I'm earning pennies. My cousin allowed me to stay at her place for free, and for that, I'm grateful. But even beyond that, when I made the calculations, I realized I cannot eat well thrice a day, pay my share of electricity, and pay for my bike's fuel expenses...all at once. Forget emergency expenses, including medicines. Even using menstrual cups and budgeting my food to the minimum doesn't seem to make this better. I'm fucking terrified.

Finally I’m legitimately happy once again!

After working with this toxic company for the past year and a half I can finally say I’m leaving for a much better job! My old job I’ve been heavily overworked, underpaid, and simply blatantly taken advantage of (see my old posts).

I found a new job and accepted their offer that pays $15,000 more base pay, full health benefits (previous job didn’t give benefits), and FOUR weeks of PTO (I only had one week at my old job).

I put in my two weeks yesterday. While I was hopeful my boss would have been reasonable and understanding, unsurprisingly he freaked out on me and went into super guilt trip mode. He basically got legitimately angry at me because apparently two weeks is unacceptable and not enough time to find a replacement (we’re a tiny team and I’m the only one who knows how to run most of our machines among other things).

He did the usual guilt tripping things of begging me to stay until the end of the year and whatnot. Not once did he offer any form of increased compensation.

The part that bugged me was he literally said “Well Xstell, if you are leaving then that means nobody else cares and I should just fire every one else and shut the company down”. 😑😑😑 My only response to that was that I can just leave today if you want me to…

Then he went on about I should have gave him advanced notice so he could have hired and trained a replacement to which I responded “I have been asking for another guy to help me for months” (which is true as I’ve been overloaded). Then he nearly yelled at me “You know we can’t afford another guy right now so I don’t know why you ever would have asked to get more help.”

If that’s not a textbook contradiction then I don’t know what is…

He stormed off and slammed the door after that. Then came back a few minutes later with more guilt tripping before he stormed off again.

He texted me later in a more calm demeanor but haven’t seen him face to face since. Nothing he say will ever convince me that he’s not a total asshole.

The only thing I’m gonna miss at my old job is my coworkers. We were a small team and we all got along great. Just unfortunate the boss/owner doesn’t realize the harm he’s done.

Isn’t that why you’re having me do this two weeks in advance in the first place? So YOU can do the schedule?

We went to a friends house last night for some dinner, kids were decorating Halloween costumes, just bullshitting. Wages came up and I just said that to me it doesn’t matter what a person is doing for work, that even if they’re working a minimum wage job, if they’re doing this “required” 40 hour weeks they deserve to at least make a wage that covers the cost of living. It should be high enough to cover rent, food, and everything else we consider basic. I could tell that annoyed him an a minute later he excused himself for a little bit.

I’m really starting to think less of people who hold opinions like these. To me it’s just a sign you are a shitty person. It sucks though cause I’m realizing a lot of people feel this way.

Saw this topic a few times and wanted to share my thoughts.

Self checkout can increase accessibility. People who have social anxiety, agoraphobia, panic disorder, autism, etc benefit from having the option to avoid forced social interactions. Stores often have their self checkouts arranged in a more open layout so people in wheelchairs, crutches, and other medical equipment may have more space to maneuver around than in the more narrow isles of cashiers.

It also has an element of privacy. A young girl buying her first tampons or pads, an elderly man needing to buy adult diapers, a young woman buying condoms, a non-binary person buying personal hygiene and clothing items that make them feel more comfortable with themselves, a Trans woman buying makeup, a single college student buying pregnancy tests, on and on. Self checkout means being a bit more free and comfortable to buy what they want or need without as much fear and anxiety of getting judged, verbally abused, drawing shitty comments, etc.

Some argue that it's wage theft or it's an example of losing jobs to automation. Yet I still see plenty of cashiers in stores with self checkout. Generally speaking (at least from my personal experience), self checkout has an item limit of around 15 items. Any more than that means you have to go to the cashier lines. There's pros and cons to both but I don't think having both is entirely a bad thing.

Let me preface that I love my actual work, it’s pretty darn close to my dream job. Quitting will never be an option, nor will I go to HR because it’s so easy.

I report to a guy named Will who has likely never held any type of supervisory position because he sucks at it. God, do I have stories.

Will does not respond to questions and oftentimes he has to correct something he has told the team because he was wrong. He only meets with the whole team and does not give any type of formal feedback. Ever.

He also shows favoritism to certain coworkers. They are assigned the best shifts and often leave work for the rest of us. Almost half the team does almost no work at all (no exaggeration that they do 5% of what the rest of us do), but Will doesn’t care because the rest carry the team.

I have raised this concern with him and he told me he is monitoring production and will talk to the slackers. Nothing happens.

I am the most productive on the team. This is important.

Last week, I got fed up and slowed my production way down in order to flunk the whole team because THAT is how Will is measured in his performance.

At the same time, Will fucked up the schedule because he was late making it up as usual and posted it 8 hours prior to the start of the week.

I immediately noticed he failed to schedule coverage in one key area where I normally work. It has a lot of technological problems like the network kicks you out every 30 minutes and it tries to reset your password.

Now if I said anything, it would fall on my shift to do ALL of it while carrying two slackers. And not mentioning it would help flunk the team.

Will came in bright and early after his trip to the beach to discover that management was pissed off because nothing was done in that area for three days due to his fuck up.

He confronted me why my production was down and I said I did everything assigned to me and I was not scheduled to work that area. He got angry and asked me why I didn’t tell him it was missing from the schedule? I said that I thought Tony or Jared (notorious slacker buddies of his) would have told him on the earlier shift. Didn’t they notice they weren’t assigned there? Will couldn’t say shit because they don’t work in that area even when assigned so they didn’t notice. I doubt they look at the schedule. That’s what I have been complaining about for months.

Once again, I brought up people not working and that I care about my job. He gave me more bullshit about how he would talk to the slackers but nothing changed.

So Will posted the schedule for this week and simply copied last week’s schedule with the same error because he is a fucking idiot. And he never corrected last week’s fuckup so there will be double the work come Monday — and I took PTO.

I will try to post an update next week.

To those of you who experience negative repercussions from taking FMLA, stay persistent.

I was fired while taking FMLA, and denied unemployment this past March. The whole situation was a mess, and a nightmare to my health.

I realized that my job wasn’t following FMLA laws after my termination, so I filed a complaint with the Department of Labor.

It took a few months for them to follow up, but it was worth the wait.

Turns out, my supervisor wrote in a message to HR, “I am firing this employee due to his excessive FMLA time off.”

They committed multiple violations, but this was this was their silver bullet.

It was a large corporation with thousands of employees.

I am happy to say because of my case, the company will be training all of their managers on FMLA law. Hopefully they will become more knowledgeable, and not put anyone else in a similar situation.

It’s crazy to think that they were just firing employees for taking FMLA, and trying to make me believe it was my fault.

Then to deny me unemployment? So inhumane. They’re a multibillion dollar corporation!

Well, I cannot believe that I won, and will be receiving a settlement.

Anyway, if you believe you’ve been discriminated or you’re rights violated, stand up for yourself! A ton of people in my life told me to let this all go, and I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.