AaaaaaaaaaaRRRRRGH

[yvannairie]

Nothing inspires homicidal rage quite like two inches of fresh snow and A 100 KG DELIVERY BIKE GETTING STUCK IN IT

EDIT: context for this post -- my shift had ended over an hour ago and I had just gotten up to where the Really Shitty(tm) part of my current route starts, and it was still snowing, and there were no plows in sight so there I was, pushing my still mostly full bike through a parking lot that hadn't been cleared yet.

You know how fresh snow gets after a few people have walked through it? Have you ever tried driving in it?

Fucking Christ.

Honestly just. Whatever. I couldn't give a fuck. At some point I somehow managed to mess up my J-letters, and I could care less. Did I misdeliver that card? Did I drop it? Did it just fucking vanish??? Who cares! I don't! If they wanted me to produce quality they should pay me more than 10€ an hour.

The only thing that kept me going was honestly just the thought that if I wanted, I could just... quit. Go home. RIP to my past self (what an idiot) who wanted to be thorough and wanted to do a good job, I'm different. By the time my overtime kicked in at 10hrs (by my calculations, at least -- I don't have guaranteed overtime unless I do 30hrs that week first) I wasn't even halfway done through the route and couldn't remember shit about what was coming next, despite having done the sorts myself.

I was home around 1830 and while I was standing in the kitchen making food, I just kept thinking "You know, Idiots like us are the reason they can afford to pay you like shit. Why didn't we just go home, man? What was even the point of that?"

Fucking serves me right for wanting to do my fucking job right, fuck.

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

:( That sucks so bad. You deserve better--your job is obviously integral to the functioning of society and you put so much effort in.

[yvannairie]

Thank you. IDK, despite the strike having just happened, apparently customers just didn't feel that big of a difference so the public goodwill just kinda. Went.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

DDD:

[cimorene]

It did?! I wish they would organize a cross-sector like society-wide strike or demonstration or something. There should be a better way to show solidarity.

[yvannairie]

Honestly I feel like that might actually happen sooner or later. We currently have a government that bills itself as pro-labour and pro-lower middle class, and we're also about to start a round of collective agreement negotiations acrss almost every economic sector. The driver's and operator's union, aviation union and seafarer's union also threatened to strike in solidarity, and some of them did actually join the strike towards the end and the postal worker's union is... well, actually, it's kinda broke rn b/c the strike was long and extremely extensive, but going on strike in support of the other unions in the same labour sector is absolutely still on the table.

The splintering of the labour market, a lack of long-term stability, bad pay and zero-hour contracts is becoming an issue everywhere. Eventually, there will be a strike that is about that, almost exclusively, which will help set a precedent. PAU is also up and suing the company that I'm currently employed with for having me on a different labour agreement than the workers employed directly by Posti OY and Posti Palvelut OY. If that suit goes through, that will also set a precedent and better the labour rights of workers like me, even if we still can't get proper contracts with the mother company.

[cimorene]

Wax was just saying the other day - when that other strike ended shortly after the postal one, but I can't remember what sector it is now; but it was on the front page - that it was probably related to the momentum from the postal strike and that we can possibly expect more things to happen from that. And then I saw the pro-labor stuff happening (and the youngest prime minister ever) too, so... that's actually hopeful too. I really hope something like this happens.

And being unemployed I really hope there's some kind of mass demonstrations because I want a way to personally support the unions, but I'm sure there are lots of other people in other sectors who feel the same.

[yvannairie]

I have such mixed feelings about our new prime minister, on the one hand I want her to succeed so badly and finally start shifting the generational makeup of our political system, but on the other hand I don't trust a lot of Finnish politics right now b/c it's gotten polarised to the point where changing your mind and shifting your platform needs to be done in a very gaslight-y "this is actually what we've always thought", instead of acknowledging that flawed methods can result in flawed conclusions.

That being said -- yeah. It is often said that labour unions are too strong in Finland, because they're capable of immobilising the economy on "a whim", and how labour strength shouldn't be used to exert political power, but what's conveniently left out of that assessment is that politics is constantly exerting power over labour. At some point, twisting the arm back is fair game.

[cimorene]

I mean, Wax used to be in the metal worker's union, which was fine, but now she works in phone customer service and like. The customer service union is in SUCH a bad position. I cannot BELIEVE a union lets the stuff by that she puts up with at this kind of pay. Like seriously??? And her job is still not as awful as yours.

But... yeah. I mean... I have a limited... not attention span, more like emotional spoons for politics? Which is still a lot compared tomany people though, and I do care about politics a lot. It's important to me to keep up, to a degree, with Finnish politics, but I've never been able to get in too much depth with it. And there's been a lot to get mad about over the years, but at the same time, it's always been less awful than what's going on in America and the world, and keeping up with American politics in more detail (I can still vote in their national elections and not Finland's until I pay the 300 bucks or whatever to apply for citizenship and I def. can't afford that right now...) and then world politics in like... even cursory detail... also takes a lot of brainpower. Obviously once I can vote I know I'm gonna have to pay more attention... and get more angry probably. But, like, I have a lot of anger at Finnish neoliberals for example, who can actually look at the current garbage fires in the US and UK or... anywhere really... and still think privatizing things and selling them off is a good idea (well they probably just want the money for their cronies and don't actually care if it's a good idea for other people, realistically)... but at the same time, a random Finnish neoliberal is usually gonna be more progressive than a prominent US Democrat. They're operating on completely different scales (except the racists and homophobes, of course, those are pretty similar everywhere).

[yvannairie]

Yeah, I get it. I mean, my folks voting Coalition year after year and being confused when them having decency and talking about how equality can't mean being equally tolerant of dumbassery nets them a constant stream of Green/Left Party ads was a big reason I was politically inactive pretty much until I got this job, and realised that Posti was never going to hire me fair and square b/c it was cheaper to keep me in an unstable temp position forever. Also, other fun life things.

I think Finland is in a really stressful position right now in the sense that things aren't "as bad as they could be"... yet. But things are getting worse and we're seeing how it looks everywhere else when things are bad. Finnish news media has also been getting better at covering human interests stories, but is still pretty bad at actually pointing out when progress is halted vs when actual gains are made.

[cimorene]

I wish we COULD just guillotine the entire board of directors. Although actually I can't understand why this last strike didn't provoke government intervention against them and their current policy. (I know I could probably learn exactly why they didn't by learning a lot more about the current political environment. But it would probably be even more depressing.) It's much more understandable how my package notifications at the old flat came to be lost or delayed... though personally I have to think delayed is better than lost... but is that even an option for you, I mean, to just let a backlog accumulate and not do endless unpaid overtime? Do you get penalized then if you don't finish the route?

[yvannairie]

Yeah. To be clear, completely losing track of a delivery like that is absolute failure mode for me, and it's only ever happened once before (around the same time, and under similar conditions, last winter). At least on the routes I'm doing, I'm the one making my own sorts so I mostly know what's in them, and know if something's dropped or fallen into the bags. Yesterday was just hell, thanks to the terrible weather and the late hour. I still have no idea if I just imagined that card, or if I actually lost it.

The problem, for me, is that long days like this pretty much invariably trigger a train crash of prioritisation problems. The indoor work recipe we use implicitly prioritises the completion of car routes over bike routes, meaning that my first instinct is to finish putting together everything that isn't mine before I can leave, and because I have such a hard time transitioning from one activity to another, that easily turns into an unmanageable amount of overtime. Over the fall, I actually did refuse to do overtime (I actually gave our new manager an ultimatum at the time -- give me over 20 hours a week or don't bother, and if you want me doing long days, actually put it in the schedule instead of counting me doing 9hrs on a 6hr day) but that only made me feel like I was doing a bad job, and wasn't worth the hit to my satisfaction over my own performance.

So, no, I wouldn't personally be penalised if I just let the backlog accumulate, but I also don't really think about it in terms of how I perform, but rather how our entire department performs. Me doing 30 minutes of overtime putting together one of the car routes might mean the difference between that route being delivered that day or not, especially while we're so short-staffed. And everything I don't deliver today will just make putting the route together tomorrow slower. But this is b/c my managers, like, actually like me lol, and know that my performance is good -- my zero-hour contract means that whether I even get invited in depends entirely on need and "pärstäkertoin".

Honestly, previously when we were fully staffed, I worked like hell to put myself at the top of the "list of people we make full-time if someone quits", but right before a bunch of people did quit, the call came in that there would be no more putting people on mandatory-minimum contracts, and everyone new would be on a zero-hour agreement like the one I was on. The biggest reason I was so comfortable giving such precise demands this fall was b/c I knew they wouldn't be able to replace me if I did decide I was being condescended to.

[cimorene]

Arrrrgh! This is probably happening at tons of branches, isn't it?

And even if you technically have the option of letting it slide to prioritize your mental or physical health, it still sucks that you have to.

[yvannairie]

Thank you :( I try not to feel too bad about it because I do kind of. Bring it on myself, by being garbage at managing my own schedule.

[cimorene]

Oh I would definitely have that problem too. I'm not sure if I'm actually ADHD, but I seem to have all the problems in those ADHD posts and I have that exact issue with managing my work and finishing for myself.