Work woes

Work has been getting me down a lot lately. Earlier in the year we got two new websites dumped in our laps, after the entire local staff that used to manage them until then was laid off. Our department manager, who'd been with the company for twenty years or so and was the heart and soul at the core of everything we did, also decided to leave the business. (Incidentally, that's the same guy whose departure I really dreaded in this post from over a year ago. And then it really did happen.)

Since then our routine has seemingly turned into a constant stream of alternately being chided for not having enough sales on the three websites we're managing simultaneously (when a year ago we were a bigger team and only had one to look after) and being told that no, we cannot have any more resources or do more discounts or basically anything else that might actually help us achieve the growth they keep asking for.

In-between I get emails from complete strangers working in other countries that are apparently connected to my work in mysterious ways now and who want me to do things for them. It's just dispiriting.

I know that every workplace has its ups and downs, but at the moment I find it difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. When I started at the company and it was still more or less a start-up, things were rough sometimes because there was effectively no HR department and some people were basically shitty in ways that no proper business should ever allow, but there was simply nobody to tell them off for it. When we started to get a bit more corporate we got into what I might now call the goldilocks zone, with rules reining in people's worst excesses, but at the same time we were still pretty small and scrappy and largely able to make our own decisions. However, at this point the business I joined over a decade ago feels like it has slowly been dissolving in corporate acid over the past two years, as more and more roles have been cut and power taken away from us as everything about our website is being integrated into being just another line on an Excel sheet managed by someone in corporate headquarters abroad.

I've started to look at the occasional job ad, but these only serve to remind me that the pay and perks in my current job are still very good, and that I have a great set of colleagues (the ones that are left anyway). I may want to get away from this corporate hellscape, but am I really willing to risk everything else for it? Especially in this climate?

I just don't know how much longer I can stand the current situation either, assuming that things don't improve in some way. When people ask me about work, I don't even want to talk about it anymore, and during work hours, I notice my own constant annoyance with the things I'm being asked to do for (what I often feel are) bullshit reasons. Some days I find myself daydreaming that they'll just cut our entire department in another reorg, once again divvying up what remains of our responsibilities among people working in other countries. At least that would take that final bit of decision-making out of my hands.

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