Bad Service is Ruining our Lives - Part 1 of 3: Jobs Are Awful

First of a three part series about how jobs being awful, jobs being impossible to get, and service being terrible are all related.

I tried to go to the UPS store today and saw a sign when I got there that read, “closing at 1pm today due to a family emergency and staff shortage.” This was frustrating as they aren’t supposed to close until 5pm and I was hauling in a big shelf I had to return to amazon. This was all the more frustrating because a good friend had applied to work at the UPS store in question and was told that she didn’t have the necessary qualifications or experience.

This experience struck me as it triggered me to realize how three of the most frustrating things in my life are all related. Those things are:

1. Jobs are awful

2. Nobody can find one

3. Service is awful

The UPS store must’ve been so thinly staffed that even one person having a family emergency caused them to have to close unexpectedly. The same place is turning applicants away who are clearly capable of making copies and ringing up customers. This combination of issues makes the customer, me in this case, fucking pissed.

So, given my little eureka moment while the cardboard dug into my forearms as I had to drag this box back to my car, let’s dig into each of these things separately and show how they’re also connected.

Part 1: Jobs are Awful

Most everybody I know hates their job these days. Employees are miserable, employers don’t give a fuck, managers are in between the two constantly exhibiting how woefully they are equipped to handle the dissatisfaction of either. Burnout is constantly in the news as it rises more and more by the day. There’s lot to unpack in all of that but one thing appears clear, working fucking blows.

More Work and No Help Makes Jack Fucking Burnt Out

Some of that is from the same old jobs just getting harder. Lots of folks quit during the “great resignation” of ‘22 and many companies are not comfortable hiring them back. As a result, those that are left over are overworked, and likely paid less from a value perspective given that inflation is outpacing most raises and promotions these days. The companies are also dealing with much higher interest rates and a huge amount of uncertainty in the economy so they are not looking to make big moves like hiring full time employees. This isn’t preventing them from listing jobs and stacking resumes, but that’s for next week’s post on how we all can’t get jobs.

Although the teams aren’t being repopulated from many of those that quit a few years ago, even more in the tech sphere are being laid off as well. 150,000 have been laid off in the tech industry this year alone and the numbers don’t seem to be slowing down (great post by someone who feels how fucked it is to work in tech right now as much as I do). Often it’s done under the auspices of “AI is making things more efficient” (Carmen Van Kerckhove wrote a great post about how bullshit this is) or “we overstaffed during the pandemic” but the truth is that the prices are staying high while the costs are going down from laying workers off. Workers are the ones footing the bill for the cuts by losing jobs if not losing money by working more hours for the same salary. Even if employers aren’t directly laying workers off, they are making work more awful to get people to leave on their own as Business Insider put very well, here are six of the most common ways:

1. Restrictions on where and how people get work done. For this think the pervasive “return to the office” policies that are popping up forcing the folks that moved away, the parents that can’t afford childcare or those that can’t come back in for any number of other reasons. This is outside of those who just don’t want to and don’t need to in order to do their job. .

2. Reducing benefits and perks. Deductibles are going up, employer paid portions are going down, retirement contributions are going down and this is all outside of the other peripheral benefits that had been handed out like candy during the great resignation.

3. Providing Worse Performance Reviews. Employers are scrutinizing the performance of employees and using any reason they cna to give “meets expectations” or worse reviews to discourage employees from asking for more money.

4. No raises or promotions. Employers are crying poverty and telling employees that they need to keep their existing salaries. They’re also not investing in manager training which is in turn rolling down hill to less opportunities for development and advancement for the employees below them. Everybody is stuck and stagnating.

5. Neglecting Workers. I see this constantly. Managers ignore the remote workers, ignore the tertiary offices or just ignore the workers that are in the office with them. The number of issues is easily kept low when you stop listening for them altogether.

6. Writing down what you do. This one is so insidious. Being asked to justify your own existence undermines the value you are perceived to be providing and makes you feel less valued in general. It also adds work that is totally fucking meaningless to the big pile already left from the lack of employees to support the team.

The funny thing, and by funny I mean fucking irritating, is that there is a labor shortage out there to this day. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that if every unemployed person took every job they were qualified for then there would still be millions of vacancies. By 2030, the labor shortages are expected to expand anywhere from 6 to 9 million workers. This is mostly supposed to be due to all the people retiring since so much of the population is old but doesn’t mention all the immigrants we’re booting out of the country or the Gen Z folks who aren’t pursuing the degrees required to fill the jobs.

Jobs Want All That, a Bag of Chips, and a Piece of Your Soul

Beyond the increase of work and lack of support from other employees to get work done, the work itself and the experience of working is just getting worse by the day. The long careers ending in gold watches, respectful retirements, and a feeling of a valued contribution to society are long gone and it’s unclear when or if they are ever coming back.

An immediate change in the last few years has been the change in the tone of employers to employees. During the great resignation, employers were pleading with employees to stay and doing all they could to get them to including better perks, better hours, better flexibility in schedules and any number of other things. Those days are long gone. As the Wall Street journal wrote about, employers now focus their message on how “everybody is replaceable.” This is where AI has become such an insidious development in technology as every executive of every large company has been using it to threaten employees if not layoff thousands as a result. The employee is treated like he/she provides so little unique value that they are often talked about as any other asset to be replaced if inconvenient like a faulty copier, or a finicky mouse. This puts a hard place on one side that’s met with quite the rock on the other side from how awful it’s become to do jobs these days.

While the Great Resignation and the pandemic before it, gave so much to employees in the way of flexibility and working from home, the other side of that was the blurring of lines that used to provide the work/life balance required to make working sustainable. Emails were for the work laptop while at work, then they were for the sofa and when customers were sending them from their sofas, the companies had to return them even if it was late at night, early in the morning, on the weekend, while in surgery or any other time conceivable. The modern white collar job never clocks out. If you’re alive, you’re on the clock.

Then there’s the work itself. Most of us have no fucking idea what we’re doing nor what our bosses want from us. Gallup found that, “In 2020, about 60% of fully remote workers said they know what’s expected of them at work. That dropped to 47% in 2023... And about 55% of hybrid workers said they know what’s expected of them at work in 2020, dropping to 41% in 2023.” The responsibilities are blurring, the bosses just want it done and don’t care who’s doing it so they ask us all to just fill in the gaps regardless of what they are.

Then, as if it isn’t bad enough that we don’t know what is expected, we are more frequently being dehumanized into data points on a spreadsheet that are supposed to stand in for our value. As more is decided by that data, I found that I am spending more and more time filling out forms so that the data can be retrieved. This data then rates my performance against a metric arbitrarily decided by a computer, which requires me to justify why I am not as good as a machine. That used to be an analogy but today it’s a literal statement as we are all compared against AI. That’s outside of my personal life where I need to sign up for a membership, download an app, fill out a form or do some other inane form of data collection just to participate in any mundane aspect of everyday life. It’s like some cruel joke where the whole world has suddenly been turned into the DMV except the joke’s on us cause we did this shit on purpose. The big difference being that the folks at the DMV don’t have to smile or be nice, where most of us aren’t so lucky.

The data collection has truly become ubiquitous as well. Everything is rated either by an external Net Promoter Score, an internal 360 rating form your peers, intermittent reviews from your supervisor, stars on yelp, surveys provided after services, or any other number of data collection points that are littered throughout our lives. The data dictates the path of one’s life and it is often provided by somebody annoyed to have to fill out the survey, and someone who may not know a damn thing about the services being rendered other than how easy it was to deal with it. It’s treated like science when it’s often as random as the way the wind’s blowing, but we’re all subject to it. The tyrannical data requires us to do all we can to make the numbers what the machines say they should be or else we will be the next to find ourselves on the unemployment line.

Jobs Have Become Bullshit or Bullshitting other Bullshitters about the Bullshit

According to the bureau of labor statistics, four out of five jobs are now in the services sector as opposed to producing goods in the United States. The underlying meaning of jobs being in “services” instead of being in goods is that we are all professional shit eaters paid to make other companies or individuals lives easier while smiling and playing nice in a giant disgusting sandbox of patronizing falsity. As if that weren’t bad enough, for the shit-eating privilege, we have to posture publicly in places like linkedin to tell the world how grateful we are for the soul sucking pointless jobs most of us are doing.

For businesses that work with other businesses, the person from the company receiving the services has to look good by being a dick to the company providing the services. That’ll show ‘em. That way they’re “earning their pay” by squeezing all they can out of the service provider. Meanwhile the service provider has to say yes to literally everything as they can be as easily replaced as the employees mentioned above.

This is another negative about jobs being based in services instead of goods, which is that it’s all easily replaced in a literal sense: software is quickly replaced by other software, advertising is quickly replaced by other advertising, servers are quickly replaced with other servers or services. It’s not always as good as the original but if blame needs to go somewhere, the third party entity is much easier to use as a scapegoat than another fellow survivor within the organization.

For businesses that work with customers, so many of us are burned out in the world that it makes us bad customers in life. We’re often not looking to interact with other people let alone be kind to those providing the services. Look at the increase in popularity of services that don’t require us to interact with other people: delivery of food or anything to your house “yeah go ahead and leave it at the door.” Self-driving cars replacing Ubers so we don’t have to talk to anyone on the way to the airport. Chatbots instead of 800 #’s.

Every job becomes a sales job selling other employees on working harder if not selling customers on staying or selling bosses on how you were great at selling the other stakeholders or being awful to the service provider. There is no number of widgets that will satisfy the gaping maw of the employer but instead we sacrifice it all until there is nothing left to give.

Speaking for myself, putting on the happy face for a moment longer than I do all week for work, feels like pulling teeth or pulling fingernails or using my fingernails to pull my own teeth out. I am not gonna lie, there are many times that I would just as soon not return things or let myself lose large sums of money rather than interact with another person.

This is all before we talk about the work itself. David Graeber put out a book in 2018 called Bullshit Jobs: A Theory where he estimated that half of all societal work is pointless and this has an immense negative psychological impact to society.

There’s nowhere else to go.

The last point for this post is that we’re all stuck in the jobs anyways because there aren’t any other jobs to go to. My next article will be about how impossible it is to find another job which is causing a whole other set of immense friction in society, but this is an important point to make here. It’s bad enough to go through the above, but to feel chained to these jobs because it’s the only way to keep a roof over your head or food on the table makes the resentment level rise to all time high scores. This is where the connections should start popping up in your mind, dear reader, between the final point I’ll make in the third article between the level of service having gotten so shit and the jobs being so shit. It’s all related.

I think we’re all feeling it, the jobs suck, there aren’t any other ones, and the service in every other part of life is sucking as well. Today is a dumpster fire shit show, but the good news is that it changes like the weather so the one thing we can guarantee is it will change.