The responses to my retirement post are a real eye opener.

[Jedi Guy]

66. Work most certainly is toxic for a lot of people. Perhaps even most.

I've recently started to sympathize a lot with the so-called "anti-work movement" when I hadn't before. I think a better term would be the "anti-bullshit-at-work movement" though. Two of my dad's favorite sayings are "that's why they call it work and not play" and "life's rough, get a helmet." While both expressions are somewhat heartless, they're also true in many ways. The difference for me comes down to, "is this reasonable or is this bullshit?"

I had a brawl with my boss over bullshit just recently. My partner in crime on the day shift has been out for surgery since early September. In the time he's been gone, another supervisor got vacation time and my boss took some herself. She declined my vacation request on the grounds that we didn't have "coverage." I called her out on it and, after fighting a battle, got what I wanted. Sometimes you just have to stand up for yourself and be willing to take a few lumps if your boss is the vengeful sort. Depends entirely on whether that hill is valuable enough to die on.

It's clear that Covid opened a lot of people's eyes and those impacts are still being felt in the workplace, as is the desire for many people to work remotely. I've done so since early 2018 and I love it. I left my last job because they took it away and most of my old team ended up doing likewise. Because management wanted us under their eye/thumb, they lost a lot of great people in the service of their power trip.

In making that move, I stepped into a supervisory role for the first time in my life. I've had some legendarily terrible bosses in my work life, and I swore to myself I would never become like they were. A supervisor's job should be making his or her employees' lives better and easier. I'm there to support them, not police them. That mindset hasn't always been popular among my bosses, but my team consistently hits their targets when others don't. I can't take credit for all or even most of it since they're the ones doing the work, though. My people work harder for me because I've earned their loyalty and respect. That's how it should be, far as I'm concerned.