And lately, at work, it seems like the warp and weave of the place is coming unraveled. Nobody really seems to be aware of what the other people are doing. Meetings are scheduled but no one knows about it until five minutes before. Rules change and the memo is never sent. Schedules change and calendars are not sent. And it is so pervasive that there is no one to point fingers at.
And a lot of crap is happening, people not doing their jobs, people falsifying their work hours… everybody irritable and tired… and the kids are picking up on this and are acting worse, which makes all of us feel worse which makes the kids feel worse… you get the picture… a never ending descending spiral into a hell of screaming spitting hitting incontinent madness, with your coworkers taking longer and longer lunches.
It makes me grind my teeth to see someone get in their car and drive away at 3:00 and when I sign out at the end of the day, see they signed out for 4:30 just like all the rest of us. And then see them do the same thing the next day and the day after that.
Hmmm…. hour and a half at the end of the day… hmmm…. Counts on fingers… 1.5 hours a day????? Times five… 7.5 hours every week? Times 4 weeks a month???? Over thirty hours… Almost a week off a month… paid… while the rest of us are working our asses off trying to find some kind of strategy to work with these increasingly difficult children.
I wrestle with the temptation to keep a tally of all those early leavings, a total of what they are stealing from the taxpayers, from the kids we work with… and ultimately from the rest of us that take their jobs seriously. To take this tally and present it to some higher up the chain mucky muck who will do something. I think the only thing that keeps me from doing such a thing is the knowledge that any consequences that slam down on the slackers will filter down to the rest of us, that the possibility of working in a place where we will all end up being treated with distrust and perhaps have our work hours reduced because obviously there was not enough to do to keep us there???? Like the slackers weren’t walking away from jobs undone and others like me (and for every slacker there are ten of us working our asses off) aren’t stepping up and doing their jobs for them.
