i was phone

if i had a penny for every time a neocon accused me of being ‘uncivil’ right before and after casually dropping a slur…

this was originally supposed to be only two paragraphs, but it uh… expanded. but i feel like screaming into the void, so here goes.

wow. great timing. i was recently constructively terminated after over a decade in a ‘flat hierarchy’ company under very similar circumstances.

thanks to financialisation and an upcoming IPO: they started aggressively bullshitifying our day-to-day to fit investor expectations; 1:1 copy-pasting procedures and org charts from places like Amazon and Google without interrogating why they work like that. more than 2/3 of our job was now time estimation and timekeeping, and all of the engineering and maintenance work i was previously doing was outsourced, and instead i was being very obviously tricked into doing feature work on things literally no customer wanted, but which we needed to have because ‘all the big players are doing it’. (this eventually included third-party ‘“AI”’ — to replace already existing solutions to already solved problems, just so we could say we were doing it as if customers can somehow verify that or fucking care — my ethical reservations to which were a contributing factor to my demise.) for the first time ever, my performance reviews were poor because i was out of my element and completely disinterested and disengaged.

this after they internally promoted a coworker to be our ‘lead’, while maintaining the ‘flat hierarchy’ claim (under the usual ‘we’re a family’ toxic rhetoric, but also ‘we don’t do hierarchies in this country’).

a coworker who consistently gave me glowing performance reviews, but then reported to the C-suite that i was a ‘culture issue’ and that i lacked clear communication — coming from a person who never checked Slack or email and who regularly misread messages or shut down conversations around process to protect their ego, to a person who had sent over 70% of Slack messages in our team channel and who wrote almost all of the documentation and was treated like the office mom/secretary. (i had male coworkers regularly pressure me into writing their emails for them…)

a coworker who went on to sabotage all of our existing procedures which i had primarily designed and implemented because it didn’t align with the vibes-based, top-down advice in the one-week managment seminars they were being sent on. granted, they didn’t need much help with that: getting anyone to improve anything at that company was like herding cats if you weren’t at least one step up on the org chart.

after years of burnout and postcovid malaise, months of medication shortages and being pestered about sixteen different things at once and only two of those things really being even remotely actionable, and once again being told i don’t communicate enough: i went off. i demanded proof of my communication problems, and had receipts to knock down every example they had off the top of their head — some of which had been resolved years ago, but they conveniently forgot that, and i had to show them receipts also of when we already talked about those incidents. i responded on the spot with receipts of every time their own incompetence led to downtime or failed projects. in the end, they made it clear that it wasn’t my communication that was poor, it was how i communicated — unemotional, clear, to-the-point — and (A) how i didn’t clean their shoes, (B) how i didn’t participate in the office plaguerat games, (C) how i didn’t work overtime, and (D) how i didn’t respond to every single message or request for ‘a quick call’ immediately no matter the time of day and with a resounding and positive ‘yes, sure’. i was even told i don’t use enough emoji. i repeated what i was seeing back to them, and their response was to sigh deeply, say it’s ‘not personal’, deny my observations by saying it’s ‘just’ about my ‘communication problems’, and then end the meeting early. surprisingly, no consequences for at least another quarter.

i had two more meltdowns after they got more and more aggressive, saying i should more actively solicit feedback on my work; work that was my sole domain. they started micromanaging and impulsively videocalling me to demand status reports. then issues started to pile up because task requirements were being filled incorrectly (by my manager), leading to incorrect work, which i was then blamed for for ‘not asking’ — as if i should always automatically assume that every task i’m given is incorrect and needs more clarification than ‘is everything you wrote here accurate?’ and confirming the usual bottom-up troubleshooting steps were done, or that i should just know precognitively what will go wrong in troubleshooting/implementation and what questions to ask before starting a task.

finally, the RTO order came, with a bonus PIP and a change of roles to put me physically next to my manager. because i love being hypersurveilled while trying to work. they refused my accommodations, telling me that i had ‘lied’ to them about my work, and that it was a ‘privilege’ that they would now revoke that i was allowed to work remote or skip unactionable, unnecessary meetings or have uninterrupted times of the day to focus. i also wouldn’t be allowed headphones or music, and i would have to log what i did every day down to 5 minute intervals with doctor’s notes for appointments, and my login, lunch, logout and appointment times would need to be preapproved (meaning: no more flex time to take care of myself, or my sick family member, who would now be left alone without care). my (now former) union said this is an ‘internal dispute’ and wouldn’t help me. this was illegal on several levels, but i already pay an extremely high ADHD tax and i was too tired and overwhelmed to deal with any of this, so i dropped the receipts of my manager’s fuckups to HR (which made the company more upset with me), along with my resignation.

i’m now effectively blacklisted in my industry in my area, because my current country operates almost entirely off nepotism hires, and word gets around. i want to switch careers, but to get work placement support, they want me to commit to going back, and i’ve told, kindly and not so kindly, ‘no’.

the thought of interviewing (again) makes me feel physically sick, and every fibre of my being fucking hates the lying and manipulative games you have to play to get a job. getting ghosted by 200+ companies only for the one responsive employer to ghost-reject you really sets off an emotional spiral. i hate having to upsell myself. i hate that i can’t answer ‘why do you want this job’ with ‘because i like to eat’.

i’m trying to get trauma and ADHD treatment, but i used one too many big words so the psychologist told me i’m ‘smart enough’ to ‘just handle it’. this set off another meltdown that put me out of commission for over a week, particularly because it reminded me of something my parents and teachers used to say to me all the time: ‘you’re so god damn smart, so why do you have to be so fucking stupid?’

something something i want to break an ablebodied neurotypical’s kneecaps and destroy capitalism. i don’t know how to end this comment.

i already have a pet theory:

• the sick children are sick because they’re subjected to secret medical trials.
• rescuing the children means rescuing the research which means secret new booster.
• bonus: the children will die either way.

now, the booster doesn’t need to be good. it would just be really funny if the immaterial benefit of saving the children turns out to be materially beneficial in an almost eviler way than forsaking the children for the antitank mines. (pls give fire resistance)

now, if the booster is bad, that would be thrice as funny: antitank mines forsook and children sacrificed, for shitty research that amounted to nothing really helpful.

this all could also explain how they’ve managed to survive so long.

my therapist: ‘well, this little maneuver’s gonna cost us 51 years’

1. threads that absolutely don’t interest me. this way, my feed becomes a list of new posts, or posts i’m (noncommittally) following for comments.
2. threads that make me upset. extension of above: not having to see or be reminded of things i’m actively dis-interested in. this is more for when i’m surfing All for new communities.

the main three solutions i have to #2 are: RSS; userscript; or blocking the OP. i already use RSS a lot, but RSS clients can be arcane to customise the way i want, and i don’t like following aggregators from my aggregator. i’m satisfied with the official web UI.

really looking forward to the post hiding and vote display changes

thanks for the heads up!

Without knowing more, at a guess that sounds like you might be on the far end of the arousal curve.

Sounds a lot like burnout, which can affect anybody.

yeah, that tracks. my current journey started because of more than half a decade of being in a constant state of burnout.

I would do recommend trying out the general advice for burnout management and see if that improves things for you

i have, and have been, for about three years now. it’s made the bad less bad, but it hasn’t made the good any more good (or stopped or slowed my semirapid decline).

what i already know is that i have autism and cPTSD. i’ve been in a constant state of stress for over a decade.

in my first journey: i was tentatively diagnosed with ADHD in another country, but i wasn’t granted autonomy yet, and the stigma and cost of ADHD treatment didn’t make it an option for my owners.

so, the second journey was of course court-ordered applied behavioural analysis and institutionalisation for suicidal depression. i’ve been on just about every single antidepressant and antipsychotic and been thru every CBT-derivative psychotherapy you could probably name. y’know: treating symptoms (chronic depression, ‘conduct disorder’) rather than causes (horrible environment, trauma, executive dysfunction). the consistent effect was that it made everything worse (and in some ways: permanently).

now, in my current country, the barrier is that my doctors are suspicious of how direct and articulate i am with what evaluations and treatment options i’m considering. they’re all either incompetent or their knolwedge is 40 years behind, and they’ve seemingly decided that i seem too introspective and too selfaware to possibly be feeling like shit. their prescription? join a book club and go back to work. and of course postcovid and burnout and shit sleep are making it hard to find the energy to argue with these people. so, that’s cool.

i understand being direct can make doctors get defensive, but i’ve tried the coy social engineering approach and it got me involuntarily hospitalised. *shrug*

anyway, thanks for the information and support.

question: does it mean anything if caffeine can have varied, random effects? sometimes it makes me jittery, to the point of anxiety like i’m being chased. other times it makes me blackout tired. there’s a spectrum here, and i rarely land in the ‘wakeup’ zone that most neurotypicals seem to be in it for. it doesn’t seem to matter what my energy level is beforehand.

also, i want to thank you so much for your post in the other thread and this one. i’ve been taking notes since i’m starting on my third journey for treatment.

mine came with a battery defect and no longer turns on. i used it a total of four times.

postcovid prevents me from going to the library to print the RMA and then to the post office to actually ship the fucking thing, and i have no one to help me get rid of it. so now it’s a paperweight.

she’s alluding to the fact that these characters — the ‘soyjack’ and ‘gigachad’ — are historically, and still actively are, alt-right charicatures. together with their friends, ‘tradwife’ and ‘doomer (girl)’: they represent misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist tropes.

this one’s for you peepaw r.i.p.

🛏💤

you mean the migration ‘crisis’ and collapse in ‘“living” standards’ which were brought on by US-EU neoliberalism driving down the standard of living in other parts of the world before coming home to roost?

there are certainly ways of reversing direction, but people in the core would sooner choose literal fascism before giving up their imperial lifestyle. they use the IMF to politically terraform ‘underdeveloped nations’ and export their own harms so they can say they’re ‘meeting climate goals’, and then complain about all the emissions and migrants coming from those countries which are ravaged to supply their hyperconsumption. the same migrants which predominantly staff their service, medical and technology sectors to prop up their precious treats and their oh-so superior ‘knowledge economies’.

voting for fascism is the individualistic choice which lets them keep their treats and means they don’t need to interact with their neighbours or advocate for real change. it’s easier to blame the victims of their actions than to cut the DARVO shit and accept responsibility.

at which point your profit becomes linked to the degree to which you provide the functionality

except when the commodity is a basic necessity and there’s no alternatives. ‘the market’ can’t really ‘vote with their wallet’ on the cost and quality of shelter, particularly when price fixing is rampant.

sidenote: ‘voting with your wallet’ implies people with more money than you should have more say in what’s ‘more valuable’, because the rich can always outbid you, and homo economicus is only a thought experiment. (see: foreign real estate investment, conspicuous consumption…)

whoops, i forgot i have lemmy.world blocked. i don’t see comments or posts from that instance.

still tho, i wasn’t getting the undiscovered 404 on dbzer0.

i don’t know about lemdroid. federation could be backlogged for aforementioned reasons.

the link you gave works fine for me in Firefox: clicking, dragging or pasting. the 404 likely indicates that lemdroid hasn’t discovered that community yet; probably because it’s still waiting to finish asking lemmy.world about it.

how do I interact with a community I cannot connect to?

are you using the website, or an app? i can see the community, but not the posts (presumably because they aren’t synced) (forgot i have lemmy.world blocked).

do you not see the community landing page at all? is there no ‘subscribe’ button? subscribing is the best way to trigger the sync job; i could try doing it for you, but i want to see if it’s possible for you to do it first.

if you’re the first person from your instance to interact with a remote community, it takes a moment for it to sync.

also keep in mind that lemmy.world is too fucking big, so they’re very slow to talk to.

i’m going to ignore your posting history and assume for a moment you aren’t a contrarian debate pervert. what exactly is the point you are trying to get across?

you agree we should move past animal cruelty, but because we have animal cruelty today, we still need to have animal cruelty today?

you agree that animal testing is fundamentally wrong, but because someone was unconsensually subjected to unethical experimentation, we need to keep the animal testing?

why do you feel the need to agree with people but then say ‘but that’s not how it works today’?

i see these types of comments in every comment section about societal problems. ‘i agree X needs to change to Y, but we don’t have Y today, sweaty. 💅’ like- what? are you all really just trolls, or do you really think you’re being insightful and helpful? because this isn’t what a discussion looks like. it’s dis-miss-ion.

think disallowing votes (down or both) from non-subscribers would defeat the point of the all feed, which to me is to display the most active/interesting posts on the Fediverse right now. You can’t have that if it is only community subscribers that vote.

isn’t this what ‘scaled’ sorting is / could be for?