Work

So it turns out that my company has funded another five counselling sessions.

I decided on Friday afternoon that come Monday morning I’d just hand in my notice and be done with the ridiculous situation, but over the weekend I softened a bit and decided to just write an email to HR lady expressing my ‘surprise’ at support being withdrawn without discussion.

So we had a meeting. HR explained that The Boss had just decided to withdraw funding and that was that. Reasons stated were brexit, currency devaluation, and the fact we have a lot of costs in external currencies. I wasn’t very impressed with this, as you can imagine.

But HR lady and I had a long chat about mental health and how I was doing (answer: not great). She is actually quite good at this stuff; she has recently completed a qualification in mental health and has struggled with it herself – she told me she had been on anti-depressants for a few years because she was suicidal. She offered to go back to The Boss and ask again.

Which she did. And then five more sessions opened up.

So on the one hand, I’m grateful for that. On the other, it just seems ridiculous to me that The Boss caused resentment over such a trivial amount of money. The company lost far more than £150 between my time, HR lady’s time, and The Boss’s time just discussing the matter. The brexit argument was hard to sympathise with; I didn’t benefit when the currency was stronger, and there are plenty of other local companies who don’t have high costs in foreign currencies, so it’s unclear why I should accept that.

So I don’t know how I feel. I was close to quitting, and now I regard this as a temporary counter-offer. But it still damages trust, which is hard to rebuild. The last year at work seems to have been a sequence of people damaging my trust and then being surprised when that causes problems.

I’m still struggling with job seeking. I am getting so much low-effort spam from recruiters that it’s overwhelming. I am getting emails from recruitment agencies saying “thank you for your application, please phone me on this number” when I haven’t submitted any applications, and “I tried to phone you but couldn’t get through” when they don’t even have my phone number. I’m not dealing with recruiters who are dishonest right from the start, but separating spammers from possible leads is energy and time consuming, which is demotivating.

I don’t get it. If there’s a strong market for my skills then make it easy for me. If there isn’t, then why are you spamming me?

I did get one from an in-house recruiter which looked a bit more promising but the location isn’t great.