Work is annihilating my soul

Friday June 13th, 2025

Tags: blog, health, personal, work

Tuesday¹ was my quarterly doctor visit. Medical appointments are always stressful, because I still don't have any paid leave or sick time benefits. I have to manage my schedule to try to miss as little time as possible, and then try to make up that time at some point during the week. I usually try to schedule appointments as early in the day as possible for telehealth, or as late in the day as possible for physical appointments. Leaving in the middle of the day on the bus, having my appointment and coming back on the bus would easily wipe out half of my workday. This time my appointment was at 16h40, so I only had to leave 1h15m early, which is easy to make up.

Going to the doctor that late is kind of creepy. Barely anyone has appointments that late and a lot of the office staff has already gone home for the day. They didn't have the AC on, so it was too hot and far too quiet. The doctor is an anxious experience even at the best of times, but going in the evening dials the uncanny vibes up to 11. I did okay, though. My blood pressure was normal for the first time I think ever? It's never been outrageously high, but they almost always have to tell me it's elevated because it's a few points above the "normal healthy adult" target of 120/80. This time it was 118/74 which is doubly impressive because I haven't been taking my blood pressure medication. Not because I'm anti-medication, but because it's very difficult for me to remember to take any drug that doesn't have an immediate, obvious effect. My brain just can't be bothered if there isn't a cause/effect relationship between doing something and feeling better. This is bad! I need to train my brain not to be like this. But this time I managed to beat the system, and I suspect I have my 10,000 step/day program to thank. Take that, big pharma, I found one weird trick to dodge your poison pills. Doctors hate it! It's diet and exercise.

Wednesday and Thursday at work were rough. My immediate supervisor, Caribou,² was out for several days last week on medical leave. Her spouse is very sick and needs intensive regular medical care; for most of May 26-29, she was scheduled to be out of the office for a visit to a hospital in another state. She was supposed to return on Monday, but she didn't. I don't know exactly what's going on, and I don't want to pry too much into her personal life, but there were complications that prevented her from coming into the office most of last week.

My work is mostly self-directed, and there's still a big backlog of stuff to work on, so this didn't effect my main duties. However, her being out for so long has made things more complicated. You see, my main day-to-day tasks are fairly mindless grunt work. That's how I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks while I work, nothing I do requires all that much brainpower. Occasionally I encounter an issue with a task that I need to give to Caribou before I can complete it. It's not that I'm not able to solve these problems, but they require granularity and attention to detail, so for assembly-line efficiency, I normally set those aside for her so I don't have to break my workflow.

She's been out for her spouse's medical needs before, and I always felt bad about giving her a big pile of problems to deal with when she returns, but I never tried to do her part of the job because I've technically never been trained or asked to do it, and I didn't want to risk doing something wrong. But she's never been out for this long, and the emails from down the chain asking about these problems have become increasingly insistent and urgent. I would probably technically not get in trouble if I ignored these emails.

But, well, this time things are obviously really bad for her to be out this long, and I couldn't bear to give her hundreds of urgent problems to deal with when she gets back. I've watched her solve these issues from being included on the email chains, and I knew I can't permanently fuck anything up by trying to step in and help. The worst that can happen is being told "this is wrong" by someone further down the chain, at which point I'll either set that one aside or ask someone else for help. If I have to ask someone of high status a dumb question and look like an ass, so be it. Whatever annoyances I cause will be tiny droplets compared to the bucketfuls I'm bailing out to keep the ship afloat.

On Thursday Squirrel, a co-worker I don't see that often because I work in another part of the office, came to me with some questions. She's also been doing her best to help with Caribou's workload and was also feeling overwhelmed. It felt good to have an ally. There are tasks that I know how to do and she doesn't, and tasks she knows how to do that I don't, so we traded problems, which helped a lot. I also took the initiative to create a shared spreadsheet to help keep track of issues as they come up and track what's been done to solve them. Caribou is very kind, but she's never been the most organized or technically-inclined critter. I've often thought her job would be a lot less stressful if she just had some better systems in place. Squirrel thought the spreadsheet is a great idea and has been using the spreadsheet as well, which made me feel good. Most of the problems involve a great deal of e-mail tag with multiple organizations, some of which are good at communicating and some of which are very bad. With the spreadsheet, we can easily see which problems have been fixed, which ones are waiting for a response and which ones have generated additional issues without needing to wade through a sea of badly organized email reply chains to find the relevant information. If we get a nastygram from up the ladder asking why something still hasn't been fixed, we can easily look at the spreadsheet and say "we reached out to XYZ Inc. on such-and-such date and haven't received a response; I'll follow up with them now."

Health interlude

The above text has been sitting in a draft on my phone for almost a week. I've had no mental or physical energy or time to add to it. I've still been taking walks on my lunch hour. I dare not lose all my inertia there. But other than that, I've been spending every available minute at work working. I haven't been listening to my audiobook. Just music and youtube bullshit. I haven't felt like reading when I got home. I haven't felt like doing anything. I've gone through busy periods at work and I've rarely felt this bad. I've been eating a normal amount and getting exercise. I wasn't sure what I was doing wrong.

Well, I just figured out one potential culprit: the sprayer on my inhaler broke. I noticed it wasn't working like it used to, the spray wasn't as noticeable, but the counter showing the remaining sprays was decreasing, so I thought maybe it was in my head. Well, I tried spraying it with the nozzle pressed tight against my hand, and the spot completely dry. This goes a long way towards explaining why my whole body has been so sore and I haven't been able to think: my muscles and brain haven't been getting enough oxygen. My daily walks have probably been doing more harm than good. I've been overexerting myself. I've been underestimating the importance of oxygen. All my life I assumed it was always there, then when I was almost 40 I was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma and suddenly my whole life made sense. Well, made more sense.

I don't know how the sprayer broke. I keep the cap on and the inhaler in my backpack. I guess I set my backpack down too forcefully one day and the plastic snapped. I'll need to be more careful. Perhaps I'll try to fashion some sort of foam-padded case.

Back to work

So yeah, having the spreadsheet has made it easier to keep the stuff organized. At the risk of outing myself as irresistibly cool and sexy, I love a good spreadsheet. But I still need to spend a big chunk of my day writing and responding to emails. So I guess that's where my writing energy has been going.

I don't like being the person who has to write emails. I'm fine responding to them, I can respond to emails all day. I'm quite good at it. I can read an entire email, distill the important information, and follow all of the instructions.

This is how the average exchange goes when I have to write an email:

Monday

🦝: Hey, this document is incorrect. Could you please submit a revision without 🍎, 🍌 or 🍒?

Wednesday

🐰: Attached is the revised document, we have removed 🍎 per your request. Please let us know if you have any other concerns.

🦝: Thank you! The document still has 🍌 and 🍒, please resubmit with these removed and we'll process it as soon as possible.

Friday

🐰: Whoops! Here is an amended document without 🍌. Good thing it's Friday 😅 LOL! Have a good weekend!

🦝: Thank you. Now we just need a version with 🍒 removed and we'll get this taken care of as soon as possible.

Tuesday

🐰: 🍒 is how we've been doing it all along. We were instructed to do 🍒 in email exchange with 🐴 on Mar. 31 2022, is that no longer accurate? Please advise.

🦝: 🐴 has not been with this organization for 6 years and it would have been illegal for us to process the documents from this period if you had been doing 🍒. Could you be thinking of policy 🍓?

Friday

🐰: You're right, sorry! Here is the document with only 🍓, 🍎 and 🍌 as per your original request, have a great day.

🦝: Thank you. I have taken a vow of silence and decided to live in the forest effective Monday. If you need any nuts or berries, please write your request on a pinecone and flush it down the toilet. Thanks for all your help.

Somewhere in the back of my mind is the faint hope that taking the initiative and going above and beyond to help in a crisis will lead to something resembling positive career movement down the line, because that's how I was always told it works when I was growing up, and what other options do I really have? Caribou is set to retire in a few years, and in light of recent events may need to take an early retirement. I've demonstrated that I'm skilled and capable of handling many aspects of her job, not to mention many of Cockatoo's job duties when she was on extended leave. I've hopefully demonstrated my ability and willingness to learn whatever needs doing. Everyone I work with agrees I'm a great asset to the organization; surely I should reach the next rung of the ladder any day now?

I'm not getting my hopes up, because I know from experience that's not how it works for people of my social strata. Whatever initiative I show, however far above and beyond I go, that'll become the new normal. I'll be expected to continue with every new responsibility I take on without increased compensation or benefits, until I eventually get so overwhelmed that I crash and burn in the manner society expects of me.

All of the adults who told me showing initiative and giving 110% is how to get ahead came of age before Reaganomics. That's not how anything has worked for as long as I've been alive. The people responsible for allocating funds and making hiring decisions have less than zero interest in skill, talent, loyalty, dependability, flexibility, cooperation, any of the meaningful parts of human work. Their job is to fill the bare minimum number of slots in a personnel list as cheaply as possible. They're totally disconnected from the actual work.

They don't see the demoralizing effects of crew skeletonization. They have no conception of institutional knowledge, or the ways losing it damages the organization over time. I'm just an interchangable line item in a spreadsheet. I have no leverage or bargaining power with which to advocate for myself, because the people who control the money can't see 5 minutes into the future. If I leave, this place is fucked. They'll probably need to hire 3 people to properly replace me, but no one will care if I threaten to leave. They'll hire one replacement, and no one in charge will connect the massive productivity loss to my departure. No one will take steps to make life bearable for the people doing good work. Everyone will suffer forever.

Anyway, sorry for all the negativity. Let's take my mind off my troubles and see what's going on in the news.

...oh.

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