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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
It seems you have rediscovered the ancient wisdom that the reward for hard work is more work. The office doesn't work based on objective principles (like any org will insist to its grave), it works on the squeaky wheel getting the grease—and the strongest links getting the heaviest loads. Don't get me wrong: being a star performer can have its benefits in the right orgs with the right incentives—but if they aren't there (which seems to be the case as evidenced by your frustration), there's absolutely nothing wrong about withholding that performance.
I imagine that at some point, you (probably implicitly) volunteered yourself to be Bob's fixer. Now that you've shown you can do it, it's expected. It's hard to unwind that expectation without drawing attention. You can't just up and stop fixing Bob's mistakes, but you can steadily fix them less and less. Your cover is that maybe his fuckups are getting worse and worse, or perhaps your own responsibilities are growing and you have less and less effort to offer for it. There are likely a dozen more angles of attack for someone who knows your situation as intimately as you do.
Don't explicitly offer these things as explanations, but try to weave them implicitly in the excuses that you offer for why you couldn't fix Bob's mistake in a timely manner that avoids pain for his higher ups. Leverage plausible deniability to the maximum extent. Feel out how much pain you can expose Bob's superiors to using which narratives as cover and lean in to the ones that work.
Good luck.
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