im not saying office jobs aren’t bad in some ways but its always very telling when people treat it like the WORST job at the bottom of the rung…because they have never had to face manual labor as a real option they would ever be forced to take.
its just like, idk, alienating coming from a family of manual laborers and factory workers without college degrees, to see theres this entire part of society that cannot relate to that life. that like, going to college and “”working in the rat race”” is the rock bottom (with benefits and holidays off and your work being so frivolous a whole part of the culture is just pretending to look busy so you don’t get more work). idk man. i hate it down here.
I can think of no better example of this attitude than when COVID first hit and the people with office jobs not only had the ability to work from home, but became pretty much the only ones acknowledged in mainstream consciousness.
So many people just being like, “Well now that we’re all stuck indoors” as if “essential workers” didn’t count, and virtually every commercial being like, “Welcome back!” after companies started making employees come back to the office, ignoring that some of us never “left” our work stations to begin with. Nowadays you see so many people say, “Remember when we were all indoors?” and I’m like…no, I don’t actually, some of us never had that privilege.
Idk it’s just incredibly demoralizing that non-office jobs are largely considered just so beneath consideration that we’ve even been (at least partially) erased from narratives surrounding COVID.
my essential job (pharmacy tech data entry) was also an office job and i am absolutely in agreement that i did not get the worst of it. stuff like warehouse and retail jobs must have been absolute hell then.
and a data entry job would have actually been my dream, if it wasn’t also a call-center job at the same time
nobody was happy. especially the nurses calling us (their job was absolutely worse than ours, enough for their misery to overflow into our world). we had almost no resources to help them. if the tech receiving a call couldn’t figure out a solution to a problem there was no one to ask. the pharmacists would also be on phone calls or otherwise busy enough to scream at you if you asked a question.
phones were constantly ringing. CONSTANTLY. nearly all the callers were nurses in long-term-care facilities. often calling about coverage problems that were the insurance company’s fault, or missed orders that were their own fault, or calling long after the cutoff to demand a last-minute next-day shipment. the delivery run would get pushed well into overnight, and I was told I could not leave between when the last pharmacist left and when the overnight team arrived, even if that meant working hours and hours of overtime
the manager would yell at us for accepting orders after cutoff and she’d yell at us for NOT accepting orders after cutoff, there was absolutely no consistent rule that you wouldn’t eventually get reprimanded for following
I am VERY sure we didn’t get all the overtime pay we should have. there was 1 person working in finance and her entire mission in life was to pinch every penny to maximize profits. she kept the toilet paper cabinet under lock and key. we got pay automatically deducted for a 30-minute break even if we didn’t take it, and she openly said that she increased the deduction if she thought she saw someone taking a too-long break. if she had that kind of power I am certain she abused it as much as she could get away with
we were technically allowed breaks but it was the sort of workplace where the “best” employees worked through all their breaks and snarked at anyone who didn’t (because any time less than 100% of people were on deck, calls went unanswered, meaning patients ultimately went without meds)
i stopped taking breaks at all, and the boss obviously must have known it because she called me into her office saying she’d been watching me at my desk on the surveillance tapes. but she did not mention my lack of breaks, only the fact that she sometimes saw me staring at my screen zoning out and not typing, which was a problem and i needed to shape up
when I left I had $600 worth of vacation time i hadn’t gotten to use and I didn’t cash it out because they wouldn’t let me unless I’d signed an outrageous form that included non-disparagement and agreeing to testify for the company if they ever went to court (and also included a clause that said the contract was binding on me but not on the company, so who knows if they’d have even given me their $600 side of the deal). my roommate read through it and went off to look up how many laws it was breaking and came back to me with 40% of his remaining faith in humanity gone, telling me sorry but this is legal in pennsylvania
(the absolute only thing that i think was good about the fact that i lived in pennsylvania in 2020 was that it was a swing state, so my vote probably came closer to having an actual influence on the 2020 election than it did any of the years i’ve voted in blue states. other than that the whole experience was absolute ass. but NOT the worst experience anyone had. not by a damn long shot)