When gamers talk about rage quitting, usually they are referring to people that couldn't stand the way the are being trashed, hence leaving the game prematurely before the game has ended. We called them rage quitters.
In real life there's something of the same nature. Especially at work.
I almost became one of those.
I like to manage my job the way I like it, within the acceptable freedom, of coz. However when things get really tough, like in March, I was totally overwhelmed with work, during working hours at least. I was handling quite a number of extra tasks plus my BAU work load. Some of these extra tasks were taken up by myself voluntarily, some were forced to be taken up because no one else could or know how to do it, some of these were assigned to me. These tasks were supposed to be distributed among 3-4 people. And for shit's sake some loser above me kept sending me emails to me to ask me to deal with some ad hoc non-BAU shitz that are forever complicated and frustrating to deal with. All these added up and impacted my BAU work performances.
I know it has and I know I should voice it, so in one of the meetings I have voiced it so that the whole team knows that what and how I am doing, and I voiced that it's necessary that these tasks are to be shuffled and distributed to different members of the team to share the work load.
Supervisor seems shocked, his newly promoted "expert" at that time seemed shocked too. One of these tasks were supposed to handled by her previously when she was still an analyst. The reason that I took it up is simple.
Because she fucking abandoned it.
Let me describe what happened.
When you are handling a task, and you are going to move on to a different role, anyone with a logic mind would understand that you will need to pass the task to someone so that things are not impacted. This Expert however, seems to live in a different world. First of all, no one knows that when and how she was moving on to her new role, secondly, she stopped doing all the things that she was supposed to do as an analyst, 3 WEEKS BEFORE she move on to the role of that capable senior, as a Subject Matter Expert.
So as expert as she is to be, she just quietly stopped doing all the tasks she had on hand, and also stopped doing all her BAU work, and also stopped taking calls, ALL WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE TEAM HAVING ANY KNOWLEDGE ABOUT. Yes, awesome. I'll talk about what happened to our schedules later. Now let me get back to the matter of overwhelming amount of tasks that i was handling.
So, I was saying, I brought it up in the meeting and made it clear so that everyone understood that these tasks needs to be handled as a team, not for some certain individuals to handle alone. I thought I communicated clearly. So finally I managed to convince most the team that the tasks needs to be distributed. Supervisor was there, the expert was there.
I also made it clear that by handling all these extra things have impacted by performance of my BAU tasks. I made it clear that because the team tasks were so important that i have to give priority to and therefore I have no time to touch many of the cases assigned to me and there's nothing i could do about it. Supervisor nodded and said he understood. I thought he did because all of us were speaking English but then, once again I have over estimated his level of literacy in English language.
2 months down the road and the cases are closed and sure enough some of these cases were not touched and had a negative results to them. Sure enough that my BAU performance have dropped for the month of March, after staying above average for more than a year.
One day a list of cases came in from the back office team saying that 7 of the cases they have capture have not been worked on. 6 of these cases were untouched by his minions, and 1 of them has my name on in. Being an ass he is, he sent an email to me with the following message:
"Please help to advise why this below cases were not worked – I believe we had mutual agreement to update for each cases assigned.
Please response by today."
I frowned and I was quite frustrated. I am a person that is very obsessed when statistics have my name on it. It takes a lot of heart of me to prioritise the team's benefit over my own, and seeing my own stats taking a hit for doing other people's work is a pain. I have already brought this issue up in the meeting and have already made things clear why and how this has happened, and yet a fierce email has ended up in my mailbox. And fuck him for his "mutual agreement", there was never any, he who does not know what his team is actually doing did make that request, we have already given the justification that cases that we did not work on simply shouldn't be updated to seem like we did. Yet he insisted that we should, just to cover his ass. All of the seniors did not agree with that arrangement and did not agree to do such. All his newly hired minions agreed, because they are his minions. duh. However, here he is, "mutual agreement" he said.
Kaaaaatuuuui~!
So what did I do with that email?
I ignored it because I have no reason to reply to his hostility.
Alzheimer's disease did not remember what I said in the meeting and then sent me another email on the following day:
"I have not heard from you yet- let me know if you’re facing any challenges."
OK, FINE.
Since he wants to know so bad, then I'll explain again. Irritated, I replied his email with as much detail as possible of what happened:
"There's no special reason sir.
There was not enough time and that case was simply missed out due to lack of time."
And then I listed out what I was doing (comments in bracket was not included in the email):
"I was doing:
1)Check and forwarding merchant supporting documents in team email inbox. (Which Volume is enough to take up 1/3 of a person's working day;)
2)Assignment of Ad hoc requests that came from other teams. (I needed to screen through and reject inappropriate requests and then assign the valid requests back to the analyst that was previously handling case. And I take up ownership of most of the cases that has no ownership. takes up about 1/2 my day when there's a heavy volume.)
3)Case Assignment, (a weekly activity that downloads a record of cases opened for the markets that we service and then manually filter and then distributes them to each of the team members. Usually takes 2 hours or up to 1/2 a day of my time doing this)
4)Concluding the team's monthly result. (I think most of us can understand, this doesn't look like a normal analyst's task at all. how can i present my own result? Because i can manipulate the outcome if I wanted to, it's non-compliance. I tried to make him understand that his Expert has to do this, but he didn't get it.)
Regards"
and so I sent out the email explaining what CHALLENGES that I am facing and hoping that he can get the email knowing that it's his poor management with me ending up with so many tasks and so he will shut the fuck up.
Sure enough, being an idiot he is, he didn't get it, he replied to my email quickly:
"I totally understand that you’re busy with your daily task and but I believe this would not be a valid excuse.
Please ensure to work on the cases below and make sure to update in The System. Hope you understand the severity of cases not being worked on."
WHAT??? EXCUSES??? ME??? WHY WOULD I FIND EXCUSES WHEN I AM ALREADY DOING MORE THAN I SHOULD? And hell yeah I know how severe when cases weren't work on, why they hell on earth did you think that i brought up the matter when I have not enough time to work on my cases??????
Bloody Idiot.
One thing in me is that I do not like slacking in terms of work because I am very very very very obsessed with statistics that has my name on it, aka job performance metrics. If i were to do something, I will do it as best as I could. Sometimes my best isn't good enough for someone but the effort is always there. Calling me giving excuses not only is an insult to my commitment to what i was doing, it also show that this Supervisor, which is a direct boss of mine does not understand what his team members are doing. I immediately understood from that point onwards that this guy is not someone I want to work under. This guy is not the person that would lead me to an advancement in my career. He is only using all his team members as stepping stones so that he himself can get as much credit as possible, and to please his superiors.
I felt rage, and immediately I fired up Microsoft Word and started typing my resignation letter. I thought to myself although I like most of the rest of the people I am working with, when work is so damn screwed up with a boss that does not know and does not appreciate whatever I am doing, there's no longer any reason I want to stay here in this office. Plus this asshole is harassing me day in day out stopping me from reading newspapers, having breakfasts, checking my headphone, trying to check on how many minutes I went for my toilet sessions etc etc etc etc etc etc. Just because he is fucking sitting next to me. If i didn't know that he is such an asshole he is, I would have thought that he is picking on me. But I know he is just being what an asshole should be doing.
I was doing something that i despise the most when I am playing online games.
Rage quitting.
Shit.
Suddenly a friend that were newly transferred to another position came and visited me. He saw what I was doing and immediately pulled me off my workstation and had a work with me. It didn't matter what he said but what he did was able to give me some time to cool down and calm down.
Shit. I realised I was doing something I despised so much.
Even if I wanted to quit, I have to plan for it.
And so started to plan for it.
signing off...
