The heat has been a problem for me. When people in other countries hear people in the UK complaining about heat, what they usually don’t appreciate is that during summer time it’s rare to get heat without humidity. We turn from a cold, rainy island into a tropical rainforest island with near daily thunderstorms.
I’m glad it’s cooling down now. When it’s hot for more than a few days I seem to go into an altered state of consciousness as my sleep gets disrupted and all the days seem to blur into one.
I haven’t felt very good at all for the past week. I think it’s probably a mixture of the weather and doing too much running last week and over the weekend (overtraining). I hope it’s not that I’m no longer on antidepressants and this is me going back to “normal”, but the fact is that I’ve felt pretty depressed and emotional all week and they’d probably have helped.
Work has been frustrating me. I learnt today that the company has made someone redundant. This person had been furloughed, so it’s not a huge surprise I suppose (and it turns out he’d actually found another job and had been working somewhere else while claiming the furlough pay too, so it’s not like he’d have been back anyway), but, hmm, I don’t know. I’ve only been here for 9 months now and in that time two people have left (by which I mean they were pushed). That doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I don’t think my job is in danger, but then, how would I know? I am starting to feel the frustrations in dealing with my manager. I get bug reports from him which are a one-line email comprising a run on sentence that doesn’t really explain what he means. I never get any positive feedback. He is friendly enough with me, but the only feedback I get on my work is “this doesn’t work”. That’s a problem. But I don’t think it’s a problem with me.
Then there is the matter of the fact I was contractually promised a salary review after six months, and they still haven’t delivered on that. I’m just going to sit on that for now. I don’t think it is worth the risk of bringing it up yet, especially as since it’s in my contract I intend to and expect to be able to recoup it later, but it hardly makes for a good employer-employee relationship.
I wonder what my counsellor would say if I was still seeing her. I kind of know what she would say. She would say that they aren’t behaving as if they value the relationship and it’s up to me whether I want to act on that. Which I don’t, really. Not yet. It’s incredible to think I’ve been here for 9 months, though. That’s both a really long time and a really short time. There’s always the concern of looking like a job hopper, but I was in my previous job for seven years so moving on from this one after a year to 18 months is fine, really. I’m already half way through that period!
But there is also a good argument for going self employed. I thought about it a bit before I left my previous job but I wasn’t really ready. Now though… I still don’t feel ready, but I feel a lot less unready.
Rambles 
I used to ask myself, “was it the right choice to have switched jobs?” & as long as I could answer “yes” that was good enough.
I understand your frustration. My boss was fundamentally incapable of saying well done, even when I told him I needed it. He’s never going to change, it’s just not in his nature & now other people are struggling with it too. Have you mentioned it to him? I guess it’s hard to have a meaningful review at the minute.
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I haven’t mentioned it to him. I don’t think I will. I don’t think I expect to be here long enough that it makes sense to emotionally invest much.
It’s sad though when a boss doesn’t think that making people feel appreciated is part of his or her job!
Have your ex colleagues also expressed the same frustrations? How do you feel with thinking or talking about it now? I still find it very stressful when my previous job creeps back into my life. A few days ago my sister sent me a cryptic text asking if something she’d come across was related to my old employer (it was). It took quite a while for my heart to stop pounding. She is job seeking at the moment and I think i was worried she had found a vacancy there and was going to apply.
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Yeah, it should be a management basic. More enlightened (modern) managing styles are forever being shared on LinkedIn – appreciated staff work harder etc.
Yes, ex-colleagues are sharing the same frustrations. They did at the time so I never thought it was just me. I feel sad for them that they’re still suffering though – and reminded that nothing will ever change. It’s deeply entrenched in the culture. I can listen without letting it affect me now, I suppose the physical distance ensures that I’d never go back. & I bounced back quickly. I was fortunate to have lots of support & an escape route. Less than a year after it really started to get to me I was gone. I think I also see my part in it, the weakness I gave in a recent interview was about how the job grew so much & I would have benefitted from better boundaries and priorities.
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