Bad Luck Continues (Copy)
Work never stopped for me.
In classic me fashion, I’ve been mad about it for an entire year, while also feeling begrudgingly grateful that I didn’t lose my job during a goddamn pandemic. I was able to work from home (I gave my boss no choice, I simply said “I’m working from home, I have it all set up already, didn’t need your input, email me pictures of anything important and mail me everything that isn’t time sensitive ok byeeeee!” and never returned to the office again [which ended up being my smartest decision yet, since everyone in that household got Covid just before Halloween and would definitely have infected me YAYY]), and we were able to get most of our usual purchases delivered, so the few times I actually left the house in my car was to go to the vet’s because, well, cats.
The phrase I’ve heard recently is “we’re not working from home, we’re sleeping at work,” and hooo boy, that gets right to the heart of it, doesn’t it? Until December, I was waking up at 6am, jumping on to work by 6:30am, taking a little break for breakfast, a little break for lunch, then jumping back on after dinner if I saw that something else needed to be done. In case you don’t recognize this as a problem, let me be clear: THIS IS A PROBLEM. More so because I realized that boss, who is the boss and takes home multiple times the amount of my salary, isn’t even keeping these hours. Then, he got Covid and I had to step up and do most of his work too, and sometime around Christmas I decided that this was an unsustainable situation. I believe the exact thing I said to myself was, “What the fuck am I doing?” then rearranged my daily schedule so I wouldn’t get burned out. Rather, I wouldn’t get more burned out than I was already, and possibly I could reverse the harm it was doing.
So, not only did work never stop for me in 2020, but I actually worked longer hours than I ever have before, even with zero supervision (helloooo, nerd!), and on top of that, I had to experience the entirety of social media having so much “extra” time that, like, bread flour was out of stock from everybody baking all the time??? Did that really happen? Like, humans, who were also laying low because of pandemic, took up hobbies like embroidery and peloton? Am I saying that right? Where in the fuck did they get those extra hours? People coming out of the Quarantimes now with six-pack abs and a second or third language and a hope chest full of embroidered linens. I’m coming out with an exploded electrical box, two dead relatives, a dead cat, two birthdays in quarantine, and the same crushing amount of student debt I had when this all started.
A lot of people had it worse than I did, and that’s why, despite my bitching about wanting “free time” to do projects or hobbies or whatnot, I feel incredibly lucky to even be alive at this point. But I’m a complex person and can feel both lucky and miffed at the same time. Second dose of the vaccine in a little more than a week, and maybe I can get on a plane this summer for the first break from work in a year and a half. I think I’ve earned it. I think we’ve all earned it.