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Well, my job as a tax accountant continues to depress the shit out of me and I want to complain about it. Still burned out, still exhausted, the works. Can't bring myself to concentrate or focus on anything for a particularly long period of time. Pretty sure I'm making more mistakes and taking longer than I otherwise would.
During the month I had to rescue a client running a failing business who couldn't pay some of their accumulated tax debts and had a history of defaults on their monthly payment plans meant to pay off that debt, last time I called the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) they had previously denied the client another payment plan leaving them effectively stranded with no feasible way to pay off the debt in short order. The tax office contacted us regarding possible legal action during the month and I had to handle the negotiations with the ATO, eventually I got them to establish a new payment plan for the client and even managed to negotiate a fairly low monthly payment instalment.
How do you bargain with the tax office when they hold all the cards? The answer is that you don't have to; you only have to bargain with the tax office representative on the other end of the phone. I called to negotiate a payment plan at 4:00 PM, they picked up at 4:20 PM, and at that point they were very intent on handling my call and not stretching the entire affair beyond close of business. I had some other strategies up my sleeve to deploy if necessary, for example if they pushed back I was gonna say “sorry let me retrieve that for you” every time they asked for info, and then leave them in silence for 5 minutes so I could prolong the call way beyond 5:00 PM. But they agreed to my terms much more willingly than I was expecting.
In my firm we have a monthly wrap-up presentation where we can nominate people who performed well during the month for a token firm award. Guess how many nominations I got for establishing a payment plan for the firm's single most debt-riddled client? Zero. It's not a very serious thing, the "award" offers no material benefits, but it would be nice to have any kind of reminder that my efforts were appreciated every now and then. Welp, just a signal to try even less hard next time.
Right now I've got a trip to Vietnam planned in the second half of April. This is the only thing I'm looking forward to at the moment.
If you want some comedy (I like to laugh at my problems and I'm less in a mode of "active despair" and more "This place is a fucking joke, so I might as well laugh at it.), here are some highlights from my last month of the beer service technician life:
We're in week four of a fleetwide maintenance freeze. I'm driving 5K miles a month. It's been about 12K (pretty much all highway) miles since I last got an oil change, not like the engine is going to seize tomorrow but really not how one should treat a $30K truck. I did inspire a companywide "Hey, check your oil" message after a week of complaining that my truck was over a quart low on oil, asking for permission to top it off. I don't know if they forgot to pay the fleet maintenance bill or if the company is too broke to pay it, but it's not reassuring, and if this goes on long enough it's a race between one of my tires showing cords and the timing chain starting to get noisy. I'm going to laugh if the solution to the tire problem (right front tire is wearing very unevenly and the inner part is pretty much bald) is just to swap it with the spare (It is a full-size spare, so this would work.).
On a related note, apparently my district has the highest rate of unpaid invoices in the company, so we're going to have our line cleaners start badgering locations about unpaid invoices (Isn't this what our accounting department gets paid to do?). I got sent on a call to a place (to work on a 23 year old glycol chiller that's begging for death and gather details for a quote on a new chiller that will almost certainly be turned down) that just got current on an invoice from two years ago. Shockingly, they didn't have checks on site after being told they'd have to pay by check, so it looks like I'll be driving by tomorrow to collect (and probably hear about how said chiller isn't cooling sufficiently after having told the customer that calling an HVAC is most likely throwing good money after bad on it; playing bill collector at an ethnic restaurant with ESL staff is super fun).
We're really pushing it on some of these calls. We're charging full-price for preventative maintenances on keg boxes (These don't really have anything to "maintain" aside from cleaning the condenser coils and this practice was described as "ripping people off" by our CFO. Did I mention that I'm out of coil cleaner? I might get some more next week and was told to make due without it in the meantime instead of stopping at a store and buying some.). I drove 2.5 hours and charged a bar $180 ($65 for the part) to replace a shank on a keg box, really to replace the spacer (that we don't have in stock) that had cracked. I understand needing to charge a markup and labor, but this part can be ordered online for $20 and replaced in 15 slow-moving minutes. Needless to say, the customer was not amused (I was apparently the third person sent to fix this.) and paid up but asked that I express her displeasure to my boss.
I drove 10 hours round trip to install two shanks only to find that the parts I was sent with didn't fit. Why we ordered shanks 10.5 inches long (and waited months for said parts to be custom made) to replace parts ~2 inches long, I don't know. I drove six hours round trip to install a nitro infusion box because our install technician did a sufficiently shit job with a surly attitude on a previous install that the customer asked the we send anyone else. I drove eight hours round trip (complete with the CEO himself badgering my superiors asking for my ETA; would've been nice to have known the urgency of the situation or even what exactly I was supposed to be working on without having to call my supervisor and ask, and thank God it was a reset button because I didn't have the condenser fan I was sent to check on hand and/or would've felt like a total jackass telling the customer "I don't know why your compressor isn't turning on; call an HVAC tech.") to press a reset button (high pressure tripped out on the compressor of a glycol chiller). I all but wasted four days doing almost nothing (not that we had many calls to run anyway, and my boss didn't have access to our list of outstanding PMs until halfway through the month) waiting on a chiller to show up because we screwed up getting it shipped. These screwups, low call volume, and our huge service area make for a lot of one-call days and mostly two call days (or three easy, low-value calls), which makes it impossible for me to actually hit 40 hours a week, let alone the overtime I was promised. For example, today I was supposed to drive 2.5 hours to my first call, .5 hours from that location to the second call (actually reasonable!), 2 hours to the third call, and then 2 hours home (The third call canceled, so I was spared that in favor of a PM nearby. Too bad it was going to be the money-making call of the three.). This is not great when all three calls wind up being one hour, low-profit jobs.
On the bright side, I actually managed to catch my boss off the record at the bar and we had a relatively honest conversation (We both have about the same tenure in our current positions.) about things. She expressed mounting frustration with me repeatedly getting sent to undo install's fuckups (I don't care, but it's got to be screwing with her numbers, as is having to scrounge for blatant make-work for lack of calls or access to the PM list.), inventory (or lack thereof; we had to punt a job for another week because we don't have the materials needed to do it, and had to split a job a job with another company because we didn't have a secondary gas regulator in stock) issues, and constant issues with line cleaners' personal vehicle reimbursement (chronically being paid out late and/or less than promised) causing endless drama. She fessed up that she and her immediate superior really were told when I was recruited to the company that said reimbursement was going to be a lot better than it wound up being, that multiple friends of hers that she'd referred to the company had been "screwed" by this, and that she and her boss had been made to look dishonest. Apparently whoever was in charge of rolling out the vehicle reimbursement had the ratio of company owned vehicles to employee owned vehicles backwards (70/30 in favor of company vehicles when the actual ratio was 30/70) such that the company was blindsided by the expense of reimbursing line cleaners for using their vehicles (Before covid every employee got a company car, but they had to sell off most of them to survive the shutdown.).
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Thanks for complaining. I am exposed to way too any influencers and beautiful people online having the time of their lives getting paid to take photos of themselves, spend money, and be hot. Granted much of this is as fake as the porn industry, but it's hard to remember than when you're sitting in a cubicle working on Excel spreadsheets.
I am an engineering manager working for a renewable energy construction company and I have utter dread every time I go into the office. COVID was actually a godsend for me as it changed my working pattern from being 8AM to 5PM every day in office (with a horrendous commute) to 2 or three days in the office per week and no one checking what time I show up. It is so much more tolerable being able to work from home the majority of the time. But those days in the office, I experience so much anxiety and negative feelings it's almost physically painful. It's not so much that I dislike the work (though I do), but the fact I'm held in that office with boring-ass engineers sitting behind a computer all day long. Even typing this out increases my heart rate.
Anyway, you have my solidarity.
I'm one of those boring ass engineers (also in infra) sitting behind a computer all day, but I've come to quite like my job, and I think I'd honestly rather do this than be most of those influencers.
Their lives look pretty hellish, waking up every morning to perform hedonism for an invisible audience. They have no community, no source of meaning. I think I'd go insane about a month after the hedonic treadmill kicked in. Compare that to my job which is interesting enough and very concretely useful to my society. To be fair, I think I'd go crazy doing one of those ultra-abstract tech gigs or OP's accounting job, and it helps I get to go commission the stuff I designed in the field every few months, so I'm not always in the office.
There are definitely people with better lives than mine, but I'm mostly glad they exist and look up to them as inspirations. They tend to also be clearly smarter and harder-working than me. Part of me is glad I'm in the middle of the hierarchy; it seems lonely at the top.
Maybe this is all cope, but it gets me up in the morning. I'm glad you could ditch the commute and I hope your job gets better.
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External validation is important but often forgotten - however you can try and focus on the good you did though. You helped out that client no? Quite a bit in fact. You did good in the world. How many people can say that about the job they do?
A pat on the back from your job is certainly satisfying but you just did something to help someone. That's amazing!
Use that to motivate you.
I strongly agree with this. The key to satisfaction in life is to not attach too much importance to external validation. External validation is nice, but it may or may not happen based on various factors. Instead do a good job at something because you take pride in it and know you did the right thing.
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