OK, Now my therapist is making me do this so maybe I can stay current

So, what’s been going on the past three years?

No, I didn’t go private or hide any entries, I was just not here, and I really regret it. This is the one place I’m really anonymous and don’t have to watch too much what I sat, beyond keeping within the community guidelines.

Still working on my degree, I’ve switched form IT with an emphasis on Cybersecurity to straight Cybersecurity so I had to backtrack a little bit. I tried to make up for that by taking two classes per term and face-planted. That along with insane growth of business at my old job and the stress of being unable to hire or even get the people I had to work their actual schedules put me out on a mental health leave for four months. But I’m feeling much better now.

After experiencing six or eight years worth of growth in thirty-six months due to the pandemic, we were struggling to get the job done. When growth leveled off after the pandemic was pretty much over in our area, corporate wanted us to keep growing at the previous rate and kept adding items and order slots to the service and wanting to know why we were struggling. Keep in mind that between 2019 and the middle of 2022 we had already reached our 2026 growth projections, but they wanted more.

So I’m no longer a manager, I’m just a humble cashier who has quite clearly drawn a line when asked to do manager stuff to “help out” and told them “no”. When someone called me on it I just pointed out that they were asking me to do $29/hour work and I was currently getting paid $18/hour and if they could adjust my pay for that time I’d help them out. Still haven’t heard back on that. I’m not a jerk about it, if it’s just a simple matter of “I’ve forgotten how to do this can you remind me” then I’ll take the five or six minutes needed to help out. If it’s “hey I need someone to be in charge of this project that in no way, shape, form, or fashion involves cashier work” then I refer them to the pay issue. I stepped down for a reason. Couple that with the fact that even after I went out on a mental health leave and stepped down about twelve pay grades when I came back with the intent to never promote again they decided to kick me when I was down and give me an “at-risk” rating on the last evaluation I’m ever going to get I’m a little pissed at the company right now. That’s coming off a “Recommended for Promotion” rating the year before, by the way.

I knew I was having problems, I knew the store and the department needed a change, so I made the change on my own without being asked to do so. And rather than just not doing an eval (which was an option) or giving me a courtesy “Solid Performer at Current Level” they gave me the lowest rating possible that would allow me to keep any job with the company. Since hourly workers no longer get evals (or raises, or bonuses) that’s going to be plastered across the top of every transfer request I put in from now until I get into a position that receives yearly evals. That means no transferring to IT within the company now, and I probably couldn’t even get promoted to an hourly manager position in my current store if I wanted to. I guess I’ll just finish my degree and get a job with another company’s IT department, because while I’ve got money set aside for an emergency situation like this one, I can’t financially handle another emergency if one should pop up, and the money I’m living off of now was actually ear-marked for adding a garage and remodeling the house.