based on the events of my morning so far i'm going to remind you that telling office workers to just walk out at 5:00 PM on the dot and never stay a minute after or do anything off the clock is asinine advice because our stressors are magnetic and they follow us
any job where you work in an office, people get your name and email address and they blame you. both your management and customers are constantly naming you when things go wrong, building up a list of reasons to fire you.
"just walk out 😎don't give them a minute of your time for free😍" ok I'll just ignore this angry email on Saturday and-- ah, here we are on Monday and I now have to get on a call with 9 executives. Cool. That was worth it. Thanks, person who doesn't know what I do. Great advice.
like i won't lie that we're way less fireable than someone working a retail job etc. but you know what's worse than getting fired? Dying. you know what will fucking kill you in your forties? Stress.
Everything I say here is on the record. Everyone remembers it and writes down my name and complains about me, personally, when they tell our executives they want to take their $15k monthly revenue somewhere else.
>I< didn't deliver adequate support. >I< wasn't able to resolve their problem. >My< email gets scrutinized by our VPs who are trying to smooth over this customer, who say "Oh, I see he didn't do <meaningless irrelevant thing they heard once>, we'll get right on him for that"
I ignored this customer over the weekend entirely within my rights and nobody will criticize me for that, but because I did so, now everything I did last week ON the clock will get looked at with a microscope for excuses to exculpate our company by throwing me under the bus.
It's gonna be the same anywhere, anywhere there's customers. There's always this option of trading 30 minutes on a Friday after hours to save an *entire fucking week* of misery, and I've never regretted it.
I got forced onto salary last week. I wouldn't get paid a dime if I'd called this customer over the weekend, and my employer is now going to explicitly steal my time from me even if I don't do this. It still would have been worth it.
This will be my life forever. Every job I hold for the rest of my life, I will have to weigh these choices and decide whether to sacrifice my personal time in order to not spend the entire next week or three sitting on exhausting phone calls listening to threats
I'm going to be asked today to commit to resolutions that are not possible. We sold this customer a black-box product from an uncooperative vendor; we have no diagnostic capabilities. The only honest answer is "We can't fix this problem because the product we sold you is garbage"
My next job will be like this, and my next one. I don't see a way to ever escape. They don't make jobs where there aren't customers who got lied to and sniveling spineless execs that i know of.
