If this turns into something I actually post, it’ll be the 3rd time today I’ve tried to write it in a way that is both comprehensive and yet doesn’t annoy the piss out of me.
I’m a “site director” for the YMCA. I refer to my job as glorified babysitting. On paper, including the extremely misleading job listing, I’m in charge of “programming” as well as a host of other administrative things related to ensuring compliance with trainings, overseeing “camp” activities, and theoretically remaining pliable enough to be utilized wherever I’m needed. It pays $17.25 an hour, I make $1,107 every 2 weeks. I drive a 2002 Ford F-150, with at least $1,000 in needed repairs, an hour or more each way to get to my first shift at 6:15 AM. The afternoon runs from 2:45 PM to 6:00 PM, unless a parent is late, like they were today.
At a glance, and by my own perspective, I don’t make a lot, but I also don’t do a lot. This is a statement relative to my history of jobs, often in social work, and one I can now compare to the 2nd job I got addiction counseling that I wedge between my Y shifts from 8:30 AM to 1:00 PM. It pays $21/hr during “training,” which…we’ll get to that, and $23/hr for me to conduct 3-hour IOP groups for people recently sober. A 10-minute conversation with a single person in that environment can be more loaded and complicated than 5 days of poorly-listening kids.
I don’t want either job, I want money. If my time is destined to be utilized in captured ways, I’m looking to maintain a basic sense of belonging or flow as I exercise what’s needed. I live alone, an hour dead into the center of the middle of nowhere, and yet I’m begrudgingly extroverted, creative, and don’t want to sit around all day. I don’t have a particular affinity for kids or the sick and intransigent egos of addiction, but I do have a knack for speaking my audience’s language.
I spoke my supervisor’s language, as well as 6 other site directors’, at the Y to get hired in the first place. I am overwhelmingly on time, communicative, and accountable to the expectations of my various roles. I used to be the type to never take days off. I’m not saying that as a point of pride, but to hint at the depth of my former pathological allegiance and sense of pretentious pride.
Today, I recognize more both about myself and the environments I work than I used to. I don’t believe the grass is greener elsewhere. I don’t believe most places are run particularly accountably or by people with any real competence for it. I don’t expect everyone at all times to rise up and be the hero that champions higher pay, proper protocols, and meaningful consequences for those who betray the “values” we’re allegedly in charge of protecting or instilling.
I still have values. I still hold expectations. I still aspire to more than merely talking my way into new ill-fitting environment after new ill-fitting environment after I’ve drifted too far into a personal financial crisis. These values get aggravated the moment I’m met with the practical reality of navigating someone, technically, in charge of me, but clearly barely in charge of themselves. They become even more aggrieved when I’m forced to “need something” from those people, and they lack both the capacity and willingness to entertain a real way of meeting that need.
One supervisor, for example, ChatGPT’d me an answer to my informing them of the hours I was hoping to finagle. She doubled down in her response. When someone has no interest or capacity in engaging with you they’ll do things like, “Per our discussion 6 months ago when you were hired…” or “The site director role requires…” They’ll cc HR on the email, because you’re clearly becoming disgruntled by the side-stepping and ambivalence. They’ll throw up their hands and shrug their shoulders about the necessary consequences of you attempting to weasel out of the strictest interpretation of your role that serves their purposes in any moment.
These, mind you, are the same people who said, literally no less than 5 times, how little the role paid and were quick to offer all of the 2nd jobs their other site director’s take. It’s something of a point of pride? They just all believe in the cause so much, it seems, that they’re willing to sacrifice adult wages and ever-fleeting time so they babysi…I mean, enrich children’s lives. Should I recall that part of our conversation too? Or, what about the part where you said, “I’ve been trying to get them to change that job description for months because you’re right, it doesn’t match at all what we need you to do.”
I have 6 people that work under me at the Y. 4 of them make $20/hr or more. One of them last week said, “That’s messed up. You’re in charge and run the program, but they’re paying me $20?” My direct supervisor has lamented this, but then always tags the conversation with how little she makes. Her boss has been roped into discussion and offers nothing. His boss avoids the issue and is noted for having shit on my friend who used to work directly under her after my friend attempted to fix that discrepancy. It was one of several reasons that contributed to my friend quitting as common sense was routinely rebuked, and often devolved into Mean Girl politics.
Anyway, I’m at a crossroads, and have until May 9th to figure out if I want to keep playing along. I’ve yet to email my counseling job the hours the Y says I need to work, and I’m not looking to add anymore messiness to their operation that I’ve somehow refrained from speaking more about yet. The Y is the current devil I know. When it’s smooth, it’s still annoying, but tolerable. When literally anything comes up that feels like an unnecessary fight, I’m daring the universe to push me over the edge.
The relationship is over, if it ever really began, and I’m not exactly clinging to it, but it’s hard to directly compare my hatred for job-searching and restarting against my hatred for these disingenuous and not-so-secretly mean-spirited exchanges. One of my supervisors still holds a grudge that I expect kids not to be covered in shit as they go to lunch. You think a person like that is working overtime to keep me around? She literally is like Y lore for not even doing the bare minimum of her job.
If I leave, I’m still driving, now an hour and twenty minutes, to work each day, but I’m able to sleep in until 6:30/7 instead of 4:30/5, and getting home before 3. I could devote my freed up time to learning and getting certified in insurance sales, and attempt to break into where my friend that left the Y started working. It’s also a space endorsed by another friend of a friend who has been doing it for a decade. I’ve a standing goal of finding a fully remote job, and this has presented itself as a reliable-enough road to that.
Then, I’m no longer playing frisbee and basketball every day. I’m not crafting or making volcanoes. I’m not really getting outside. I’m not accumulating the knock-on effects I’ve yet to even explore of having a role that isn’t the heightened drama of social work broadly. I get along with my coworkers. I’ve earned a place of trust with my school and respect from my kids. Those aren’t nothing. They aren’t paying the bills, but they are a far cry from the types of things I utilize in describing what I hate about work, poor authority, or society in general. I’m not particularly sentimental, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely felt more human, and it’s made more sense why people fist-fuck themselves in service to others within systems that can’t be bothered to get their shit together.
It’s a different kind of role. Even in counseling, the onus was on the adults to follow-up with me and my free nonprofit service if they really wanted to keep in touch and weren’t just talking out of their ass about my impact on them, as “addiction services” teach you to do. I’m second-guessing the impact I might have on the kids. Or, at least the kids that like me, as if I believed any of them hold particularly reasoned, strong, or salient opinions. I’m also feeling “old,” and not like I accept negligent authority for its own sake, but that am able to tolerate certain manifestations of it better. If I never had to write another email, I’d probably never again flirt with getting fired.
I’m also on the road to exhaustion. I’m already “behind” on my IOP notes, not because I haven’t written them, and not because they take even 10 minutes to get entered into the system. The “start-up energy” and “messiness” of that work environment is regularly impeding my ability to develop a flow and system. I’m extremely competent in building “loose” obligations into a machine, and right now, there’s a larger machine that’s crippling my capacity to do so. I’m told things last minute. Schedules aren’t kept. Rides show up late. Expectations vary wildly between other IOP counselors. Meetings appear to be held and cancelled at random. I came in an hour early today do notes? As soon as I unpack my computer and open the browser, they want me upstairs for a new-to-me team meeting, even though I’ve been in “training” for a week and a half.
Am I still in training, and getting the training pay rate? They don’t know, because also they forgot to get me enrolled in payroll, so I’ll need to fill out 8 missing punch forms they’ll send me…eventually. Is yoga every Wednesday? Yes, says the office manager. It happens to be in the middle of your 3-hour IOP session, but whatever. Also, it’s not on today, so that 25 minutes of going upstairs and waiting around, yeah just head back down and cross your fingers your group regroups in a timely way. Teaching material? It’s in a binder around here somewhere, let’s make sure we never quite show you where 7 minutes before each of your groups when you might need to print 100 or more pages. Do I work from 9 to 1? or 8:30 when you want me on the meeting as I’m driving there on raceway 465? Good question, let me check on that. You ever been attacked by 6 pissed-off women at once who cite their PTSD about men after you asked them to not talk over someone who was sharing?
I can do just about 4 hours of that once a day provided I have low-stakes routines and games to play a few hours later. I will not be attempting to increase my hours if I leave the Y.
I’m stifled. It’s different enough from stuck. My goals have transformed to include some measure of stability or desire to see different fruits of different investments. I don’t want to perpetuate treating work environments and the people in them as disposable as they insist on making me feel. That’s giving them too much credit as though it’s intentional or that anyone can truly * make you feel one way or another. Of course, superficially and colloquially they can and do, but what kind of counselor would I be if I wasn’t interested in the conscious clear-eyed choices there are the moment you recognize and distance yourself from the feeling? I don’t want to go out on a reactive email. I don’t want to get caught pleading with, literally, a chatbot employed by someone wholly nonplussed about the smell, or taste, of shit. I don’t want to find myself racing towards the next iteratively negligent space crafting new naive narratives about its potential.
At least I have 9 stays to stew.
