Be Excellent To Each Other

Yes, adult shingles is a very different thing to childhood chickenpox - and having the latter doesn't even preclude the former, which I think is just rude.

Any better today, Mimi?

I had a really rough night again. Nothing is comfortable but somehow laying down in the worst of all, so I tried to sleep sitting up but must have kept slipping down and waking up with my nerves feeling like fire. But now that I’m properly sitting up I think I’m a bit more comfortable in the ‘still’ positions than I was yesterday, so I’m hoping that’s a good sign. It’s the first night since Tuesday that I’ve not phoned 111 at 3am, so that’s something.

All the different meds are really messing with my stomach though, so I’m not holding any food down. I think I’d feel a bit better if I could retain food, so I’ve just had some fruit and will have some kefir in a bit.

But yeah, I’m hoping a slight improvement, thanks Daz xx

Meds won’t have had proper chance yet, I bet you’ll have a better night tonight.

I made ‘Mimi Soup’ n your honour yesterday

Aw, I love this!!

I’m hoping that’s soup made from Mimi’s recipe, rather than just from Mimi?

…

I wasn’t using that arm anyway.

It’ll soon grow back.

The circle of soup.

I was having a really, really shit week at work and had ordered some smarter shoes for when the colourful trainers aren't so appropriate. Online clearance, plus a discount code, plus a little bit of cashback and I'm feeling good as they had exactly what I wanted so I ordered a pair of size 10s, as that's the size of my favourite boots (an old pair, from a different company, that are so comfy that I wish I'd bought a bunch of them). In fact, so excited was I that I ordered two pairs - a light brown and a slightly darker brown.

They arrived in a nice box, it's a 'proper' show comapany and they look great BUT I could tell as soon as I put my foot inside that somethign was not right. These new shoes are WAY bigger than the other size 10s, so much that my feet slide around and I feel like a kid wearing their dads shoes. Mucho disappointment and it just felt like such a crappy but trivial way to end a shit week.

The thought of having to mess about and be mildly inconvenienced having to send them back and get a replacement pair is for some reason making me feel really anxious.

Of all the parts of the internet that irk me, Generation Wars is perhaps one of the most tedious. Luckily, as a late gen X'er (as I'm sure many of us are) I'm mostly left out of it because people forget we exists and the Boomers vs Millennials vs Gen Z cycle is enough to bore us all to tears.

But... Is there actually something wrong with Gen Z. No, there isn't, but my gosh I would think so if the people I work with were the sample size for us to study.

I am the only mid 40s person where I work. Everyone else is either 62-65, or 19-25. I am the only person bang in the middle.

The younger people there are just very uncomfortable. There is a strange amount of bullying and people trying to get each other into trouble by constantly reporting each other, but it all seems to stem from a a complete lack of empathy.

I'm not sure what drives it, but it was really stark last week.

I noticed one of my (older) colleagues was unhappy the second I walked in. When it was quiet enough for her to pop in and see me I asked her what was wrong, and the second I did her eyes filled with tears, she thanked me (what seemed like too much at the time) for asking, and told me that five minutes from the front door of work that morning she had received a call to say that her sister had died, completely unexpectedly, and she was at work, going through the motions of processing the news.

As I sat her down and made her a cup of tea and spoke to her, she started crying as the grief suddenly came to the fore, and whilst she was telling me the series of events of the day, but also the awful, awful (unrelated) things that had happened in her life in the last few years, for whom her only solace and companion to discuss them was her cherished sister, she said that it had just been made so much worse that she was struggling so much at work that day and literally every single person she had told had just basically responded ';whatever' and completely ignored her pain.

I said that we (meaning her workmates) do of course care and that we will support her through the day and beyond, and I gave her a hug, and she cried more, but also said that no, really, nobody else cared at all. I was the first person who had listening to her all day and she had been there four hours before I arrived.

I honestly thought that it was just her grief clouding her receptiveness, but at that second one of the younger workers walked in and asked her why the sweeping hadn't been completed and why she was running behind on things. Bear in mind that the older person is the younger person's manager. She walked in on her manager, who was full of tears, and asked that. Her manager then gave a brief but tearful recap of what she had just said to me, and this other staff member listened, completely emotionless, waiting for her to stop speaking. The second she did, she said 'So are you going to finish the sweeping then?'

The clang as my jaw hit the floor...

I told the older woman to stay put whilst I went and swept and sorted everything out, and it took me maybe 20 seconds. It had been swept and literally needed popping into a dustpan and emptying into the bin. As it happens, she had been crossing my space to get to the dustpan, and I happened to sidetrack her by asking if she wanted to talk. It took that other person longer to ask the question than to just help. But it was awful. And The older woman said that everyone else that was in that day (which on that occasion was all of the younger staff members) had reacted in exactly the same way.

Since then I can't help but notice in there interactions that there is a strange lack of empathy and connection. Everyone seems very much keyed in on wanting to cushion their own feelings, emotions and rights, but also not give an inch to recognise that need in others, without seeing the problem that if we all only care about ourselves, then as a result we can have nobody but ourselves care for us.

I hope to goodness that this is a localised problem to my workplace, because if not it is really depressing.

Anyway, this has been bothering me since the day it happened. Something just feels really icky about it.

TL;DR Not one of the young people at my workplace gave a single shit when their workmate came in to work to the news that her sister had suddenly and unexpectedly died.

On the funnier side, someone please please please ask me to tell them about the three best common sense fails that I have witnessed this week.

Please tell us

I thought you'd never ask!

First two concern the same trainee/apprentice who has been based there for 12 weeks, so twice as long as myself.

On the first occasion I asked her how she was enjoying the placement. She said she was enjoying it but was looking forwards to going home as the last day of her placement was the last day of her university term. I asked where home was, and she said *wherever it was* but it was 1hr 45 minutes drive, so a bit too long for her to go to visit for a weekend so she hadn't been home in weeks. I said I knew the feeling, as my train journey from my home town to my university was 4 hours, but whilst they were re-doing the West Coast line it would take up to eight hours. She looked me dead in the eye and asked why I didn't stay at university rather than doing a 16 hour round trip every day.

The next thing was only yesterday. The same girl walked into my kitchen, where I had just boiled the kettle and poured the contents into a big pot of veg on the stove. She came in and said she was getting her lunch. I asked what she was having, and she said a Pot Noodle. 'Nice' I said. She walked over to the kettle, picked it up and said 'oh, has all of the water been used?'. Yep, I said, I had just been starting off the veg. She looked at me a while and then turned back to the kettle.

She looked at that kettle for ages, I think waiting for me to say something, but I sort of carried on with what I was doing. After about a full sixty seconds she slowly turned back away from the kettle and put her Pot Noodle back in her bag, and without a single other word she sort of tiptoed away.

The third thing was on Wednesday. A different, well established member of staff was there and came in to tell me that we had run out of bin bags.
Me: Really? I thought we had loads (I had sorted out all of our supplies last week).
T: No, we used the last one yesterday.
M: Oh? (checks cupboard, where a green bin bag is laying right on top) Look, here's one.
T: Bin bags are black.
M: Mostly, but here's a green one.
T: I don't know what that is
M: It's a bin bag
T: But bin bags are black
M: And sometimes green, this one is fine
T: I don't even know what that is
M: (by now I had put the bin bag in the bin) Just a green bin bag. Look, it fits perfectly. Oh, look, there's a huge big roll of them here, they'll be fine.
T:But I've only ever seen black bin bags.

Later on I went to put some kitchen waste in the bin to find that the yoghurt pot this staff member had eaten from had been thrown in the bin, but they had moved the bin bag aside and dropped it between the bin bag and the wall of the bin, so that it fell outside of the bag

Is the place you're working some kind of hostel for people with 'special needs?'

Not in any way.

To be fair the trainee just seems really lacking in any common sense and like she’s never had to do anything for herself in her entire life. She seems to expect everyone around her to do things for her.

The thing with the bin bags though was surprising. That employee seemed pretty sensible up until that point.

Are you having to check in a mirror that your mouth isn't hanging open?! It sounds incredible!

We’ve got yellow bin bags at the moment. I can send you a photo and blow her mind.

Sorry, I was being a bit flippant, but then you DID have three examples of surreal oddness.

I can see the humour in it to some degree, but to be honest the behaviour of the trainee actually irked me a lot (she completed her placement this week so I’m happily writing about her in the past tense).

She seems to have never had the responsibility of caring for herself or anyone else. Like the example with the kettle, she expects someone to do everything for her to the point where she cannot compute the steps needed to do it herself.

The staff gave their own break room with washing up facilities, etc, but she’d always just come in and drop her pot noodle pot and cutlery (or whatever she was eating that day) on my food prep counter for me to wash up and/or dispose of, even though she’d have to walk past the bin to do so. She’d never mention the fact that she’d do it, either, she’d just sidle in, leave it there without saying a word. She lives in a catered halls of residence, and she said she has decided to remain there instead of moving to student housing, and I’m both relieved that nobody has to deal with her as a housemate and irked that she simply will not learn.

Wow….

That is funny and terrible.

Oh no, it was funny! But no, these are actual people working with members of the public, which is pretty worrying.

I think the bin bag thing was maybe just a bit of a mental block, but also a general lack of common sense. As I was arriving at work the other day the same person also came in to wash her hands in my kitchen sink (already a huge no-no for food safety) after cleaning up where somebody had unfortunately vomited, as Norovirus is sweeping through the staff I hasten to stress that I was just arriving at work, and this was nothing to do with my cooking, thank you very much. So I had to completely clean down and disinfect my kitchen because of that. This was the day after a completely different member of staff caused me to completely sterilise the kitchen after they cleaned out the fish tank and then left all the fish net and tank sponges, etc, on my draining board. Absolutely idiotic.

I had a series of text messages from the owner yesterday saying that she’s holding a meeting tomorrow because after I leave each day and before I arrive, the staff dump all of their nonsense all over my kitchen, and the owner has gone in and seen their stuff just left all over my kitchen and lost it.

Not just there, she’s documented stuff all over the business. I always leave my space immaculate, so this will be good news for me, but yeah, there are problems.

I hope she read the Riot Act to them.

She did, and she told me about it afterwards too. She sent a barrage of messages to all the other staff on Saturday, and held an emergency meeting on Monday, so hopefully things improve.

I’ve sent a gentle memo out today because two staff still came to wash their hands in my sink. I think that was more habitual than anything more sinister, but really it should be common sense (which is bizarrely lacking).