askchapo

Continuing to be tired of the job hunt

This year has been yet another pile of dog shit. Our finances are on a knifes edge and if I can't get full time work we will have to move in with in-laws. Thank god we have that option, but living with my MAGA in-laws isn't the most ideal...

However, I am currently training and getting certs to be in the water industry - hoping to be a wastewater plant operator but I'll take whatever I can get, wouldn't even mind just being a meter reader or utility worker to start. It feels like a good stable long term career path if I can get my foot in the door. Just taking classes and being with other people in a community college setting has been great for my mental health

Happy to hear tour went well. Stoked that the universe aligned for you to come back to a job that doesn’t sound entirely soul sucking. Sorry to hear about all the flooding tho, but glad there is a resolution finally.

As for me, I found out my partner has Lupus…

After years of joint pain and fatigue with no real explanation besides early RA with no real indicators, we finally got a positive ANA test and did a second round of tests to confirm. I’m still processing it right now, but the initial reaction is dread followed by a bit of relief that we know what is happening and have a path forward. Then I go right back to dread because the treatment is immunosuppressants which in this society means we need to become bigger hermits than we already are.

It’s depressing as fuck, but there is a glimmer of light in the tunnel. I won’t say at the end of the tunnel because I don’t foresee an end to a chronic illness with no cure. Alas, we have a path forward and hopes of something that will alleviate/lessen symptoms and enable a better quality of life in our day to day.

2025 can suck my ass tho.

Today marks the 3 month anniversary of me actually going to the gym six days a week and making an effort to actually be in shape instead of just really good at punching

My legs are tired, I'm sweaty as fuck and I have never felt better

Rather warm. It is laundry day so my jeans are in the wash, leaving me with wool pants in 80 degree (burger) weather.

my partner filed for divorce. i'm still jobless, now I'm couch surfin'. anxiety is... down, surprisingly. i think maybe i was in an unhealthy relationship, i think maybe i knew this was coming, and i'm extremely lucky for the people around me who think better of me than i do... giving me leave to shed some nasty brainworms i got whilst co-depend'n.

Congrats on the tour and the job!

Personally I'm hitting that mid 30s realization that I don't really have many friends anymore and the ones I do have I'm not super close with entirely by my own actions/inactions. I'm not torn up about it, it's just something I need to work on as a person I guess.

Terrible. Trump has started his persecute trans people focus, seasonal depression is kicking in, some snitchass neighbor complained about our lilacs bush so now the city is making us cut it way back in summer (technically), which is the wrong time to cut it, and I got all excited to play Hollow Knight only to find out it sucks so I don't even have good escapism to run to rn.

Also Israel still exists. I had a dream last night I was in Gaza getting shot at by the IDF and woke up mad.

So bad honestly. My cat had surgery Tuesday and did fine. And then Thursday decided she was gonna stop eating. She's doing well now but just still refuses to eat. If cats don't eat for 36-48 hours they basically die from liver failure and we're past that 36 hours now. At the vet waiting but just so fucking over this shit. Trying to do right by her and now the surgery is killing her. In absolute shambles right now

I had two job interviews and did great at both of them! I really think I should have a job in the next few days

Spring has sprung where I live after a wet, cold winter, at the exact moment I have two weeks off work. My mental health has consequently skyrocketed lol. That’s really all it takes in a lot of ways. Went on a 4 hour hike the other day, sat in some pleasantly cool grottos:

Been very stressed. Lotta life stuff going on, plus my job and goals take a lot of work to keep up with. Made a big ol batch of refried beans all the way from dried pintos, though, so I have a ton of bean burritos to make! Very lovely comfort food for me, plus I have Silksong and my partner. Good weekend!

Been better, but been way worse

I'm getting interviews finally (although one of them is an in-person which i have to take a short flight but I guess I can make that a little trip on top of the interview) which I am a bit more happy than like last couple of months which just sucked.

My partner broke up with me without warning or reason which sucks. Other than that I'm thinking I might get my BJJ black belt here in a couple months which is really really exciting. You take the good with the bad

I’m quite tall and have recently realized how bad my posture is, especially after a seizure early this year. I really need to find ways to improve it.

Got groceries today, marked down 4 udon noddle packets but got lucky and got six instead which is p. cool so now I have lunches for the weekend and week. I'm okay otherwise I suppose.

things were alright mostly, but the figure head of the relatively large org i work for decided arbitrarily that we're all returning to office in 90 days. some insane number of us were hired as full remote after 2020 (imagine +75%), because there was a lot of turnover and allowing full remote was seen as a way to save money, attract talent to fill vacancies, and distribute jobs more equitably around the state. they had developed and rolled out a pretty comprehensive telework infrastructure allowing people to work pretty far away from the office building. we would still have periodic in-person gatherings, and they were fun because it was novel to see everybody. the office building, which is ancient and always fucked up, has never been able support the number of employees so it had unassigned work stations in these lame open floor/distracting office setups. my personal situation only rises to the level of "extremely annoying" because i live very close, but of course i was all set up remotely with my own permanent workspace, comfortable chair, and protected from the distractions of an old, substandard building pretending to be a modern office.

a whole shitload of my organizational colleagues are absolutely fucked by this decree, because they accepted the 5+ years of "we have no intention of returning to office" that had been issued by leadership, because it was a win for everyone. many moved over an hour away to be closer to family or sidestep the cost of living of the home office city, some live several hours away. i work with a lot of cool people who use their heads and their hearts to find creative ways to help people, and they are now all getting the screws put to them.

no employee i have heard from wants this, the union is sounding the fight-back alarm and we're having multiple meetings organizing ways to fight it collectively and legally, but we get these shitty emails from leadership pretending to receive feedback implying "many" are excited by this return. fucking NOBODY wants this. like people 2-3 tiers above me in management are all shell-shocked at suddenly having to be a pain-sponge/buffer for a new policy they aren't allowed to openly shit on, but they all hate it and, according to rumor, are actively looking for the door. i mean, just operationalizing a solution to the lack of space for people is a logistical nightmare, and it wouldn't surprise me if some people left just because that problem was dumped on them. even if you paid me a million dollars to come up with a solution and i wanted to come up with the solution, i really don't see how they're going to do it. there just isn't enough room, even if they gutted the building, added floors, and put us all in tiny cubicles, the math just doesn't work. it's going to be a catastrophe, a massive loss of institutional knowledge, which is a bummer because if you can't tell, this is public sector helping people type of work, so the end result is a significant degrading of public services, especially for the underserved. so, when it has this inevitably crash-and-burn result, it plays into the hands of the worst people.

its making me anxious because this job and the culture was pretty solid. it took a significant amount of disrupting my situation to get, but this move reads like a surprisingly cynical layoff play to sidestep the bargaining contract and broader morale is in the absolute shitter now. all kinds of cool colleagues are looking for the door, everyone is tense and anxious as hell because this shit is totally out of left field. and for many people, it's just not going to be feasible and they're going to leave. i keep having to spend my free time attending union meetings, which i appreciate exist and if we have any shot of killing this, the union is it... but still, like my workday is already enough. having to fight extra hard just to keep what we've had sucks, and i can't imagine the vibe of in-person gatherings is going to be a positive thing anymore. it's gonna be some mando-fun circle jerk of people sitting in chairs being like, "i'm just here because they told me to."

it just blows. the difference in the vibe of the place has altered drastically since early august. nobody has the spare bandwidth or executive function to find cool ways to help people right now, because it's like they flipped a switch that tripled everybody's burnout rate.

again, my personal situation is relatively fine, as i got lucky as hell geographically. it's that so many great and caring people are suddenly getting the screws put to them. it's infuriating. and we're fighting it, but it's tiring.

Honestly doing pretty great for someone that almost died like 2 months ago. Nice try, world.

Pretty good actually, on a small road trip and currently getting ready for sleep in a small log cabin in a camping site with this view.

Reinstalled new vegas, believe it or not I have never played this game with mods (I don't do mods in general tbh, unless it's something small like tweaking the graphics a little), please suggest mods

Finally out of the tech field, and working thru Americorps to help with a local anti-homelessness organization. Im gonna be doing back end stuff interfacing with other local orgs, but its still a job im happy to have and can be personally proud of rather than working with stupid bullshit SAAS stuff.

If you don't mind me asking, what was the nature of your old tech job, and why did you leave? I'm in the middle of getting out of the niche area of tech I used to work in (firmware) and looking into other areas, but want to know what to watch out for.

Work is too repetitive (made that way by management decision) and I'd like to quit in the next 6 months, but I'm only about a third of the way to the savings target, and there's no guarantee of what the job market will look like at the beginning of next year. I kinda just want to brew kombucha and sell it at the farmers market, but I need a clean place to work out of for that.

In addition to dealing with my own lack of initiative, I've ended up with the task of shepherding yet another person away from alcoholism, this time a roommate. The apartment has been in a dirtiness spiral for months. One step at a time...