I know I said I hate social media, but I started yelling into the void on Bluesky a while back. I justify this by using it as another outlet to channel my shorter unhinged thoughts which I can’t spin out into 800ish words worthy of gracing your inboxes / this website. It’s scratching an itch I have supressed since I stopped using Twitter in 2018.
You can follow me there. Or don’t. I really don’t care. Much like here on JJW unhinged, I doesn’t really matter if anyone reads the posts (I cannot bring myself to call them skeets) and consequently I have found a niche in posting about some of the fucked up places/people I have worked at/with and the batshit things which have happened while I’ve been trading my labour for money.
Obviously I’ve posted about my former shirt popping boss and royal blue comic sans loving colleague in long form, but some shorter stories spin out into longer threads, a couple of my favourites include
- the time my boss hired a videographer without telling me,
- the problem with efficiency,
- the guy who ate raw sausages, and
- Nigel.
Folks over on Bluesky — and by this I mostly mean Dylan Reeve (New Zealand author and video guy) and former Ōtepoti/Dunedin Mayor Aaron Hawkins — have been questioning whether my stories are fact or fiction. Which really is a low key form of gaslighting when you think about it because whether the events I relate are really real or if they just present as real in my head is beside the point if I feel like they are real. Which I do1.
To be fair to Dylan and Aaron, I wanted to check it wasn’t just me hallucinating because of the massive amount of solvents I had to inhale to get through 8 hours in that office. So, to allay the feeling I was going doolally, I asked a former colleague and now close personal friend — one of the very few people I have worked with who didn’t turn out to be a reprobate freak — to provide me with some examples of things that happened while we worked together.
Here is what Becky2 came back with.
The same guy who patted my bum and who wrote a poem to a young woman colleague (see below post) also patted Becky’s bum.
Worked with a dude who would, I shit you not, sit staring at his screen completely motionless, barely even breathing, in a Rodin's Thinker-esque pose for +2 hours at a time before making a single tracked change to a document.
— JJW (@jjw.wtf) 18 December 2024 at 14:16
When Becky complained about the bum touching, the HR schlub shrugged and suggested Becky take him into a private meeting room and talk to him about how uncomfortable it made her feel.
Becky reiterated: “This chucklefuck touched my bum! I ain’t gonna go into a room alone with him, you fucking twat”.
HR schlub shrugged again and continued to play Candy Crush and smoke darts in the open plan office.
Sensing a troublemaker, who complains about such trivial things as sexual assault, management loaded her up with too much work and made her use an IT platform which wasn’t fit for purpose.
Obviously Becky pushed back, going to the trouble of identifying the problems with the platform, suggesting solutions, asking for extra resource, and help from the IT team to switch providers.
Management liste… lol no they didn’t. In fact, at a team meeting the boss person called her out saying she just needed to figure it out.
Not long after this, she had a mental breakdown and they only let her take two days off work, with her direct manager suggesting she drink wine to deal with the stress. We worked at a place which dealt with harm from alcohol 🙃
At some point shortly after that, it was performance review time. Of course they didn’t give her a bonus because… she needed to work on her facial expressions during meetings.
Look. Becky has no poker face — I’ve won so much money off her — and she would openly react to the absolute batshit insane contradiction-filled stuff the boss folk were spewing. While Becky’s facial configurations might be annoying for a boss, they shouldn’t be the sole, stated out loud by an adult, sole reason for denying a bonus.
Also, perhaps the bosses should’ve stop giving such fucked up directives that visibly confuse and terrify their staff!
Becky then did the ol “have a baby to escape a toxic workplace” trick but decided to come back because sometimes the literal devil you know — the office did reek of sulphur, would spontaneously combust, and the cries of the damned were pumped in via one of those large UE Boom speakers — is better than the devil you don’t
Sometimes is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it pains me to tell you in the year she was away, sweet FA changed.
Prior to her return to work, management avoided speaking to her even once. This was probably because they were sheepish knowing they were going to deny her request for flexible working arrangements, something which other women had been allowed to do and was company policy.
When she did eventually talk to management, the wannabe top dog (another woman with children) literally told her she was being a “hysterical mother” and asked Becky to call her back when Becky had “calmed down”. Wild.
Becky is doing fine now (after almost a decade of intense psychiatric care, group therapy, medication, and a period of about 6 months where she was constantly in an ayahuasca trance under the protection of a team of Peruvian shamans).
Obviously she quit this job in a spectacular fashion.
There was a very public yelling episode, an actual table flip, multiple people needing to attend the Emergency Department, and the theft of a significant amount of office supplies, like more than you’d ever expect one small woman to be able to carry.
Becky wrote about all this for a popular media outlet and shared it on Linked In dot com so all her (former) colleagues could see what an actually fucked up hellscape they were working. Unsurprisingly, if they did see it nothing changed and sources tell me it’s still a wild place to work.
I hope sharing Becky’s story goes some way to quell all these pesky rumours I make these stories up.
You can’t make up stuff like this, in large part because the modern middle manager is an actual dunce who sees Bill Lumbergh as aspiration and human experience as something to be mitigated rather than empathised with.
On a more personal note, this might be the last post for a while. Life has gone right for once and I am going to be happily preoccupied at least for a good couple of months. If you know why you know, but if you don’t please reach out and I’ll tell you ☺️ If you miss my voice, you can listen to me over on JJW live and unhinged.
Until then,
Stay safe, stay sane
<3
JJW
