I’ve been thinking about the process of this glimmer a lot. I really hope it comes through, but it’s almost maddening to not know where you are in the process, or even have any expectation of what the process looks like.

It’s kind of like when you need surgery, but it can’t be done immediately, like on some TV hospital show, because this is real life and we would hope that our doctors don’t, in fact, spend their days having affairs and throwing tantrums about their feelings in between surgeries. In real life, if you’ve got a torn meniscus or need a hip replacement, it can take months. And as you get closer to the date of the surgery, whatever is ailing you seems to get worse and worse. It wears you down more. It’s more painful. It hinders your movement, your ability to get things done, even your ability to think straight.

Things may not actually be worse, but the knowledge that relief is coming makes us impatient, insists our focus dwells on the pain and it seems to get worse. Much worse.

This is much the same. I haven’t been this completely unhappy and disengaged at a job, possibly ever. In fact, guaranteed never before. For nearly eight years, I suffered through those idiots, watching them denigrate everyone around, lie constantly, dump all their work on me, cleaning up after them and watching as they sent lie after lie to the bosses about how I wasn’t doing anything. I sat through their homophobia, their racism and most especially, their extreme misogyny. I was scared of the threat of violence or property destruction at the hands of my former boss because he’s that level of unstable. If I heard one day that he went on an incel rampage or attacked a group of Muslims, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. He’s that kind of unstable, which given his adoration for all things Q and Alex Jones and Donald Trump, isn’t surprising.

And then the new owners fired them. Not because of the aforementioned; that was just window dressing to legitimize the real reason they were fired (even though all of that entirely justifies firing them with cause). The real reason, in my opinion, is that they went over the new boss’ head to the CEO and the new boss’ ego was bruised. At the very least, it must have made the CEO wonder why these guys were still there, given they did the same thing they always did – made up a bunch of lies, included a petty grievance or two that wasn’t worth the drama (the CEO even said that outright) and even bitched about “male discrimination” because we (the other men in the office) got tired of them not flushing the toilet after a shit or washing their hands (in a pandemic!) and put up some signs asking them to do so. Apparently, calling them out on not flushing the toilet is some sort of gender discrimination in their minds.

The sad part about all of that was that we then condensed four guys’ jobs into mine, making me the equivalent of five people. Listen, these guys were screwing around and lying about what they were doing all day, but they still did something (sort of), which four of them combined is at least one or two other full jobs, and I already had a full time job. To make it worse, despite the fact that they just saved a quarter million dollars a year, they couldn’t hire me a proper networking guy to help replace them, even though I was quite clear about only doing this temporarily and having no desire to be a network administrator.

Seven months later, I’m still waiting on my glimmer. They’ve given no indication what the process entails or how long I can expect, so it’s become like a person waiting on a surgery that is always on the verge of happening and never does. The excruciation of staying in the twenty-four hour a day job after years of burnout and exhaustion is almost unbearable. It might be better if I could at least get some indicator of whether this is something I can expect to hear on today or two years from now. They’ve given absolutely no indication where we even are in this process. Are my hopes up for no reason? It’s the hope that kills you, I remember reading in some book or comic somewhere.

It’s certainly killing me, and it would be much, much better if they just laid out the process for potential candidates and what the potential timeframes might be. Setting some expectations about the whole thing would go a long way to calming nerves.

Target: 1000 words
Written: 371 words, novella: The Mungk