[735] LifeLickMyBalls

I just want to do a little bitching about my job so that maybe by the end I come up with a reason to not quit before my next paycheck.

 

My job wants me to have 21 or 22 face-to-face hours with clients. This includes driving, “goal-oriented” phone call time, and “casework.” I've been at the job for a month and half. The first month a series of shit shows that boiled down to having next to zero job shadowing, no instruction on the proper buzz words and paperwork, and a general “you'll figure it out, it's early” attitude.

Oh! the difference one week makes.

 

See, this morning was “these numbers are shit” a comment made by a supervisor who I don't believe realized I had signed into the video chat yet. I was told, “maybe you need to think about if this is the career for you.” I was offered to be put on part-time. I was asked, for the tenth time, “what is it we can do to help you?”

 

I'm not joking, last week, every week, there's been some sentiment of “yeah, starting out sucks, it's the worst part, you get all of the worst cases, have no idea, are overwhelmed, yada yada yada and it's okay. On a dime, I speculate because the boss's boss is a dick, I'm being told I might need to leave because the 30+ hours I had scheduled had people go on a cancelling spree at the last minute.

 

This is where things come to a head. This isn't “put in the hours” kind of work. This is “extract billable hours from the state” under the guise of “help.” You remember the list of things I gave that count as face-to-face? They LOVE if you're driving a client to and from Indianapolis for a 2 hour visit. They'll encourage you to hang out in the driveway “doing paperwork” an extra 15 minutes to tack on that much more. Casework? I'm not a therapist, I just play one under the guise of help. This means either watch YouTube videos related to the listed problems on their referral, pretend to make a 2 hour conversation out of 10 minutes worth of information, and build rapport with people who are at a phase in their life that may, on a good day, be described as pathologically lie-ridden.

 

The idea is to persistently make mountains out of mole-hills, ignore effective treatments and money savings by, you know, actually addressing the underlying systemic problems, and then berate an individual case manager for not making their hours, to the tune of their slightly above minimum wage, you know, the rate they went to college for.

 

On top of this, the horribly designed “leadership” structure means I'm catching it from 3-5 people in 3-5 different contradictory and shitty ways about information I've had to learn on the fly, pull out of them, or fuck up consistently enough that they finally figure out they can just answer simply and give me what they want and they'll get their way. We keep having check-ins and sit-downs, asking me, the completely new idiot who has no perspective or experience in this field just what it is I can do to get them to like me. I'm a number to you, asshole. Nothing. There's nothing I can do but go full sociopath and translate your ridiculous irrational anger onto clients until I scare them into compliance with threats over their children.

 

So that's what I'm doing.

 

I don't know if I'll have to atone for this period in my life, as I take no pleasure in it, but my arguments for a measure of pragmatism are wearing thin on my last remaining hairs of a conscience. This system, by design, turns “help” into a thinly-veiled bilk and threat that manifests as a number of hours. There's more than a little room to consider the people tasked with coaching and cheer leading and playing the game all at once might deserve a measure of fundamental respect, trust, and maybe paycheck that underscores their efforts. But no, it's incentivized. I need hours like a door to door salesman needs to unload knives. That's what I should be doing with my degree in psychology, sales and juggling HR complaints.

 

You'd think the people would be the worst part of the job! You'd think hearing grandma repeat herself 90 times about how low her granddaughter's bar is and how high her own is would be annoying. You'd think watching someone itch their pocked skin and lament they can't get the case worker who's looked the other way when they were high would make me feel bad. You'd think getting cussed out on the phone or getting shitty comments from some sickly piece of white trash might stick with me. NOPE. The hardest part is being pulled off to the side and being talked to like a feeble-minded huckster operating under the delusion that it's not time to put me out to pasture. It's knowing, full well, that the “better” I do this job, the more I refine my sociopathic tendencies. It's watching people, your middle-managers and supervisors, break in real time as they can see their families starving and on the street with one more ass-ramming from the indignant boys upstairs, so now it's your turn.

 

This is a great example though of me not really knowing what to do. Stick with it until the probation period is up? I'm already looking up other jobs. Most of my life has been living on between 4 and 6 thousand dollars a year. I made my 4 thousand or so so far. I've also made it almost 30 years without telling someone to go fuck themselves and walking off a job in a huff or breaking something. I'd like to keep that streak going, but with every ignored suggestion on how to make things better, with every explanation blanched, and every insinuation that I've been acting ignorantly or maliciously deliberately, I may show them what breaking can really look like. I want to do good, and I've put myself in the middle of the worst kind of people and job. I need money. Do I need more money that self-respect?