Having thought over the interview from last week more, the chances of me accepting if offered are quite slim. The company has just been acquired, so it was announced a few days before the interview. I asked them about this and they said it was business as usual, but… that department could disappear very quickly, so it’s hard to justify at the moment, particularly as the job isn’t very appealing except as an alternative to my current workplace.
The weekend was mostly good. I went to a guitar shop with someone from work yesterday afternoon, which was fun. It’s unusual for me to do things with people outside of work because I get a lot of social anxiety, but I found it quite easy to do this for whatever reason. I’ve been in the market for a new guitar for a while anyway and I needed to go and try a few so it made sense. I crossed off a couple of possibilities, one of which I was really disappointed about – the Ibanez JEM 77p BFP. It looks beautiful, but it just doesn’t feel like a £1300 guitar.
Once again though, I am expecting THE chat with HR lady to happen this week. The reason I expect it to happen imminently is that my counsellor texted me to tell me that she’d informed HR lady that I’d use the last session of paid counselling, and HR lady replied to say she would have to discuss whether they wish to proceed further. I’d like to think that might involve me, but who knows.
I don’t know how to approach any meeting with her anymore and I’m pretty stressed about it at the moment. I don’t feel supported by the company at all. I am not really greatly interested in them continuing to pay for counselling, to be honest. It seems to me that they pay for a few sessions of counselling and they think that’s their part done. I voiced this all to my counsellor at the last session, and she agreed. She summarised it as saying that the counselling is very separate to what’s happening at work and she can’t fix Becky. You can’t outsource the problem of fixing a toxic work environment – you can outsource the problem of repairing the damage it’s done, but you also need to address the source of the problem internally. By offering me counselling and nothing else, it implies my employer thinks I am the problem.
I am going to try to express that I don’t feel the situation has improved much, and, importantly, I don’t see any reason to believe it will, but ideally, I need to do that without making an enemy of HR lady. I am not sure how to do this currently, because she’s only added to the problem by refusing and cancelling meetings. I mean, I’d be totally justified in putting in a formal complaint against her, but I don’t think that would be tactically sound. I don’t think she’s malicious (unlike Becky), I think she’s just incompetent. This brings complete unpredictability.
Rambles 