The Daily Whine

It was 90F when I left the house to walk to the store at 8:30 this morning. Welcome to Phoenix in the summertime.

Aside from other unhappy side effects, depression + anxiety = cravings. I'm trying to fight them, or at least substitute healthier choices, but it seems a massive task when piled on top of the other issues at hand.

How is it possible that EVERYTHING is top priority? Everyone says, "Take care of you first." Well, those people don't have an old lady to look after, a grown son living in their home, and a crazy work environment. Well, what do I not do?

OS is in a difficult situation and trying to get a handle on it and move ahead. I have to leave him alone to work out his business and financial plans, but find it difficult to butt out when we share the same house.

Grandma Lee is going bonkers, and once her granddaughter goes home tomorrow, will have no one to make sure she's taken care of properly, visit her, and so on if I'm not there.

I guess I can hand back doing her laundry to the nursing home, although I know they won't be as careful with it as I am. Stuff gets lost all the time, and she finds that disconcerting, to say the least. Still, I'm responsible to make sure her finances are handled properly, sign papers for various reasons.

Yes, I'll talk to her about that on Sunday...maybe she still has enough marbles left that I can tell her it's all too much for me.

Work--I have little control over that except to go in and do my tasks every day, and try to shut out all the other stuff going on around me. I wish I had a little room to work in, or they'd let me telecommute. Every time I think about going back, my throat closes up and my hands start to shake again.

It isn't entirely about the current political environment in the company. I'm doing the work of three people, have told my boss I can't keep it up, and been told it needs to be done and to hold on until he can find a way to get the program(s) I'm handling assigned to the appropriate departments.

That's just dandy, but everything has to hold fire until executive management reveals (or decides) what the company structure will be and who will be in charge of what. So we all hang in limbo, pounding away, trying to get things done and hoping something will be done sometime to solidify roles and responsibilities to some extent.

I understand that the business world is fluid, and the company is adjusting to it, but we drones in the workforce are the ones at the end of the line in Crack The Whip. I feel like I'm about to be snapped off the end and into space. The guys at the top of the ladder make their million or so, and have golden parachutes to make it easier for them to make decisions that affect the lives of thousands of workers.

If I thought they cared, it might be easier to take, but the new bunch on the 20th floor are strictly bottom-line. We are not people to them--we are "workforce". While they whack away at staffing and budgets to make Wall Street happy, here I am worried about whether I'll be able to hold on for the next year, at minimum, and until retirement age, optimally.

They get to screw around with the company and our lives for their five years or so, and leave us in our mess as they leave with millions in stock options. Hired guns. How can you respect that?  The answer is, they don't care whether or not we respect them, because we are expendable. So long as we fear losing our jobs enough, they can make us dance to their tune. If we don't there are always 100 people waiting in line to step in. Well, in my case, they'd need three of the 100. If the economy was better, I'd be gone at the end of February. Twenty years in, and gone somewhere I might be treated as a person.

I'd like to see one of them do my job for a week.