For almost… Probably two decades as of this year, actually, I’ve been getting up at six in the morning for work. Or, you know, whatever counts as work. That’s when I needed to get up in high school in order to get there on time, regardless of how I was getting there. In college, I almost always had a class at eight in the morning and, for a couple years, had an opening shift at the tech support desk in the library. Even on the days my class schedule was different, I still got up at more or less the same time unless it was specifically a day off or that was at the end of the week and didn’t have an 8am class. After I graduated, it was just easier to keep that same schedule going. I kept it going without issue until the pandemic rolled around. 2020 killed my ability to easily get up at the same time every morning and turned me from an easy early-riser who was always in bed and asleep by midnight into the current cluster-fuck of a sleep schedule I’m unfortunately maintaining to this day. For a while there in 2020 and 2021, I was waking up at whatever time every other week since I was only working every-other-week at my job and struggled to maintain a consistent time on the weeks I had work. I eventually got that under control again, around the time I started having insomnia issues and needed to structure my sleep better, and maintained that until last year. Then, last year, thanks to all the pain I was and how it ruined my ability to sleep last fall, I started letting myself sleep in a bit more so I could make sure to always get at least four hours of sleep. While I would let myself move my alarm time as much as I felt I needed, the default time that I always returned to was six. Always. Now, though, after some more developments at work along the same frustrating lines as the last ones, I’m throwing decades of history aside and setting my alarm an hour earlier. I’ve already had one miserable morning up an hour earlier as of writing this and I’ll have another five at minimum by the time you read this, so hopefully I’ll know if it’s working by then.

Once again, rather than talk to me about what’s going on, my coworkers have begun complaining to my boss who, once again, has let their comments pass without defending me. I do not know why they do this. I can’t think of a good reason why they won’t seek me out to talk about what I’m up to, if I am free to help them, or where in my to-do list their development is. The closest I can get to any kind of reason at all is that I don’t join for team lunches or thrice-weekly sit-around-for-an-hour-while-our-boss-holds-court pre-lunch events, but one of my coworkers doesn’t join those either and no one is complaining about him. But, regardless of why they do it at all, they’re complaining about not knowing what I’m doing most days, which is clearly an extention of the whole “annoyed that I’m not physically present and refusing to reach out to me digitally” stuff from last time. My boss, once agian, mentioned that he knows I’m getting work done and said, once again, it’s a visibility problem, so now I have to come up with a way for people to see what I’m doing every day. Or going to be doing. Or have done. I don’t know. He wasn’t really clear about what I was supposed to do other than solve this problem of people talking to him about what they might need from me that I’m not doing rather than talking to me about what they need from me. Because, of course, I definitely knew about all that stuff they wanted from me and was ignoring it. I definitely wasn’t unaware of half the crap that got brough up because people forget to put me on emails constantly and would apparently rather stew in silence for a week or two until my boss asks them what’s up in their one-on-one meetings than send me a message or an email or just walk across the lab to my office to talk to me about what my plans are for whatever thing they think needs testing immediately.

Given the way my boss pitched this, I can only think of two things going on here. One is that my boss doesn’t actually understand what I’m doing or feels that my reports on what I’m doing from week to week aren’t detailed enough (though he absolutely complains and gripes in a “joking but must be taken seriously because he’s my goddamn boss” manner if I ever get granular and specific) so he wants to change what he expects from me in terms of day-to-day or week-to-week accountability without actually saying that outright so he can maintain the “relaxed, chill, laid-back, and approachable manager” facade. The other is that my coworkers who are already paying attention to my schedule notice that I sometimes don’t get in until ten minute the morning and, since they all leave by half past four or five, don’t realize that I work until eight on those days in order to maintain my “ten-hour days five days a week” schedule because they’re never around to see it. I tried to ask my boss questions during our meeting to figure out if it was one or the other (and the vehemance with which he said that he didn’t have any suggestions about how to create a layer of accountability for unspecified other people makes me lean more toward the coworker issue), but I got nothing or any use to me and, as he suggested, will be spending time figuring out what to do.

Which is why I’m going to try getting up an hour earlier. No more late mornings for me. Now I’m going to try to be one of the first into the office. Then, with my ten-hour days, I’ll also probably still be leaving after them, so I will be present for their entire work day. If I do that for a couple weeks without changing anything else I’m doing and the complaints to my boss stop, then I’ll know that it was my coworkers once again not knowing my schedule (which I’ve cleared with my boss who loves to say that he doesn’t care when the work gets done so long as it does it done and done well!) and making judgments based on their incomplete information. If the complaints continue… I don’t know. I’ll probably still keep waking up at five in the morning so I can at least answer with “I was in the office when you got here, working, and was still working when you left” should it come up again. That’s as solid a plan as I’ve got other than somehow publicly posting my daily to-do lists (which I maintain on a notepad at my desk because no digital tool can replicate the great feeling of scratching off a to-do item) or posting my hour-to-hour accomplishments somewhere for everyone to see. After all, if what my boss says is true and this stuff isn’t for him, then this shit needs to be put together in a way that any of these random assholes I work with can find it to satisfy whatever part of them would rather judge than walk across a room to ask me what’s going on. That or I just make my rounds every morning and force my coworkers to directly speak to me about what’s going on in my day so that whichever one of these motherfuckers is complaining so much has to find something new to be shitty about.

The upside to getting up at five is that I’ll get done with work earlier and can participate in more weekly events with my Final Fantasy 14 group. And, if this horrible, seismic shift of my schedule is enough to shake me out of my bad sleep habits, then I’ll maybe even have enough energy to start spending time touching up my resume and applying for jobs with hopefully less-shitty coworkers. Or maybe even a job I can do completely remotely and in isolation so I can just be left to do whatever dumb shit I need to do to survive this capitalist hellscape of an existence long enough to get out from under my student debt and finally make some progress toward comfort and stability rather than just continuing to tread water for yet another decade.

And, like, the worst part of all of this is that, in the same meeting, my boss showed me the paperwork for a 5% raise, which is a really good raise for my workplace. A buck and a half more an hour, therabouts. So clearly he thinks I’m doing well enough to give me the best raise I’ve gotten since 2022, the year I was both promoted and given a raise (following two years where we skipped getting raises due to economic issues in the pandemic). Just sends a lot of shitty mixed-messages.