Saying No to the Culture of Death

This post is not meant to be about the right to life, but it is about my life and the changes that have been continuing ad nauseum. Yes, I am out of work again. My assignment lasted for 6-8 weeks and once again I find myself without employment. I must admit that I felt relief about leaving the workplace because I continue to find that I less than tolerant when it comes to how others behave. Their behaviour affects my own behaviour, and this time I found myself feeling disappointed over the way in which I was treated as something that resembled something like a squashed insect during the period of the assignment.

I am a graduate with a Bachelor of Economics and Commerce from Melbourne University, and with a major in accounting. Since I joined the workforce I have done some really boring tasks. Some of these clerical tasks have in fact caused me to have permanent problems with my shoulders and body in general. My work career did not begin until I was over the age of thirty. By that time I had already suffered a dislocated and fractured coccyx (a fall down some stairs), as well as a severe form of whiplash due to a car accident where we were hit from behind. My first job involved doing heavier work than anticipated. I worked for the Australian Government at the Australian Archives. My work involved fetching and putting away files for people who came to the archives in order to study those records and to use them for research purposes. The compactuses at Mitchell were quite heavy, and in one area some of the handles were broken. At the time that I injured my shoulders, I had been working very hard, I was not completely happy, and I had come down with influenza. I had to put files away in the compactuses that were broken, and the effort was just too much for the muscles and ligaments surrounding my neck. I ended up with a severe problem and my muscles were so seized up that the doctor who examined me could see exactly what was wrong without doing too much in the way of testing. This is only the beginning of my work story.

The injury that I sustained at Australian Archives occurred in 1987 and to this day I have never fully recovered. It is obvious that something else was brewing below the surface and it has taken a long time to find out exactly what that something else might be. It was a rheumatologist in Townsville who correctly diagnosed that I had clinical arthritis. In other words he could not identify the form of arthritis that I appeared to have as a young woman under the age of 40. The rheumatologists in Canberra diagnosed the problem as fibromyalgia, and they packed me off with a warning to go and exercise, even though I found exercise at a gym to be too much for me. Yes, I did attend an exercise class - one that was given by a physiotherapist for a group of her patients and at a very reasonable cost. Yes, I did benefit from attending those classes. Yes, I do feel the difference because I often feel too exhausted to do the exercises that I used to do when I was in my 20s.

I am adding this background because it ties in with how I view people in the workplace. Always I have found that there is bound to be someone who is obnoxious when it comes to working with older people or with someone who is a committed Christian. What irks me the most about the workplace happens to be the way that so many take the name of the Lord in vain. I find myself going quite tense when I hear them saying "Jesus", not out of reverence, but as though the name was a swear word. It is something that has spoiled nearly every workplace where I have been. Something else that is quite irksome happens to be the way in which young women, when they are given management roles, tend to be extremely obnoxious in their manner towards those who are so much older than themselves.

To put this into context regarding the workplace and psychology matters, my beef happens to be the way in which temporary staff are often treated with contempt by the permanent staff. It seems to be a matter of seeing the temporary person as someone who is beneath contempt simply because that person does not have a permanent job. Perhaps it is a sign of the insecurity of the permanent worker, that this temporary person might in fact know more and be more professional. This is the issue that I faced with my last assignment. Most of the staff were fine, yet I had that feeling of unease every time I had to do work for one particular individual. These are little things yet they are an indication of the insecurity of the other person. In this case I found that the woman in question was quite hopeless when it came to organizing her work. It was pointless trying to help her with some organization because she did not appreciate the effort. This lack of appreciation was expressed through some very loud comments about how she did not understand my methodology in attempting to reorganize her filing. What I had tried to do was to take the claims paperwork of her largest customers and put that paperwork in some form of order and keep it together. She did not understand what I was doing and told the whole world that what I was doing was illogical. She also seemed to resent the idea that I could allocate claims and credits, or that I was doing any allocation at all. Yet, she was not bothering to check what was sitting unallocated to see if it matched. When I first started to do the work, I had in fact gone in and matched up quite a bit of it. The point that I am making here is that although the woman was good, and she had been working through a difficult mess left by someone else, her own deficiencies meant that she is creating a rod for her own back because of the inefficient way in which she was handling the credit claims. When one is not valued then there is nothing that one can say or do that will make a difference. The opinion of a temporary in such a situation is totally worthless.

As I have already indicated what had in fact happened during this assignment was the opening of some old wounds. I faced situations that had that familiar ring about them, and I tended to react in a similar way to my past experience. In my next post I will elaborate in more detail about some of those other experiences. I am a very emotional person, and especially this year after the death of my sister I have tended to break down into tears very easily. The situation that I have just left contained some elements that left me feeling quite lost and alone. I found that at lunch time for example the others did not even bother to come near me. Even if I did not want to be disturbed, I found this to be somewhat upsetting. My brain was in fact remembering another occasion where my co-workers had deliberately embarked upon the silent treatment. There were other little things that were constant reminders of the past. I will continue with these past experiences in other postings.