My wife belongs to New Haven RTC.
I can't quite say that there's ever been a job in my life that has consumed my life, but I have been in the relationship that I'm in, and seen my life disappear into her job. It starts out with a simple thing, and only progresses from there.
All staff at New Haven RTC are on constant 'on call' status. At any point of any day a mass text goes out, and all hands are on deck, have to leave whatever they are currently doing and phone into a large conference call, if they don't, there's hell to pay and your job starts to hang on by only a thin thread. This only happens when a girl attempts to run away from campus, but it's still annoying when you are doing something with your wife, and then a text comes out and she has to drop everything to worry about her job from anywhere from an hour to six or seven hours. Just a few weeks ago a girl tried to run around five at night, and Alicia was out hunting for her until nine at night. It didn't matter what was happening at home, it didn't matter about anything else, Alicia was there. She wasn't getting paid for it, she didn't get any bonuses for playing hide and go seek with the suicidal teenager, she was just 'doing her job'.
Luckily, runs are a rarity. They don't happen that often, and when they do, they typically are over in an hour, or less. There's even been a few times that by the time Alicia is dressed and ready to go out to play hide and go seek, the girl shows up and there's no need to run off from whatever we were doing.
Want to know what isn't a rarity? Emails.
Alicia HAD (her words, not mine) to get a smart phone for work. It wasn't even an option. When talking about data plans and phone plans, she says that there is no way that she could possibly ever do anything less than unlimited, and mainly it's because of her work.
Her phone is constantly in her hand and is constantly bleeping, ringing, or buzzing telling her that she has a new message. Most of those messages are email notifications. All of those emails are from work. Stay around her for more than an hour, and at bare minimum she will receive two emails from work. If things are really bad, she'll have to respond to them at any give time.
What this means is that when she's finally home to be with the family, she's constantly getting emails from work (which confuses the hell out of me because what are people sending you emails about at 8:00 at night?) and she has to read them, because that's her job.
Along with her phone, she also HAS to have a Facebook account just for her job and her students there. So that means that she isn't just checking one Facebook while at home, she's also checking work Facebook.
Then there is the pure massive amount of physical effort she has to put into her job. There has yet to be a day in the past month that she has come home and said anything besides, "I'm so tired." or "I have had such a long day." or "I have such a bad headache from work." It is a rare day that my wife comes back from work without feeling completly drained wanting to go to sleep at 9:00, has a headache that requires her to lock herself in a silent dark room for an hour as soon as she gets home, or isn't completly beat so the only thing that she can do is lay on the couch while she goes through all of the emails that were sent to her on the car ride home that she missed because she was driving.
.gif)
I look forward to the day that she quits that job because hopefully I'll get my wife back. She won't be constantly tired, constantly having a headache, and constantly have her nose in her phone. It'll be an interesting day when Alicia spends more time playing with her daughter and talking to her husband than thumbing through emails on her phone. And just to be clear because I don't want to hear about this later - it's not her fault - it's her jobs.
No comments:
Post a Comment