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

[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.