed to use. Illnesses ranged from painful migraines to colds, flu, and other contagious illnesses that involved vomiting and diarrhea at work. Those who went to work sick said they did so because they could not afford to lose the pay or their jobs.
I was reminded of this radio spot as I forced myself to go to work sick today out of the same fear. I’d called out the past two days with severe bronchitis but could not afford a write-up for missing any more time, so I stuck it out. I ended up getting worse throughout the day because I wasn’t able to rest or take the medications that I have been at work – they put me to sleep. Upon returning to work today, I also heard from several others that they’d had to call out sick this week too for the same thing and I know where it came from. One person who came in sick 2 weeks ago coughing up a storm and even bragging about having the flu and still working.
The question is: where does someone who lives paycheck to paycheck draw the line between going in sick and staying home for their own health and others? Is it worth losing money or even your job to keep others safe? How do you handle it? Comments are welcome.

Perblog-Rainy Sunday

Normally on Sundays, it’s errand day. There’s mass in the morning, followed by religious education until noon, then the weekly grocery/necessities run and then the ATM to pull out my rent money for the week (landlady only takes cash!) Today just caps off the weekend “adventures” though as I recover from late work nights and a stomach bug plus ongoing migraines that seem to not have let up for 2 months straight. That’s why right now I am not doing a damn thing besides taking some time to myself after playing in the warm summer rainstorm that just passed over, enjoying the cool air on my wet hair and recounting what a crazy weekend it’s been. 

I didn’t wake up until 10:30 this morning after writing late (I freelance writing SEO content for websites). Fresh coffee was on and my breakfast wrap (sausage, egg & cheese, my favourite) was waiting in the microwave for me. After getting the sleep out of my head, I walked out to find my landlady under the kitchen sink trying to get the faucet unhooked to replace it. Of course I got recruited to help, so I did the clean work and held the flashlight for her, handing her tools. The faucet the neighbor gave her to replace it though was the wrong type and she spent the next hour struggling to get the old broken one back on. 

When she turned the water on, it was spraying everywhere under the sink. She’d given up trying to get the pieces to fit back together any tighter. That convinced her that she needed to turn the water back off and do it right this time. There is still no water in the kitchen sink because that faucet for some reason has been slowing down for a couple weeks and now just produces nothing. So after breakfast, I washed my coffee mug in the shower (now the only working water in the house) and am settled at my computer just waiting for a new job to post for the web content.

Mind you, during this plumbing fiasco, someone had dropped by unannounced to see the room she’s posted for rent. He was chased off pretty fast by the state of the house, but not before he asked us if we were single. What kind of creep was that? Not one that we want in the house, that’s for sure. 

Today’s craziness follows yesterday’s in a symphony of “I should have stayed in bed.” Yesterday while I was working on a website, fully concentrated in my content research so that I did not hear my landlady leaving to go to the store, all of a sudden I am ripped from my work by the sound of my favourite dog screaming at the top of her lungs. I slammed my computer shut and ran out to see what was going on and found the dog stuck with her foot in the bottom of the outer porch door in an absolute struggle to free it with paint everywhere (I’ll get to that in a minute). I freed the dog, grabbed her and immediately started washing the paint out of her mouth and off her as best as I could while the other dog (also covered in paint) ran to hide. Once the stuck dog was calmed and partially cleaned off, I checked her foot and nothing was broken. She was walking ok, just freaked out. 

Taking a moment to assess the situation, I went back out to the porch to try to figure out what the hell just happened. There had been a gallon of white paint apparently knocked over and kicked around in her struggle and it had spilled and sprayed everywhere. Imagine two dogs and a gallon of paint in a blender. That’s what it looked like when I ran out to her screams. I had no idea how I was going to start cleaning the paint off everything – it was a half inch thick coating the enclosed porch, so I left it and tried to call my landlady, only her phone had been left behind. She got home just at that moment and had a “WTF?!” pause before dragging the hose into the porch and starting to disburse the paint. As she started sweeping the wet, white mess out of the porch, I secured both dogs outside and hosed them off completely, restoring their natural colour. 

With the dogs cleaned and all the paint hosed off the porches, we sat trying to figure out what had happened. The best we can tell is the dogs were sleeping on the inside porch and someone tried to come in the outer door. Ceri, the big dog, would have rushed the door at the first sound and that would have scared the person enough to slam the door on her foot. There was no way, as far and as solidly as her foot was caught, that she could have done that herself. The door is too hard to push open at the bottom when it’s closed and even I could not force it open as far as her foot was caught. It was obvious during her struggle the paint got kicked over, slammed around and emptied. The takeaway: Ceri protected me from an attempted home invasion and got hurt in the process but she kept someone from entering the house. GOOD DOG!!! 

Seriously. This dog is my hero. She gets a sno-cone.