The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
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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