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Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Well, TIFU.

Today I managed to achieve the incredible feat of making it to work over two hours late. I was so smashed that I slept for 11 hours, through an alarm, and made it to work at 11:35 AM. Was expecting to be raked over the coals once I got there and apologised, but instead my superior repeatedly told me it was alright and that she was just worried if something had happened to me.

While I am usually a very reliable worker and often work close to 50 hour weeks (for a job that pays far lower than the median Australian salary), I don't feel good about it. At all. I stayed three hours after close of business just to try and make up for it and got off work at 8pm, something I was told I didn't have to do but did anyway. I feel especially bad because my superiors are genuinely nice to me and even though the job is tiring, requires a lot of task juggling, and doesn't pay very much at all, that's not their fault and I would really like to not disappoint them.

A few years ago, I went drinking with some friends, forgot to set my alarm and woke up at 11am on the day of a critical pitch (which I shouldn’t even have been in, but had been drafted into at the last minute), which started at 10.30, 20+ missed calls on my phone. Firing me would have been at least arguably justified. Instead, when I met my boss that afternoon, he said some variant of “This happens to everyone once. Consider this your one get out of jail free card. I won’t mention it again. If it happens again, you’re fired”.

I thought that was pretty fair.