I’ve spent a year going into the office to sit at a desk, stare into the middle distance, and then do exactly what I would have done from the front room, or the sofa, or the bed, or the shed, or Gulf Shores, or Nashville, or Prague – because I did. And nothing ever slipped, nothing ever failed for lack of my physical presence. In fact, since returning to the office? Half the support staff has been laid off and incompetent three-ring-binder phone jockeys have been given the keys to the kingdom. I’m still waiting for a review, still waiting for anything but the same across the board raise as everyone else, waiting for promotion, waiting for acknowledgement that we do a good job, waiting for acknowledgement that we even do a job, waiting for the axe to finally come for the oldest system administrator because why do we need an administrator for someone else’s system.
I just about survived the first year of Trump 1 because that was all I had to deal with. There was no work misery as such, or at least no more than the traditional frustrations. Nothing like the second-class citizenship that came from being outsourced. I could just about handle that. And then when we were outsourced, we got a break from a worldwide pandemic and then a ghost of hope that the world would stop getting actively worse, so work was the only real issue. But then the seesaw broke. Now look, both sides are on the bottom.
The attempts to punch out and get some separation from reality aren’t going too well, if the stress dreams are anything to go by. When you dream that the most incompetent part of your org has set fire to your Corvette because they were proactively trying to fix something they imagined necessary, it’s to a point you can’t even rely on going to bed as refuge.
If 2026 is anything like 2025, bugger all, I might take the whole Christmas fortnight off and see if we can decamp to Santa Cruz or something. This is unsustainable.
And that is my Grievance, Aired. Now give me a ball bat for these Feats of Strength.