Job Depression

Depression comes in several flavors for me, and it's a fairly comprehensive list. The types are very entwined; some of it is just my brain's chemical makeup, some is grief, some is situational-but-not-directly-grief, some is body-chemistry-but-not-brain-chemistry.

It's not a good mix.

Please don't suggest meds, meditation, weight loss, Vitamin D, melatonin, counseling, etc. We're doing these things, and doing them appropriately. They've helped a lot; I can now use the phrase "widowed mom of two," for instance, without curling up into a ball. People offer to help, and although those offers (especially from family) often make me feel like an incompetent-at-life-preadolescent, I do usually take them, especially if they directly benefit the kids. Swallowing my pride over and over is not helping with depression.

But these things don't actually help a lot with the current underlying issue, which is that I need a job.

I'm working a bit on a freelance basis; textbroker.com is terrific. I've tried delivery services, though there are some technical snafus going on with that. But these are not a living in and of themselves. I don't qualify for assistance (except the food bank, according to my research) because the death benefits I get for the girls means I make too much for that. And I wouldn't want to do that anyway; I want to work. I'm not disabled, not enough to be unable to work anyway, though if you read my blog regularly you probably know that temporary emotional disability due to a death in the family was certainly a big part of the problem at my last job.

In any case, this is not meant to be (yet another) post about that whole mess; suffice it to say that I'm better now, and as long as I don't have to deal with retail or call center hours and bottom-line-only-screw-the-worker employers or irrational-Veruca-Salt customers on the daily, I could work. I could work full time and be happy and productive in it. Because the daily rejection is adding to the depression in a big big way, and as well-meaning as it is, so are the offers of help.

So here goes.

Requirements: standard work week or telecommute ability, 25 to 40 hours a week, $16+ an hour, in writing or editing or communications or software testing or even plain old data entry.

Wish List: the above, plus a few dollars an hour, close by (to northeast of Seattle) or with commute subsidy, full benefits for me and Lizzy (Abby has her own through her dad), and writing about video games (at which I'm actually pretty good, thanks, Atari/Humongous).

And for the sake of all you hold holy, please no "business opportunities." I don't have the wherewithal, financially or mentally, to start my own business or participate in your MLM.

Emphasis Mine

Interesting bits of a work-personality report. Pretty accurate, as far as it goes. Any emphasis is mine, not theirs.

You have shown that you have strong emotional reactions to problems in the work place. This means you are probably a very genuine and sincere person who others enjoy being around. But it also means that major setbacks at work can take their toll on you. You are especially sensitive to interpersonal setbacks such as very unhappy customers and angry bosses. Because of this, you typically try to separate stresses in work and personal life, but may not succeed. It is important to you that you are able to rely on others to provide the direction and resources necessary for you to get your work done. You do not mind minor day-to-day changes, but are uneasy with larger changes, especially when you are not given sufficient reasons as to the reason for the changes. 

You work very well in groups because you are adaptable and cooperative. Beyond those attributes, you also enjoy the company of other people. More than most people, you have an interest in and the ability to work very effectively in group situations. You are very well suited to work in team-oriented environments. In most situations, you are dependable and cooperative. Usually people can trust you to do what you say you will do, but in certain situations you are willing to do something different. While you are dependable in most situations, sometimes you surprise people who were expecting something different from you.

Your work style indicates that you are motivated by other aspects of work than simply a drive to succeed. This internal motivation may simply be an appreciation for the work itself. It appears that results and achievements are not your primary reasons for coming to work. For this reason, you often must rely on other factors such as direction from supervisors, encouragement of co-workers and rewards such as pay to serve as your primary motivation at work. 

You do not seek out leadership roles. You do not see yourself as an assertive person and prefer to let others take the lead in most situations. Your interests are suited to team or individual roles more than to leadership roles. You choose to be less assertive than is sometimes necessary and you don't have a strong interest in influencing others unless it directly impacts your own results at work. Also, you can be unsure about whether you will actually succeed in influencing others so you may not persist as long as is necessary. You do not place much importance on being a leader, and you prefer not to lead unless it is in an instructional or teaching role. You are not motivated by power. Because of that, you do not look to take on leadership roles in most situations. 

You enjoy working in jobs that are not highly structured but with enough structure to ensure that the direction and available resources are sufficient to be successful. At the same time, you have a strong preference for working with others where your own outcomes depend on collective efforts of teams or groups. Your personal rewards and satisfaction at work comes primarily from a collaborative, interdependent work environment. Level of structure is not as important a consideration although you would not enjoy the extremes of very highly structured or completely unstructured settings. 

Your work style is  creative and innovative, although there are limits. Consistent with that, you are willing to work in new, uncharted areas where less is known as long as there are clear expectations about the objectives and limitations. You are well suited to this type of challenging, uncharted work that requires insight and creativity more than consistency and reliability. While you are willing to take some risks at work, there must be a significant amount of information about the degree of risk and the possible results before you would feel comfortable with the decision. 

Um, yes.

Let's Talk About Drugs

Yes. I know.

But I'm talking about specific drugs here, and I discovered something interesting. First a little background, as this is a newish, more work-safe area than my personal blog.

My husband Laston was diagnosed in October 2015 with colon cancer, metastasized to his liver. After several rounds of chemo, he didn't make it, and his death in August of 2016 threw us all for a loop. In addition to counseling, etc., my doctor wrote a prescription for Xanax, as needed, for "Primary Grief Reaction: Anxiety." This is also the diagnosis that covered me for FMLA (previously I had been covered as "spouse of patient").

This is not a whine about Big Bad Corporation and how they Done Me Wrong. They may have, but that is not the point of this post. I have plenty of other complaining writing about that whole sitch over at my personal blog.

The point of this post, and this blog in general, is to be more positive about such things.

And to get back to topic, when I got that Rx for Xanax, I wasn't taking it often. Maybe three or four pills a month until the numbness wore off, then five or six. A month. Not too bad. And I usually took a half dose, so that's what? Half a Xanax every three days on average?

Since I was let go from AT&T (November 29th, and today is January 5th), I have had half of one Xanax, and that one was Christmas Eve, after taking an hour and a half to slide on ice home from my aunt's house, which is on top of a fairly large hill. With three kids in a top-heavy mommy-mobile.

I have also had no migraines, not even ah... cyclically, and very few other issues. I'm even sleeping most nights without any aid but the Calm app's Sleep Stories.

Even with the stresses of joblessness and money during the holidays.

That says something important about work at that place affecting my health, does it not?

It's All About the Benjamins to Them

Hey all.

I've had it pointed out to me that my blog - Out of the Mouths of Gamers' Babes - has been, well, rather more profane and obscene (and whiny and just plain bitter) since a) my husband's death, b) the 2016 US presidential election, and c) February of 2017, when AT&T stopped feeling like family to me.

I am, therefore, publishing a new blog; this one has more to do with the job hunt and the state of my life in general, and less with the titular Gamers' Babes. Never fear, fans of Gamers' Babes, that one will still be updated as (not very) often as usual; this one is safe as an example of my writing style without being the whine-fest that one has occasionally become.

To that end, let's take the relevant bits of a fairly recent post on the original blog, and edit for whine, shall we? Also cheese, because what's whine without cheese? It can still be funny and engaging without being a constant rant. At least I think so.

Same Sh*t Different Day... I can only rant about the same damn stuff our government (or the upper echelons of my employer) are doing so much (or I get angrier)... there is the never-ending, all-consuming problem of Money, or more specifically, Work. I've said it before; I love my coworkers (including local management), I enjoy my job (though I have to say that this has been a very stressful autumn), and I even like working for AT&T. What I don't care for is the ridiculous way in which the upper management folks in charge of negotiating our new contract think of us. Do they really think we're so stupid we don't see what they're doing? They keep doing these booster kind of things for morale, but I wonder, if they took the money (these are pretty high production values) they put into the cheerleading videos and plowed it into the people who work for them instead, wouldn't that be more of a boost to morale than yet another t-shirt?
And I'm not talking about the off-shore and out-sourced folks either; I'm sure they deserve jobs too. But they're cheaper and less consistently trained (based on the number of mistakes they make that we fix every day), and therefore AT&T thinks... what? that the people who actually work for the company should forgo cost-of-living raises and decent healthcare/PTO (because I used up all my paid time off earlier this year because of severe depression due to my husband's death, that sinus infection - two and a half days of fever - went unpaid), and fix the outsourcers' mistakes for less? We've been working without a contract for ten months. And AT&T has already tried to make an end run around the negotiating team by speaking to the union members directly. While this may not be illegal, it is certainly not adhering to the spirit of the negotiations, and seems to be unethical to me.

First, the title. Yes, I starred out the i, but still? Not really SFW, no? Then the body of it. While I still think there are some valid points there, some of this post did get perilously close to just plain complaining. Not constructive criticism (just sarcastic), and certainly not in a professional tone. So let's try that again, shall we?

I think part of the reason that AT&T has disappointed me as an employer is that they seem to be taking a stand similar to that of the federal government, that the worker should show loyalty to the company, but the company does not have to reciprocate. (In the federal government this is shown by Congress cutting welfare and VA benefits and such, but voting in pay raises and the best medical benefits in the country for themselves, just as an example). From this (former) employee's perspective, they are spending available funds on things that do not fundamentally benefit the average employee, and therefore not the average employee's loyalty to the company.

Employees want sick time, a living wage, security in their jobs, and good medical benefits. The unionized ones want a decent contract now, not when you feel like it. If you put the employees first, they will want to take care of the customers and therefore the shareholders; this stuff trickles up, not down.. Carrots work better than sticks.

JennTheJobHunter