TheOfficialTab

Nah, man. I got you. I've worked at Walmart and seen first hand people forget about other people and strictly look at the numbers like they were the ends, and being an a-hole justified the means of getting them to where they needed (or just wanted) to be. Used to have a coach at Walmart that would actively lie and breath down the necks of my team to try to get a task done quicker. Spoiler alert, they never succeeded because the type of work we were doing takes time, and we weren't being lazy to begin with. It was all an attempt to make our store's times on mods (rearrangement of shelves and products) to be lower. From many different jobs I've been lied to, belittled, called stupid, been ignored, and even been completely forgotten about by members of management, and it's honestly ridiculous. I'd love to do the same, become a developer, but the amount of self teaching I'd have to do with time I don't have, to make a portfolio of projects so I can send it in to a company that would probably treat me the same way. The only reason I'm even considering it is maybe the possibility of working remotely. I'm tired of commutes. I'm tired of having to put time in to put myself together 5/7 days a week. I would love to wake up, sit at my computer with a warm cup of tea, and already be at work. No need to mess with my hair, or put on my shoes. I mean, at that point I don't even need to be wearing anything. Unless of course it's one of those places that requires zoom calls because for some reason some places have management that just can't function unless they see the faces of their workers while they speak???

I've heard of people intentionally getting a second phone for when their work wants their phone number, that way they can turn that phone off when they get home. That's probably what I would do as well. In your case that was company supplied, and they wanted to be iffy about it. I probably would have come up with excuses about the signal for the service they use not being good where I was at the time or something. Can't stand the idea of a lack of work-life balance. When I go home, I should be able to forget about work entirely.

I've heard of the quiet quitting "movement," I could maybe understand if you were working at Walmart or someplace similar, and you knew that regardless of how much effort you put in, they always pile too much on to the workers, so everyone suffers anyways, but it's when you could make the difference that I start to disagree. Where I work right now, I do make a difference, since it's a local chain and the people there do actually half care. So I like to try to put in the effort to spare my coworkers extra work, but now I have the issue of not having the heart to be there at all. When I come in, I think about how the person I work for is a liar and doesn't care about if I have issues unless it's convenient or would look bad on them if they didn't give me sympathy. As for the sleep thing, I know this all too well. My second job was a night stocker at Walmart, and it was awful. I would work really hard all night, come home and immediately pass out, and wake up either waaaaay too early and be exhausted by the time the next shift would roll around, or wake up just in time to do my shift all over again. Nearing the end it was only the latter. That existence was terrible. Wake up, go to work, suffer all shift, go home, immediately pass out, and wake up to immediately go back to work and do it all over again. That's not living, that's surviving. I have heard stories about those kinds of jobs in the tech industry where the amount of work on an individual is just too much. I think that if I were working long hours, that by itself, I would probably still take the job; not because I'm okay with that, but because all I need to do is get my foot in the door. Once I show I'm competent and have experience in the field, I'd swap companies. Now the hourly, weekly, monthly thing, I would never take anything other than hourly. That usually means they want me either on call for when even the smallest problem arises, which sounds awful and I have a friend in IT that used to do that and he hated it; that or they, as you implied, know that you'll be staying late and don't want to pay the extra money for your extra labor. As for management incompetence, I've had jobs where even the low level management was acting stupid because upper management was putting too much pressure on them. Like you said, contagious. It infects the entire business because the top's influence works its way down.

I'm glad you weren't stuck where you were at, that sounds miserable. I do need to keep this job, at least until I find another one. I would say that the sad part about retail is that you go in thinking the customers are going to be the worst part, but weirdly enough, it usually ends up being some of the people you work with; most of the time the people you work under. I can deal with rude customers really well, I don't let them get under my skin, but if they're particularly awful I have tricks to dealing with them. I can't really do anything if my boss decides to be awful. I agree that even if you're medically retired, trying to find an obligation is certain to keep you grounded. I remember when I first graduated high school, I had a grace period where I wasn't making any money; the lack of scheduled responsibilities made me feel aimless. I think it's also possible to self impose it though, like with hobbies or helping yourself spiritually. And when I say spiritually, I mean self-help, self-improvement, and enlightenment. Not sudo science, like chakras and stuff like that. Just trying to better yourself.

So to give a bit of background, I work in retail, and have been since 2019. February of this year I applied for a job at a place, and when asked if I had any physical injuries that would prevent me doing my job, I told them that I didn't have anything that would normally get in the way of my work. This is still true. However, that is assuming that I'm not given all the most strenuous tasks, and that we don't have so much stuff to do that it forces us to be over by more than an hour past our normal end of shift. They gave me one of the heaviest categories in the store... Well after a few months of being there, one of our members put in their notice, and after they left, things started taking longer for our crew to accomplish because we were without one worker. Since I knew we would be getting another member soon enough, I just kept on working. Well it took them a while and eventually after having too many hard days I had to call out because I have a muscle knot on my back that I used to have to go to physical therapy for. I started getting the reputation of calling out on Wednesdays because out of the two trucks we get a week, Tuesday's truck is the only one I have to work the next day. The day after a tough truck day my back can be giving me a lot of issues. Finally we got a replacement for the missing member, but here's the kicker: they gave us a retired, part-time, half-and-half. Meaning not only does he have limited hours to work, not only is he slower because of his age, but on top of that, he isn't even entirely our department. He's partially another departments as well. Meaning the truck we could really use him on, one that would mitigate my issue, Tuesday's truck, we only have him for half the day. And not the half we'd actually be doing the truck. The day usually goes: most of us front the shelves, and a few of us break the truck down to be worked by aisle. So by the time we start working the truck, he's got maybe an hour to work his aisle if that, and most of the time he doesn't even finish... Well by this point I stopped calling out on Wednesday with one exception where I used a vacation day. So as far as I'm aware, I'm in the green by that point, but... People started getting COVID in our department. When one came back, another called out, and while they were out, I got sick. The problem was, I tested negative for COVID, that being said, I still felt sick as a dog, and while I called out the days around the truck, on the truck day itself, I STILL CAME IN. On the Wednesday after that truck, I told my boss I'd need that day because I still felt awful, they told me the store manager was thinking about swapping my departments because she thinks I can't handle it there. I told him I simply was sick this time, and they told me I needed to speak with the store manager about it. Well the most recent truck, a difficult one, we finish up and I'm about ready to head home, and she calls me into an office and proceeds to grill me about being out all the time. I explained to her the situation and she just didn't even care, and then proceeded to belittle my being sick, and then tell me she didn't know I had an injury, which is a lie, and that she used to do an entire side of the store, which is either a lie, or she's not telling the whole truth(My guess is that if this is true, the truck she did was much smaller, because there's no way she was doing the amount we're doing. Some of our best on our team couldn't do one side by themselves without serious overtime), and then tells me that the reason we can't put the truck off till Wednesday is because I'm never there on Wednesdays, which is also a lie, and if she DID do that, I would be there every Wednesday because I WOULDN'T NEED TO CALL OUT. Did she want me to come in and get everyone else sick while I carried heavy boxes with a fever high enough to make me feel dizzy??? Maybe if we would have gotten a fulltime member like we were supposed to, in a timely fashion, it would have been an isolated incident of being out a few days because I was unwell, but instead they're expecting me to put all this heavy stuff up, move on to another heavy category, and then help finish in the smaller categories within the span of 4-5 hours, and if it takes longer, to stay overtime and tire my back out more. I'm getting to a point where I know I need to swap careers, and finally pursue one of my passions, and right now it really seems like my gateway is tech, like becoming a developer, or a software engineer. Issue is I don't have the money for a degree, and I don't want to put in months of effort self-teaching and find out that it's extremely difficult to get into the field without a piece of paper that said I went to classes that barely taught me anything for however many years. I really think if I had another option, I could leave, and I wouldn't need to deal with the abuse, and they could see just how much I do for the team.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/48zdww/how_to_reset_your_batmushroom_cave_choice/ This Reddit topic talks about how to edit the save file to allow you to fix it. I recommend backing up the save file so you don't accidentally harm it, and I also recommend reading this word for word, and making sure you've listened to what he has to say to the T (this also means in order, don't wait till after you've done the rest to remove the items from the inside of the cave.) There's a comment of someone who mistakenly didn't remove a number after the post said to, and Demetrius didn't show up until he found out what he'd done wrong and rectified it. The latest comments also seem to be from a year ago, but if it doesn't work and it does more harm than good, you could always go back to your backup.