Oct 02, 2014 22:37
I kind of woke up yesterday while overtaking a car about halfway home from work. I don't mean I was asleep, just the normal kind of zoned out that most people probably go in the middle of their standard daily commute. This wouldn't be particularly exciting, except that for some reason on this occasion it felt like I was recognising something that extends to a lot more than just going into autopilot on a longish, familiar drive.
I’ve been feeling recently like I have moments/periods of lucidity in amongst the day to day blur. I don’t know whether that indicates deterioration or improvement to be honest but I guess it’s different which is something. I’ve been thinking about it a bit since then and I have heard this snippet of some stupid trailer for some awful sounding show on the radio a few times where this woman says ‘I feel out of place everywhere I go’. That sentiment seems kind of familiar. I’ve somehow got into this state where I feel completely disconnected. It’s a little like one of those stories where someone is stuck in their own head looking out from behind their eyes while someone else controls them. Or that thing where you're wearing sunglasses and imagine that and imagine that because no one can see your eyes they can't work out what you might be thinking or something.
I’m probably getting into clichéd territory but it seems a bit like a lot of the time I’m almost invisible or irrelevant to what is going on in the world. I have never been particularly outgoing and maybe this is just ongoing development but it seems like I don’t have any mechanism for engaging with people. When I am addressed directly I often find it difficult to work out how to even respond. Sometimes I find myself with absolutely nothing to say so I just stand there looking blank. I keep interactions with people to a minimum usually and when I do have to deal with someone I usually tend to focus on something else as much as possible, like whatever I’m working on if a staff member asks a question, or the till or a product if I have to serve a customer. Thankfully (or not) a lot of what I do every day at work involves tasks that I can perform without getting out of first gear. Also, my boss is pretty undemanding for the most part so I can get away with being way below my best.
The other day a customer was asking about the difference between two different types of razors and commented that I might not know too much about it. I was genuinely nonplussed until I realised that I actually have a beard. I’ve never been too massively bothered about my appearance one way or another but I actually forget what I look like nowadays. The same happens with other people actually. On occasion I will realise while I’m dealing with someone, be they staff, customer or family and realise I haven’t made any eye contact at all and in fact have no idea what they look like. I usually then make the effort to look at them but that probably comes off even worse, like Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys with a shirt and tie.
Not long ago, a woman who works with us (technically no more senior than anyone else but in reality essentially running the show) was off on holidays for a few days. I can’t count the amount of people who came in looking for her and a few even thought I was new despite having worked there for a year during which they have been in a few times a month. It’s kind of tricky to pick apart what are my issues, what are specifically related to circumstances and structures in the business and what are my coping mechanisms for both working there and dealing with the stress and strain it causes. The most difficult thing for me is to feel so powerless, incapable and stupid.
There are so many competing interests and factors and uncertain outcomes involved in what’s going on I’m finding it very difficult to separate it all out and see what’s best.
I remember a concept from a lecture or talk or something years ago that really stuck with me. It was about the difference between internal and external locus of control. Essentially, it’s whether a person believes that they control what happens or whether it is controlled by external factors over which they have no control. I’m sure that’s a gross oversimplification and there are more aspects to it than that and other related issues, such as self esteem, self efficacy and so on. I latched on to it as a way to explain how people respond to things and linked it to taking responsibility for one’s own actions. It seemed obvious to me that the internal locus of control was the preferable and more logical of the two and I think this, along with plenty of other things of course, helped push my attitudes and actions strongly towards taking responsibility for my own actions and believing that if I worked hard I’d benefit from the rewards of that. I guess it goes some way towards political philosophy too. I haven’t done a lot of reading in to it although I should since I find this kind of thing fascinating. According to Wikipedia (that ultra reliable fount of all knowledge) those with an external locus of control are more likely to have clinical depression. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that to be honest. Take for instance, a person with a very strong religious faith who believes that God directs every action and consequence. I can see that being a great defence against depression as long as it holds true.
The thing is, these days I feel like I’ve gone in completely the opposite direction. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation though. Did I start believing that I had no control over anything and that I couldn’t change any outcomes for the better because I was depressed or did I get depressed because I started to think I had no control and I had so strongly wanted to be in control of things before? I can pinpoint pretty well where the whole situation went dramatically wrong though. During the dispute between pharmacists and the government a few years ago I was left in the position of making a lot of decisions about what to do in the specific pharmacy I was in charge of with very contradictory guidance/direction from those I was employed by. They gave me little enough to absolve themselves of responsibility for what happened but enough that I didn’t feel I could go ahead and do what I actually wanted to and thought was right. The stress caused by those few days chucked on top of whatever else was going on felt like a defining moment (in a bad way).
About three or four months later was when I first went to the GP and got her to start me on antidepressants. I know I still actually had a lot of control of what happened and I I still took responsibility in a big way for that and other things. I think the conflict between what I wanted to do and knew I _could_ do if I was willing to take the consequences along with the massive uncertainty about what might happen was just too much strain. There are other areas of my life where I’ve made stupid decisions and where it’s been obvious that I don’t always have as much control on things as I would like but work is the one thing where I have/had a lot of self confidence and belief in my own abilities. Outside of that I was less affected by things not going the way I would prefer I think because there wasn’t that difference between what I managed to achieve and what I thought I was capable of.
I think the biggest issue for me has been to have this strong belief in my own ability to dictate what happens and need to take responsibility for good and bad outcomes coupled with some evidence that perhaps I can’t do as much as I thought I could due to some external factors and also the thought that if it’s my fault that things go badly then that doesn’t say much about my own qualities after all. It’s all pretty contradictory but difficult to unravel all the same. I should say, having a more internal locus of control doesn’t make you a control freak. It’s more about believing that your abilities are sufficient to achieve what you want and that you are able to change things if you decide to.
These days I’m kind of stuck in a very frustrating situation which just constantly feeds itself. I’m essentially trying to do at least two full time jobs in the space of one. To my mind I’m doing both of them half assed even though I think I could do a great job at either one if I put full concentration and effort into it. Both have heavy regulatory and safety burdens which makes the consequences of failure a lot more problematic for myself and others which introduces more pressure. I do think I’m holding together the basics so that everything is going ahead to an acceptable enough standard but I think I would struggle to demonstrate that definitively and I’m expecting an inspection in the near future by at least one of the regulators. I can probably get the procedures and such like up to date and to be honest we’re probably not far off a lot of other similar operations. I’m just not happy with patching things up and making do and doing the minimum. I would be much more comfortable to have things running really smoothly and be ambitious and try to improve.
My boss talks a good game but in reality he just tells everyone what they want to hear. He avoids conflict as much as possible and hates to make decisions. He’s happy enough to just potter about going along and patching up small cracks as they come along rather than put in place proper improvements. He’s great at practical stuff where I’m poor and he’s good with people, on the surface and in the short term at least. He has connections and generates income that I probably couldn't but there are plenty of other things I think I would do better. The problem then is that someone ends up dealing with the consequences when he for instance orders a shit ton of stock (probably short dated) we have no hope of ever selling just because the rep gave him a good discount on it. This happens on a regular basis. He might get annoyed if he finds out later that we had to dispose of all of it but he won’t refrain from ordering it next time or decide to train anyone on how to sell it or run a promotion or whatever. It's kind of a shame because he's such a nice guy but he's pretty useless overall.
I used to do a lot of the cleaning up after him due to the fact that I was working in a very quiet new opening and I actually gave a fuck. Also, I seem to be the only one who has the capacity or willingness. Now I have so much more to do I’ve mostly given up on that side of things which can be even more frustrating especially when people who were used to me helping out call needing something and I can’t do much about it. The accountants in our head office also are pretty motivated by immediate figures on a spreadsheet, as tends to be the case, meaning that people being paid appropriately or creating extra positions to do some of the work that would really help drive the business forward aren’t big priorities alas.
Of course, I do appear to have some issues with not delegating and wanting to maintain close control of things and that's exacerbated by my current aversion to actually engaging with people in person or my lack of resources to be able to do it, whatever way I want to look at it. It's not actually like I necessarily want to take his job either. In fact I think I would be relatively happy just to help him do his job properly. He can be difficult to deal with though, partly because his eagerness to please and avoidance of conflict leads to quite a lot of lying and being generally completely unreliable. It's very hard to work with someone you can't trust. You end up having to work around them instead which is no way to run a business, especially when he's supposed to be the one in charge. If it was me I'd be in all sorts of misery about the fact that every one of my employees thinks so poorly of me (as demonstrated by the fact that I am) but he's either oblivious or he just doesn't care. It's probably a bit of both in actual fact.
At one point recently I was on the verge of quitting. I kind of chickened out and have decided to take leaving off the table as an option. I could go back to locum work again easily enough but it's hard to be sure of full time work that way and the rates vary too. I could probably cobble together enough to keep going for a while. It might even work out longer term and a bit of relief from responsibility would sure be nice. Hard to say for sure though and it feels kind of selfish to take the risk. There are no permanent full time roles in the Republic within commuting distance of where we live at the minute and the few that have come up in the last couple of years would have meant jumping from the frying pan into the fire as far as I can tell. The North is even worse really. I would have to get registered up here instead of or as well as down there. My latest experience in the jurisdiction was over 10 years ago. Not to mention the place is so parochial that it is absolutely essential to have connections to even get locum work. No such thing as a recruitment agency or locum agency, just needs a lot of networking and legwork. I could certainly do that but it would be a big commitment in time, money and everything else. The main reason why I work in the South though is that the pay is at least 50% higher. I'm not greedy but it would be seriously stupid to take that decrease even if it weren't pretty much impossible for practical reasons. To be honest, the way I'm feeling these days I'm not convinced I could hold it together enough to go through a recruitment process and transition to a new post. Recently in fact there was a role advertised south of Dublin for €20k more than what I'm on. I have a feeling it would end up being too good to be true even if I could get it together enough and I'm trying to hold out on not moving house from where we are for the sake of the kids mainly.
These obviously seem to be external factors that I don't have a lot of control over. So, I decided to try to shift my focus a bit. I decided to disregard anything to do with the other four branches in the group and just concentrate on the stuff I absolutely have to do for the one I have actual direct responsibility for. Going above and beyond hasn't been getting me very far up to now but if I can't actually leave then I need to find some coping mechanisms that might actually work. I talked to my boss and he agreed to spend an extra day a week working in the pharmacy on one of my days so I can try to get some of the paperwork and management and so on up to date and take some pressure off. Of course, the first week he didn't have a free day, the next week he turned up late and left early and I didn't get a massive amount done, last week he had to cancel on me and go to another branch instead. Who knows what'll happen this week? I told him it would only be a help if it actually worked. Unfortunately I knew it was pretty unlikely and I don't see him being there as any sort of a solution anyway as I don't really trust him to do the normal work either. He covers my days off as well and keeps saying I should leave him work to get done that would help me out. I've tried that and I just end up having to redo it afterwards so it's a complete waste of time. I end up having to go around fixing whatever he does while I'm away anyway without adding extra stuff to that. I struggled to even express what is wrong nevermind come up with any solutions. In the end I just went with the idea of him doing the extra day along with me in the hope that something better will come to mind in the meantime.
Last month and this month the busy periods for both roles are unfortunately getting synchronised. From about the 20th onwards in the month is when the wholesale stock needs to be dispatched and the nursing home we do medication for is on a 28 day cycle, which obviously moves forward a bit each month. Right now the dispensing of the nursing home medication and the wholesaling are pretty much happening right in the same week which is decidedly tricky time wise.
There are a few different ways I think I'd prefer things to be.
I think I could do the wholesaling full time. It's not what I trained for, although it is certainly within the pharmaceutical field and plenty of my skills are applicable to the role. I've quite enjoyed some aspects of dealing with it over the last year even though there are parts I don't like much. I know I could do a much better job if I was devoting more time and effort to it properly instead of trying to do other stuff and constantly taking short cuts. As well as making us more compliant with regulations and such like I'm pretty sure I could generate a lot more business from it and increase profits and so on if I was immersed in it properly. It would mostly be an office job and less interaction with people and such but there are still reps for suppliers and customers to deal with, networking to do that I can't do now and an element of management involved with dealing with the staff within our company already.
I would like to be able to forget about the wholesale altogether and concentrate on running the pharmacy. The place is nowhere near as busy as the one in Bantry was or even the Boots in Wick but it's a decent enough business, especially when the nursing home is taken into account, the veterinary sales we have and the normal retail. Throw in an element of central purchasing and distribution to the other branches and there's definitely plenty there for me to get my teeth into properly. It's pretty neglected right now. We just took on a new staff member to replace one who left. Part of the reason the other girl resigned was that she was unhappy about how things were going with a different staff member who is still there. Big management failing in my book. Once we kind of found out about it, my boss and I did talk to her and discuss fixing the issues but if I was doing my job it would never get to that stage. Of course, now the new person has started and is actually really good with loads of fresh ideas and the like. Naturally the same issues are now arising with the staff member who is still in place exacerbated even more by the fact that the new girl is new. I simply cannot devote the very necessary time and energy that is definitely needed while trying to do everything else as well. It's a shame because the business desperately needs my attention and I know what needs doing and what I could do to improve it. My boss seems to agree but as I mentioned, I don't trust him to help out properly, he says what I want to hear and he does actually have four other branches to deal with too and can't get involved in mine to the extent it needs someone to even if that would work. In fairness to him, I think he's overstretched too.
The third option I would like is to take a step back/up away from managing the pharmacy I'm in now. I'd quite like to take on an overall management role for the group. I don't actually want my boss' current job as I do think he contributes in some ways and probably he does stuff I wouldn't be so good at. Every Irish pharmacy has to have a Supervising Pharmacist which is the pharmacist who is in full time charge of the pharmacy practice. They have to work in the pharmacy full time, they have responsibility for pretty much everything that happens on a day to day basis and can only do this for one pharmacy at any one time. Each Irish pharmacy also has to have a Superintendent Pharmacist. They can be over more than one pharmacy at a time and take overall responsibility for procedures and policy, making sure these are in place while the Supervising Pharmacist actually implements them. In single independent pharmacies they are both the same person but in a group like ours there are five separate Supervising Pharmacists and just one Superintendent. When I worked in Bantry I was both and now I'm Supervising while the actual Superintendent is a guy who is Supervising and managing in one of the other branches since before I joined. Officially it's him for a kind of complicated and stupid reason but he doesn't actually make any attempt at doing the job. Practically my boss says he's doing the job but he doesn't really do much with it either. He is a pharmacist but he's not particularly good on professional issues. I'd like to take over the Superintendent Pharmacist role and actually do it properly. I think I could probably even combine it with the wholesale or at least give it a good go.
The problem with all these great ideas (in my opinion) is that any of them would require more investment and a bit of forward thinking and like I said before, those things don't seem to be much of an option. That said, I've only hinted at and talked around these things with my boss up to this point. Partly because I've been having trouble expressing what I think and what I want and partly because I guess it feels easier in the short term to go with the status quo. I often get annoyed at the fact that I feel like I have to be the one coming up with the ideas and telling him what we need to be doing while he's supposed to be the one officially in charge. Last week he and the lady who does our accounting at head office were having trouble working out some profit figures for the branches. Part of the problem was probably that stock is getting sent from one place to another without being accounted for and booked out of one branch and in to the other. On Friday he brought a shit ton of sun cream to our branch from one of the others. There wasn't any paperwork with it so I checked and it turns out the staff in the other branch had no idea what they had sent to us. They had it set aside to go but hadn't counted it or anything and he took it without checking whether it was actually ready to go or not. Needless to say, we ended up spending most of a day sorting it all out and fixing up the mess. I'm sure I probably could just act like I have the authority to tell the staff in the other branches what to do and neither he nor anyone else would particularly object to that but I have enough trouble dealing with my own shit without doing all that too. Not to mention the fact that I would like to think that taking on extra authority like that should be official and should also involve better pay and so on. Back to the investment and such though.
It's always possible that I'm wrong and this sort of thing might be agreed to though. When the woman who left recently was first talking about leaving she did also mention that her pay is pretty low and hasn't been increased in the 3 years she's worked there. (Turns out she was actually pretty badly underpaid compared to most of the other staff in fact but that's somewhat beside the point.) His response was that you never get anything if you don't ask for it, which I did certainly agree with at the time. However, I think it's another part of his wilful ignorance of issues he should really know about and be dealing with. Don't get me started on the fact that I don't even know what any of my staff are paid and when I recently asked for details of one of their total pay for a period (on their behalf) I was told by the payroll person at head office that they couldn't tell me at all. I thought it was completely ridiculous but it wasn't worth arguing over since I had already worked it out based on the fact she told me herself what her pay was and I just wanted it confirmed. I asked for a payrise about 6 months after I started working for the company and immediately got about what I had wanted. Kinda made me wish later I'd asked for more and negotiated a bit harder. Apparently other staff have been asking for pay increases at various points as well. He's good at making vague promises about future reviews and stuff which then never materialise. In a decent sized company, like we have, a proper structure even just facilitating reviews or minimal incremental rises or something would be really useful.
It's entirely possible that by focusing so much on work, on structural issues there, on blaming my boss for things and so on I'm just avoiding examining my own problems, my home life and what I could do differently in my own life. My rationale though, is that fixing those things is more difficult and would have a big effect on how I get on outside of work. If I was less stressed or more fulfilled at work I'd be happier at home and that would make me a better husband and parent which are also massively important both in their own right and for the beneficial effect it would have on me.
In the interim I seem to have developed some coping mechanisms.
Distraction is a big one. Books, movies, video games, tv shows, twitter, facebook, other random internet junk, work (funnily enough). I've been throwing myself into serial obsessions.
Unfortunately since it's kind of difficult to concentrate a lot of the time they don't always last. It's tricky to get the right combination of mindless and compelling. I've pulled back from twitter and facebook a bit again recently. There is some good among the dross but it's too easy to get caught up with just endless clicking and scrolling and looking at shite and not even absorbing anything. I guess that's what I'm looking for but there's the mix of wanting to forget and not think with the feeling guilty for not being productive and useful.
I tried GTA V recently but I keep getting distracted. Civilisation: Revolution was good because real time strategy games are pretty formulaic but engaging but once I had all of the achievements that was finished with. I tried going back to Red Dead Redemption but it's too similar to GTA. Right now I'm constantly playing Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time on my phone. It's the first time I've ever actually seen the point of a tablet actually. The bigger screen would be mighty handy for this sort of gaming.
The library is a godsend. I'm also not sure if it's just that I'm looking a lot for Sci Fi and Fantasy so that's what I see or that there are a bunch of other library users with similar tastes but our local branch has a pretty good selection of the kind of books I enjoy. I've done pretty well recently with my selections actually. I've read a lot of good thrillers, crime novels, spy stories and a chunk of Fantasy and Sci Fi. The latest success is the Wool series by Hugh Howey. I just started the third of the trilogy after devouring the first two last week. I'd recommend it to anyone. It's a bit irritating though that this sort of reading tends to lead to frequently forgetting the contents again pretty quickly unless it is really outstanding. I picked up the latest Tom Clancy today. I know I have been reading them mostly as they come out but I really couldn't tell whether I've already read this one or not. I'm kind of curious whether it will become apparent as I get in to it.
We're finishing up the last couple of episodes of season 2 of Arrow and the new series starts in a few weeks. I had vaguely seen a trailer or two or something a long time ago, probably when the first series was out but presume I had other things we were watching at the time. I started watching it not long ago without really knowing anything much about it. I wanted something I could watch on my own that Uli wouldn't be bothered about. Partly to fill the time between me finishing reading How to Train Your Dragon to/with Donncha (on the last book published so far) and him actually going to sleep which is when she can leave the room. Partly just because I was feeling a bit peeved about something kind of non specific. It worked out well in one way because it's actually really good and has improved the whole way through. Didn't really achieve the other goal though as Uli started watching and got into it too. That's good too really but it did piss me off a bit. I should probably have known better as I tried the same thing with Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and it ended similarly.
I haven't had such good luck with movies on the whole but it's difficult to get time to watch a full movie on a work night anyway so it's not such a loss.
I get anxious and unsettled when I'm at a loose end, especially on days off. I need to be doing something, it doesn't really matter what. It actually happens at work too sometimes and seriously prevents me getting any long term planning done or work that requires more focus. At home it often means I log into my work email. I'm pretty much off every Monday and work every Saturday apart from the odd one I specifically need. This is also kind of stupid in a way. Saturday makes a good day for catching up on things in the shop and paperwork but those Mondays tend to be important for time sensitive stuff like the nursing home and some of the wholesale work. The last few weeks I've just ignored that and not done it and I'm very deliberately avoiding work today but it's difficult. Of course, since I ended up having to stay for 2-3 hours after work three different days last week, maybe I should do it at home instead.