Integrity and Injustice

I spent most of the day today yelling at the day job about injustice. It’s unlikely to be effective but it was a good break from real work, and makes me seem engaged, something I often have to fake. It started with my boss reviewing our employee surveys, which are lower on my team than most others because of our security (read: cynical) focus. The results are aggregated by team but there are only 8 people in my team, and I know how I answered, so it’s easy to see where I’m the one giving the most negative answers. It makes me boss worry but I like it.

In any case, I was prompted to talk about our low evaluation of managements integrity, and talking about how people in power suck (you can tell because they decided power was a good idea) is one of my favorite hobbies, so I was well prepared. I got to talk live about how there’s obvious discrimination in our company, gave examples, cited the authority of other people who would tell a similar story. I know for a fact my 3rd level manager is a huge sexist – he talks about how he wants to raise his kids in India ¹He has also been placed in charge of our colonial operations in India. We’re spooling up teams there to provide lower-cost support for our legacy products, which were going to keep selling for years even though we will no longer be developing them. I’m all for hiring global talent, but I think we should integrate them into our development … Continue reading specifically so he can train them to be a sexist – and my old (female) boss complained about him on the same basis. I didn’t name him because it wouldn’t help, but I did convince my team that there was a problem, which is a step up from their previous state of being oblivious.

Later I wrote a 7-thesis letter describing some things that management could do to help demonstrate integrity, including collecting data about our existing discrimination and setting measurable goals to reduce it, taking people seriously when they talk about their discriminatory thinking, removing barriers to hiring, admitting that we use contract labor to exclude “support staff” from our benefits and pay, changing our training from compliance-based to outcomes-based, and of course the incongruity between what management says they value and what they actually act to value. It was good stuff. I’m sure I’ll be chastised for writing it down later.

I also reviewed our job postings – something relevant since my team is likely to move to a different organization – to point out that our boilerplate job requirements list a number of exclusionary and unnecessary conditions. Beside claiming, during our global work-from-home operations, that work must be done on-site and sitting, it also says that you must be able to read printed material and communicate on the phone, among other untrue claims. We just plaster this into every job description as a way to exclude people (or more cynically, as a way to eventually fire them “for cause”).

And I spent some time convincing a peer that they might want ADA protections for their long-standing work-from-home arrangement. It’s a great time to put forth the arguement that being on-site isn’t in any way a real job requirement. Like many people they are both afraid of appearing non-compliant and feel guilty about “not trying hard enough” to hide their disability. It’s hard enough that human brains often want to minimize our needs, and it really sucks when the world tells you that’s the right thing to do. I have not been impressed by the responsiveness, kindness or helpfulness of my “HR business partner” and I don’t really expect their support on anything. But they did get the paperwork filed and didn’t object to it and that’s 60% of the way to a favorable civil court outcome so I can make it work. It’s also good ammunition for my boyscout boss, who still believes in authority and is willing to wield it. My specialty is more in subverting authority than using it, but I’d be happy to give him a framed, embossed, high-cotton certificate of righteousness if it helps him do good work.

I have been exhausted the last week or so. I sleep normally and then for another 4 hours and then am still low enough energy that I could just close my eyes and comfortably hold still at any time until I go to bed again. Not sure if it’s the new meds or what but I’m getting sick of it. Makes it hard to get anything other than day job and sleeping done. It’s also not super compatible with the way Dog wants to be up until 2 AM.

Dog is doing okay again. He’s still got a fair amount of steroid twitch happening, and it can be a problem to make him lay down at night instead if barking at his empty bowl in the kitchen. And his food obsession makes it difficult for him to see us eat. But it’s getting better. He’s down to half doses of ‘roids, which is helping, and he’s been feeling well ebough to get back to normal levels of activity and a more regular weekly and daily routine. There’s still lots of huffing and whining but it’s approaching the range of his normal. I think with a couple weeks of diligence we can get him settled back to a lifestyle that is more compatible with our shared lives.

The quarantine theater is still coming along. We had to buy some equipment to make the couch compatible with living outdoors – it’s too much work for me and Shanda to get in and out regularly. But since no one can use our back couch (and since Dog is too twitchy to care) it might as well just live outside this summer. It makes the theater room loom really empty (and messy, and screws with the lighting and audio) but it’s nice to have out there. We did a full A/V test last weekend, which worked great. Today I added navigational lights. Hopefully tomorrow we can get the plastic divider up and that should make it ready for pictures, and I think also ready for visitors ²I still want to improve WiFi reception in the back yard, as I never wired the house for it. The playback computer has a wired connection even in the back yard but visitors would probably like better WiFi. That’s not a problem I have to solve for pictures though, and I can always fake it with a cellular bridge if I don’t come up with better … Continue reading.

Pre-screened the movie I want to show to L – Matilda (1996) – which was a good plan because it made Shanda ball. That’s sort of the goal: inducing a feeling about being a child with too much responsibility and not enough support. A feeling about being hurt by the people who are supposed to protect you, alternately ignored and abused, always coming in second to their fickle whims, and being told that it’s your fault. But getting some cries out before L shows up will make that day easier, and it was a path to let you actually see and feel some of the ways you were overburdened when you were 12 and had infants at home and anxious, dismissive, immature parents.

Talked with @BPS about art heists and crying sessions and our favorite witches. I think they’re doing a little better this week. I know they spent Sunday actually doing art instead of just being anxious and stressed like they have been. Learned some things about their sister – about the life they don’t often share in Amnesia Diaries – which feels dangerously close to actually being friends. I’m sure it will pass.

I’ve been on the queue for more than a week and I’m super ready to be done. I’ve processed almost 20 cases in the past 9 days, which is like 85% of my quarterly goal, and I’ve still got 3 days to go. I’ve offloaded or closed more than half of those but I’ve still for 8 or 9 waiting for me, and I haven’t had any cycles this week to advance them. Here’s hoping I can avoid collecting any more before Friday. And that I can do literally nothing next week except finish whatever is left of these and nap.

Therapy last week went better than I expected. My therapist actually did the work ahead of time – maybe consulted with their therapist – and could see the misunderstanding that started all this. So it took three weeks but it did work out ³By “work out” I mean we agreed on what was happening. The actual resolution included my therapist saying that treating me was challenging because I was so perceptive and that they didn’t really have a plan to deal with it. Which is not great news – I would prefer to not always be challenging to people – but it’s better than before when … Continue reading. We also made one inch of progress on the way professionals who get overwhelmed by or refuse to see oppression are often quite harmful, which has been difficult for them to grasp, and that might allow for new opportunities in the future. I of course smashed all that goodwill by immediately writing an email that will make them speak carefully to me about suicide this week. I hate when people imagine they are being careful with me, because I can smell it with my eyes closed and it tastes like lies. But I’m trying to get them prepared to actually help me when I need it, and it’s a better risk to take now than in a crisis.

Beyond that we talked about my GoFundMe feels, which I can see more clearly now. I need to apply some anger to the situation, to protect me from all the rich people charity bullshit that will get on me while it happens. But that has felt unsustainable to me, as a way to interact with people at work, because I do not want to Music Man away after the scam. I’ll need to stew in it and maybe repeat it (I sort of want to repeat it, so I can redistribute some rich people money every few months), so I need something I can keep up without a lot of resentment. There is a path in there, to summon the anger without lashing it on to my task, but it’s not the one I usually take.

I’m not sure what this week’s topic is ⁴I have written almost this same sentence dozens of times. It always means “this paragraph is where I try to work out this week’s topic”, but somehow it always induces a bit of panic in Shanda about how i “don’t know”. I know you’re worried about knowing the answer, but I’m really only interested in the questions. I wish me not … Continue reading, once we get past the suicide reassurances. Eventually there’s more food issues, though that isn’t very present in me this week. Maybe some more on the way my perceptiveness of others emotions and the high cost I associate with ignoring harms I can’t stop seeing make social work interactions exhausting. I poked at that before but my therapist was caught up in a framework of social anxiety that doesn’t apply to me, so it didn’t really go. I might be able to reframe it now into something we could discuss in terms that aren’t about my social self image.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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