Just FYI: I meant to publish this back in June 2021. I guess I was too worried at the time about what my employer may think.

Today I did probably the most rebellious thing that I have done in years. I called in sick and took today off for mental health day. For at least a year or more, I have been under immense pressure at work that has only grown exponentially and I am not sure how I will be able to keep up that pace much longer. I work for a very prestigious company, one that I had hoped I would retire from, but now I’m not so sure.

I am a manager of a very small team that is tasked with duties and responsibilities way more than our resources can handle. But that does not matter to upper management, whose attitude is: if these people can’t do the job, they would find someone who will. The thing is, the people who work for me, for the most part, we’re not hired to do the jobs that they are doing now, and have been thrust into those roles because of lack of staffing. A lot of the work that is required has to be done at night or on weekends, and once again these people did not have any say into whether that was agreeable or not, and are feeling frustrated and abused. And I don’t blame them one bit.

I am working 60 hour weeks doing what should be my job and also doing a lot of theirs because there is just so much. I tried to protect them from the toxicity of our upper management as much as I can but even that is failing because my direct manager has thrust himself into our day-to-day work and is micromanaging instead of letting me manage the team myself. Actually, I will take that…