It’s that time of the year.
Last year, I realized that I give this day a lot of importance and I credited it to being the reason tostart this blog in the first place. Now, I think it’s more of a tradition, and also a dull ache somewhere that I’m still here with the work culture being more humiliating and suffocating by the day. I work remotely, but that does not exempt me from the discrimination. If anything, it gets worse. But I power through.
Work Anniversary | 3 Years & Counting
Work Anniversary – 6 years and counting
Work Anniversary | 7 Years & Counting
Work Anniversary | 10 Years & Counting
I still don’t like discussing my concerns with my manager because I have grown wise enough (at least I thought I had) to realize that discussion doesn’t help anyone. But then, there’s another breed of managers, y’know, the kind who asks questions until you relent, the one who feed their negative words in your mouth no matter how smartly you try to dodge them. Trust me on this. I have several chats in ChatGPT coming up with ways to be safe from such managerial tactics. Boy have I failed and how.
There were three distinct occasions that I let the guard down, as in, I DID voice my concerns. Here’s how I went.
- I told my manager of past 12 years (I no longer report to him), and his resonse was: I hear you, but I can do absolutely nothing. This was the least he could do, and it was very decent of him.
- I asked my new manager of past one month about certain expectations and he flew into a fit, started yelling to drown out my voice. For several minutes, I didn’t even know how to react. He left two months later, and we are grateful to Allah for all His mercies.
- It wasn’t even my manager, just a project manager, whose job is to create dashboards. During retrospective, I mentioned one of my concerns. His reaction was… let’s just say I thought he’d die of anger. I don’t know why he was so triggered, or why he took the discussion not just on a different tangent but a different universe altogether.
And this might come as a shock and a repetition from last year, but even though I hate many things, but I can’t leave this job. I don’t need this money as much for myself as I do for others. The trick to stay sane is to write my monthly salary on a tiny, bright post-it note, and display before my eyes, so I know the ROI 😀
If only my writing and blog takes off the way it had in 2021-2022, I’d be ready to quit.
Keep visiting! Stay blessed.
Shabana Mukhtar