Slug Thoughts

Perak Horned Frog (Xenophrys cf. aceras), family Megophryidae, Yala, Thailand

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

as is somehow Mandatory for jobs like these, anyone in a position of power made it their job to make everyone else’s lives as miserable as possible with constant micromanaging. like, i got told in a strongly worded email to reorder the $2 plastic shelves in my cubicle that i used to store spare paper. it was fucking dire.

but anyways. the reason i quit has to do with what im talking about in the original post. despite the fact that i was consistently at the top of our department leaderboards (yes, we had those, they were emailed out daily) my manager decided that because i couldn’t stay late one day because of a doctors appointment, i needed a Talking To.

he spent an entire day hounding me about this single event, saying that it was a “growing pattern of careless behavior” and that i “forced [my coworkers] to stay until 6 pm”

obviously i felt awful. i was friends with everybody on my team! i didnt want to inconvenience them!! even thought i knew that he was being too harsh, the guilt trip still got to me. but every time i tried to defend myself and explain what was actually going on, he would double down and make it an even bigger issue. this kept going and going until the situation got spun into me being a terrible employee who needed an Action Plan, and i was Ruining The Department, and Everyone Was Going To Stay Overtime Because Of Me.

while i was dealing with this instead of, yknow, actually doing the work that is apparently so dire, i realized… it wasn’t that serious. like, not even fuckin close. the things my coworkers had to do overtime to complete? folding papers. and while yes, it was shitty that they had to stay so late to finish up, i wasn’t the one who made them do it. my manager did! and there were literally dozens of other options to pick from instead, including just leaving the work for me to do the next day! the work we did was nowhere near time sensitive, and certainly not worth the overtime the company paid.

but because i wouldn’t just roll over and accept a chewing out that i didn’t deserve, my manager decided to keep laying on the pressure until i caved. man was assigning legitimately apocalyptic levels of intensity over folding papers. i went from being an asset to the team to getting yelled at by both him and his manager for my “poor performance.”

so i quit. because it’s not that serious.

this whole shitshow is a standard tactic that employers use to trick you into signing away more of your life to the job. make you feel stupid, make you feel like the menial tasks you perform have these dire consequences that simply do not exist. ramp up your anxiety over nothing. they will punish other people because you aren’t slaving away hard enough, and then say that it’s your fault in the first place. you’re not being a team player! you’re not pulling your weight! don’t you see that everyone else is doing their part? don’t you understand what will happen if you don’t contribute?

it is absolutely fucking vital that you don’t listen to any of it. it is even more so that you don’t fall for it when they try to pull this tactic to get you to turn against someone else. the most effective tactic to get someone to fall in line in a workplace is social ostracization. don’t be a tool for your boss to use to manipulate someone else.

Three Toads Beneath the Moon

That dumpling can groove.