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I think this week has been the worst week I have ever had at work. Until now the extreme maximum number of hours on the phone in a week has been like ... 11.* If you got that you were dealt a bad schedule; usually you only had that occasionally. Usually you'd have more like 7 hours. You had time to get other shit done and weren't spending the whole rest of the time catching up on all the tasks you accumulated during your phone shifts, the very urgent tasks that seem to just go into a black hole of nothingness. You regularly got to do those things that are ACTUALLY What We're Supposed To Do.
This week I was on the phone for 16 hours. I want to cry just typing that out. I'm an extreme introvert, and a normal week leaves me exhausted and craving only to putter around my flat for the entire weekend. I spend a couple of hours with a knitting group once or twice a month and talk to my parents nearly every day. Other than that I only ever speak with people at work - even during our times with a normal workload. This week I'm so overloaded I've ended phone calls with my parents after about 10 minutes; I've stayed up later and later because I can't let myself feel that I'm tired and going to sleep just makes the next day come faster; I browsed through the headlines of 5,000 job ads to pick out the 100-odd that sounded even remotely suitable to apply for and now have to summon the energy to write applications for as many of the 20 that are left after glancing through the rest of the text as I can.
I'm trying to get off the sofa to spend an hour or two finishing a sewing project, washing dishes and maybe baking a little. But I'm just so goddamn sad about everything and beating myself up for not taking advantage of Weekend Time.
I'm also so angry about the way our organisation is managed. I'm trying to speak up but my boss only says she has no influence over the things they're doing. They're constantly claiming to be soliciting our input but every single thing we ask for is turned down. They make decisions that have huge ramifications for our work environment and the actual work we do without any knowledge of how it's going to work out - when we can see immediately that it's going to be a fucking disaster. And they ask us to show solidarity with each other - i.e. to work harder than we can sustainably do - while they don't have to experience any of the consequences of their decisions (angry and rude people on the phone, angry and rude emails, over 30,000 cases needing to be handled by the ~200 people who do this work). And they're subtly blaming us for not getting any of our "real" work done while increasing the phone shift workload?! We're so tired and overworked that every colleague I've talked to brings up how hard it is to be kind and patient with people on the phone. Even the most people-loving ones. I can hear myself sounding curt and cold even as I say the agency name and my name (before the person calling has said a single word), and I've started pointing out to people when they're being unreasonable, rude etc. (I'm extremely nonconfrontational so that says a lot.)
(* I need to point out it's not a customer service job. It's a government agency that pays out a certain type of welfare benefits. My job title is something like "case officer" and when I was hired the job description was "you'll mainly process and decide applications for [benefit], perform checks and controls, and administrate payments. You'll also do a bit of customer service by phone and email to help the public navigate this system". Until very recently the customer service part was about a quarter of the work hours because we had one office that was a call center who didn't process applications etc. Most of the current problem was caused by the decision in 2018 to switch the call center over to doing our role because then we'd be more people processing applications! understaffing issue solved! yay! except the number of calls and emails to the agency hasn't changed, meaning everybody else now has to do more customer service and less of our "real" work. Somebody up high thought it only took three weeks to learn the job which is so completely laughable (the people who trained me said it takes 3-4 YEARS, and I'd say that for me as a very fast and independent learner it took at least a year and a half). Which means highly qualified people are spending time helping people fill out their applications while people who are new to processing applications do all the easy ones and skip the trickier cases. It's been at least four months since I last had a decent chunk of time where I could process "plain" applications rather than doing tasks around checks and controls (which is more complicated so the newbies haven't started learning that yet? I don't know their updated education plan) and I know people in my office haven't either and this week we had some time to ... and everybody's like "how ... did that work again? I know I used to immediately know how to handle xyz situations but now I have to spend ages reading the handbooks to remind myself. It's like I've never done this work before". Super efficient, right? It's A HUGE MESS and management simply won't acknowledge it, or admit that they were wrong (which, again, we could see from a mile off that this wasn't going to work!!!! and we said so!!!!). Ugh.)
I think I've just convinced myself to actually give my notice on January 31 as I was planning to do but had chickened out of. It's not ideal but not catastrophic. My notice period is two whole months so that still means I'll have to stay until March 31 which is AGES and I wish I'd quit back in October.
This week I was on the phone for 16 hours. I want to cry just typing that out. I'm an extreme introvert, and a normal week leaves me exhausted and craving only to putter around my flat for the entire weekend. I spend a couple of hours with a knitting group once or twice a month and talk to my parents nearly every day. Other than that I only ever speak with people at work - even during our times with a normal workload. This week I'm so overloaded I've ended phone calls with my parents after about 10 minutes; I've stayed up later and later because I can't let myself feel that I'm tired and going to sleep just makes the next day come faster; I browsed through the headlines of 5,000 job ads to pick out the 100-odd that sounded even remotely suitable to apply for and now have to summon the energy to write applications for as many of the 20 that are left after glancing through the rest of the text as I can.
I'm trying to get off the sofa to spend an hour or two finishing a sewing project, washing dishes and maybe baking a little. But I'm just so goddamn sad about everything and beating myself up for not taking advantage of Weekend Time.
I'm also so angry about the way our organisation is managed. I'm trying to speak up but my boss only says she has no influence over the things they're doing. They're constantly claiming to be soliciting our input but every single thing we ask for is turned down. They make decisions that have huge ramifications for our work environment and the actual work we do without any knowledge of how it's going to work out - when we can see immediately that it's going to be a fucking disaster. And they ask us to show solidarity with each other - i.e. to work harder than we can sustainably do - while they don't have to experience any of the consequences of their decisions (angry and rude people on the phone, angry and rude emails, over 30,000 cases needing to be handled by the ~200 people who do this work). And they're subtly blaming us for not getting any of our "real" work done while increasing the phone shift workload?! We're so tired and overworked that every colleague I've talked to brings up how hard it is to be kind and patient with people on the phone. Even the most people-loving ones. I can hear myself sounding curt and cold even as I say the agency name and my name (before the person calling has said a single word), and I've started pointing out to people when they're being unreasonable, rude etc. (I'm extremely nonconfrontational so that says a lot.)
(* I need to point out it's not a customer service job. It's a government agency that pays out a certain type of welfare benefits. My job title is something like "case officer" and when I was hired the job description was "you'll mainly process and decide applications for [benefit], perform checks and controls, and administrate payments. You'll also do a bit of customer service by phone and email to help the public navigate this system". Until very recently the customer service part was about a quarter of the work hours because we had one office that was a call center who didn't process applications etc. Most of the current problem was caused by the decision in 2018 to switch the call center over to doing our role because then we'd be more people processing applications! understaffing issue solved! yay! except the number of calls and emails to the agency hasn't changed, meaning everybody else now has to do more customer service and less of our "real" work. Somebody up high thought it only took three weeks to learn the job which is so completely laughable (the people who trained me said it takes 3-4 YEARS, and I'd say that for me as a very fast and independent learner it took at least a year and a half). Which means highly qualified people are spending time helping people fill out their applications while people who are new to processing applications do all the easy ones and skip the trickier cases. It's been at least four months since I last had a decent chunk of time where I could process "plain" applications rather than doing tasks around checks and controls (which is more complicated so the newbies haven't started learning that yet? I don't know their updated education plan) and I know people in my office haven't either and this week we had some time to ... and everybody's like "how ... did that work again? I know I used to immediately know how to handle xyz situations but now I have to spend ages reading the handbooks to remind myself. It's like I've never done this work before". Super efficient, right? It's A HUGE MESS and management simply won't acknowledge it, or admit that they were wrong (which, again, we could see from a mile off that this wasn't going to work!!!! and we said so!!!!). Ugh.)
I think I've just convinced myself to actually give my notice on January 31 as I was planning to do but had chickened out of. It's not ideal but not catastrophic. My notice period is two whole months so that still means I'll have to stay until March 31 which is AGES and I wish I'd quit back in October.
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