Unemployed Again

I'd been struggling with the changed nature of my job for quite some time. Mostly since the original colleague I was hired to help and practically the entire Sales team left. My new colleague wasn't properly briefed on what I was hired to do, and even after a year of working together, he still didn't quite seem to understand what I could and couldn't do. Add to that a new Sales team working under an actual bossy boss who thinks he's above the requirements laid out by our department, my job stopped being what I was hired for and started being a source of stress and frustration instead.

I was originally hired to make shapefiles and check satellite imagery for poorly placed GPS points. This is something that literally anyone with a reasonable attention to detail could do. I didn't have any problems with this once I learnt how to do it. I was more than happy to do it and it was absolutely worth the €18/h I was getting to do it. But then came the request to take over running the code that used the shapefiles to produce the GPS points.

This actually wasn't that terrible to begin with because all I had to do was take something I knew would work because I made it it, and run it through the code that only required me to hit Shift + Enter a few times. There was the ocassional issue I'd have to get my colleagues to help me work through, but it was simple and straightforward enough. But then the code started getting more complicated and the process was changed.

My new colleague decided that the client should be providing the shapefiles, which in theory was a good idea because clients had been sending some really ridiculous images (low-res, overly complicated, unlabelled, angled photos of computer screens instead of screenshots, etc) I had to work with to draw the shapefiles. But the clients started sending some equally as ridiculous shapefiles, causing me to have to spend just as much time fixing them as I would have drawing them myself.

Then, the bossy boss from Sales started sending very unique requests that required specific code or other tools I didn't have access to so I had to keep sending those requests back to my colleague. This defeated the entire purpose of having me there to run the code, because I wasn't bloody well able to run the code. It got to the point where maybe 3 of 10 requests were actually ones I could process without assistance.

In February, I gathered up my nuts and sent an email to my colleague and boss asking whether my assistance was even necessary at this point. I wasn't really doing any real work most of the time, and the hours I did work were mostly trying to figure out how to do something without bothering my colleague before eventually just having to give up and send it to him anyway.

I thought the email had been a success because my colleague then organised a training session for the Sales team and I to get on the same page about how requests should be made and providing me with the tools to do everything. But that meeting ended up just being a platform for the Sales bossy boss to tell him what he should do to improve the code without him having to make any changes to what he was already doing.

My colleague did take some of what he said on board though and wrote some new code to try and manage everything, but that's exactly when they lost me because that new code required knowledge from me that I simply do not have so I was spending most of my time trying to figure things out and sending emails saying I couldn't figure it out, rather than just doing what I was hired to do: reduce the workload of my colleague.

After one particularly irritating email that made it clear that the gap between what my colleague thought I knew and what I actually know about the programs and code I was working with was quite large, I realised that it wasn't going to work out for me. I was going to be stuck in a constant loop of time wasting. There was just no point to it anymore and I was tired of trying only to end up stressed out and frustrated.

So I quit.

My zero-hour contract says that I only have to give 4 days notice, so I'm going to try and complete the request that caused me to finally give up and then likely pretend to work on any requests that may come in before Wednesday next week before sending them back to my colleague anyway, like I've already been doing. But then after that, I'm back to being a proper unemployed bum again.

I was only earning around €300 a month, so it's not like quitting will make a huge difference to the bank account, but it still sucks to give up on this as a disabled person who was lucky to even have a job and be able to contribute at least a little financially. Unfortunately, my mental health was legitimately suffering from simply not being able to actually do my damn job, and that shit can roll over into physical health issues as well. It just isn't worth the €300.

• Overall Mood: relieved
• Song of the Day: Alice in Chains - Man in the Box
• What I Ate: Mexicano riblet
• Weather: Bright and sunny, but chilly
• Outfit: Sumo Cyco monsters hoodie, black & white striped tee, black jeggings
• Grateful For: That I'm in the privileged position to not be losing a lot by quitting my job

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