Tag: work

Life update (01/13/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This morning, at about eight, I found myself awake in this disappointing world once again. I decided to stay in bed for a little while longer, immersing myself in my usual daydreams that take place in 1972 and involve someone I would like to talk to. Then my phone rang. I don’t engage with people; I only use my phone to text my parents rarely. A call is always either spam or something bad.

It was the HR department of the Basque public health organization for which I worked as a technician for seven years. They were offering me a job to cover someone’s paternity leave. I was immediately distraught, but also confused, because I had spoken with the Occupational Health department last year, and given that nobody had called me for work in December, I figured the matter was settled. It clearly wasn’t. The job offer wasn’t at the usual hospital, but at another I’ve never worked (but that is located basically next door to the previous one). That threw me off bad. I asked the HR person if I could think about it. She told me that I could only think about it for like ten minutes at the most, because I was supposed to start this very same morning.

I hung up. Anxiety had already spiked to the point of nausea. Working in IT had sent me to the ER thrice for heart and brain problems. The last one made me feel like I had a stroke, and I’m not convinced that my brain left fully healed. They called it a hemiplegic migraine, something I had never experienced before. All triggered by stress.

I have so-called high-functioning autism, which, despite how it may sound like, is only high-functioning relative to autists that spend all day groaning and hitting themselves (or others). I also have the Pure O OCD comorbidity. Intrusive thoughts, adherence to strict patterns. Living in my mind, if I say so myself, is a sort of hell.

It was obvious from the beginning that working IT at a big hospital was like someone pushing me against a person-shaped whole in the wall that simply didn’t match. Day to day, you only rarely know what you’re going to deal with. Someone may call from an operating room because their computer has ceased working during someone’s spine surgery, and they know it’s not our job but the technician from the external company doesn’t know how to fix it and whether we could go and make it work. Someone may call you to blame “computer guys” because they accidentally gave a baby an incorrect dose and killed it. Both of which happened. Of course most are mundane like someone forgetting how their fingers work when typing their password. Or calling to say their computer didn’t have internet, claiming that nothing had changed, and neglecting to say that they had pulled out the network cable and put it back on incorrectly.

I could mention many things about that job. All I want to say is that by the end, they put me in charge of supervising the replacement of about one thousand printers across the complex. That involved me going room to room, meeting people, having to argue with them because they didn’t want their printers replaced, asking me to install functionalities that I had nothing to do with handling, and the general bitching that you get when you put women together in an office. I also struggled to handle a Gen-Z worker who was a pain in the ass, to put it mildly. Motherfucker agreed to replace printers in some rooms at some time and date, which had me organizing with local workers to avoid disturbing their schedules, only for the motherfucker to change his mind basically because he felt like replacing other printers. He also did things like leaving work early then telling his boss that I had claimed he could replace nothing more that day.

By the end, I was done with everything. My brain made it clear when I suddenly smelled of burnt dust, my right hand could barely hold my pen, and I lost sensitivity in the right half of my body. Hemiplegic migraine, so said a doctor younger than me. In the past, some doctors had gotten annoyed when I mentioned the fact that I had only started experiencing heart issues when they jabbed me with the Moderna poison, which now is widely known to cause heart problems. I have very, very little confidence in the medical profession after having had to deal with them both as a worker and as a patient.

But I figured, I’m unemployed, I’m unlikely to get work as a forty-year-old programmer who has only worked at it for nine months in the last ten years, at least under contract. So I called the HR person back and said that I was taking the contract. A month and a half at a new hospital dedicated purely to cancer patients. After I hung up, I groaned out of pure psychic pain. The anxiety in my chest was something akin to panic.

I was waiting for the bus when I received a call from HR. A supervisor. Asked me how come I had accepted a job at the other hospital when they had been informed by Occupational Health that I wasn’t taking offers as a technician. That I can’t choose to work as a technician for one hospital but not another. I told them that I thought Occupational Health had already handled that. They told me they would call back. I waited at the bus stop while construction workers drilled incredibly loudly close by, and some fucking imbecile listened to music without earbuds. I thought, as I do often, about how is it possible that people actually want to live in this world. About five minutes before my bus came, HR called back. I was supposed to meet with Occupational Health immediately.

So I took the bus to Donostia and met with the doctor who had seen me previously. I thought she had declared me unfit for the job position due to my autism, OCD, and 52% disability in general. My certification for “job fitness” is currently expired. She told me that I should have spoken with HR to tell them that I quit the job listings. Then she asked me if I had been looking for a job in the meantime. I told her no, that I had been dealing with autism-related issues and that I struggled to leave the house. Then I stopped talking because I felt like I would tear up.

In the end, she told me that she’d speak with HR and tell them not to call me for technician jobs anymore. Right now I’m beginning to feel relieved about it, but on my way back, I was in a bad place. Standing at the bus stop with my earbuds on, listening to nineties Weezer, while old people milled about close by, asking people about bus times. A young woman stopped before me to ask likely for the same thing, and I pointed at my earbuds without making eye contact. All I wanted, all I want really, is to be left the fuck alone. For the world to forget I exist. To have a small place for myself and to be left in peace.

Anyway, I guess that’s it. I really hope I’ll never hear from that public health organization again jobwise. But I suspect that I’ll receive a call from HR at some point for me to formalize abandoning the job listings.

In forty years, I feel like I haven’t changed at all in what matters. I’m still that child that wanted to be left to his devices and daydream the day away. Everything else is just garbage that society has piled up on me. What I’ve learned from my experience is that I’m not suited for anything that society demands of me. I have no plans for the future either. If it gets too bad, the recourse is a tall bridge. I don’t like being around anyway.

Life update (12/17/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

It seems I’m programming for the long run. The big boss at our office told me that he had asked HR to prolong my current contract for three months, so I’d be working until April, but there’s a good chance it could be extended further for a total of nine months. My case is tricky, because I can’t speak Basque (and I will never get that certificate; even if I remotely intended to get it, I barely passed Basque even in school). In any case, when my boss got the news from the head of HR that my extension had been prolonged, he seemed quite enthused, but I thought, “Why would anybody want me for anything?”

This couple of weeks that I’ve been programming in an office otherwise filled with regular computer technicians has been far calmer than the rest of the six years I’ve worked here. I need calm, given that stress literally landed me in the ER at least a couple of times, one of them possibly causing me a small stroke (I’m still waiting for someone to call me to schedule an MRI). When I’m programming on my own, I’m in charge of structuring the whole thing, figuring out how a real-life problem could be turned into a programmable system; working as a paid programmer for a company, I just program whatever I’m told. It usually involves reworking the same stuff over and over, but what do I care? I’m a wage slave.

Of course, all this stuff is far removed from what I actually intended to do with my life. Growing up, I wanted to be a comic book artist. A bit later, I wanted to be a writer. More accurately, I wanted to produce interesting stories and be paid for it so I wouldn’t need to spend my limited time on this Earth (and presumably in any other planet) by doing things I didn’t feel like doing. However, realistically, as an ethnic European man that doesn’t hate his own kind, and that doesn’t have connections on top of that, I’m pretty much fucked when it comes to getting published traditionally.

I recall a relatively famous case in Spain a few years back, when an author with a female name won a prize supposedly based on the quality of the book, but it turns out that the author was actually three dudes. There was talk of revoking the award. Surely the book was judged on its merit, right, not because it was written by a woman? But the reality is that those dudes chose a female pen name because in this day and age, that made their book far more likely to be published.

Anyway, I thought recently about the last times I worked professionally as a programmer. You see, before I landed a job in the public sector, I only worked for private companies. My experience there taught me that it wasn’t for me, mainly because they didn’t want someone like me. Private companies seem to be mostly about fitting in, while in the public sector, you have to screw up severely to get fired. Fairly often, some of my coworkers keep yapping like school boys during recess, and you’re seen as the one with a problem if you have anything against it. In turn, my last programming job at a private company ended because a supervisor believed that I wouldn’t fit in with the team. Note that I had given them six months of my life for free as part of an internship through an institution that handles autistic people, so they knew what they were getting. My direct boss at the company, with whom I had been handling technical matters, argued with the supervisor, but it seems that the supervisor didn’t care about performance. That was the same supervisor that often had all the team seated around the table during breaks, listening in silence to her talking about her private life. It wasn’t the first job experience of that kind I had, so I wasn’t surprised. Still, I remember the HR woman who gave me the news telling me that I should be proud I had programmed the intranet for the company. Yeah, why don’t you spit in my face directly, lady?

The best chance I had at making it as a programmer in a private business was right after the 2008 crash. Somehow I got a job at a big name company of the province (or even the country), with its own multi-storied building in the Zuatzu business park in Donostia (same business park where the protagonist of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked works, but a different building). I didn’t like the job itself, which involved putting together the HTML and CSS of a website, as well as programming it in PHP or ASP, but that’s the kind of stuff you usually do as a programmer unless you’re engaged with very particular projects, and for those they often demand a college degree. I couldn’t get through even the first semester of college due to my inability to deal with numbers, that borders dyscalculia.

Anyway, I worked from nine to half past five, if not longer, with an hour and a half of lunch time that you were often expected to spend with teammates for informal reunions. I’m autistic, so dealing with people drains me horribly. I often fell asleep on the train. Once, I was so out of it that I even took the train in the opposite direction, and I realized it about forty minutes later, when I woke up in the middle of the province. Most of the time, when I managed to get home, I just felt like sleeping. I was beyond miserable. My life alternated between stints as a hikikomori and miserable stretches of jobs, some unpaid, so I dealt with suicidal ideation very often. I recall one time that my father entered my bedroom and I had passed out while eating chips: I was slumped on the chair with bits all over my chest, and for a moment my father thought I was dead. If only.

By the end of my time working there, they had started pressuring me to work overtime. My supervisor offered to drive me home in her car. I hate being driven around by virtual strangers, as that prolongs the torture of having to deal with people, so I never agreed. It was the kind of place where if you refused to work overtime, you pretty much had no future in the company. Curiously, when my six months contract was coming to an end, they told me that the following week, they planned to have me working on whatever else. I said that I wasn’t going to continue working there: my contract ended on Friday. They told me that they had planned to extend it, but I refused. I was so miserable that I simply didn’t want to remain there any longer. One of my bosses, annoyed, said that I should have given them a fifteen-days notice, but I said that I doubted it, because the end of my contract was already set. Pretty sure they’re supposed to give me the choice to extend my contract with some advance. I was also earning close to minimum wage, so it’s not like I was in the mood for anything. In any case, a couple of hours later I was called into a meeting by a boss of my immediate boss. She was an attractive woman in her mid-to-late twenties. She told me that she had “fought” for me to get me a higher wage, but added, in a sort of “threatening” manner, that it would involve more responsibility. I didn’t want to keep working there, and I particularly didn’t want more responsibility, so I refused. I still remember clearly how the young woman’s smile dropped. Why go through such trouble trying to keep me there, anyway? And do people actually want more responsibility? Is it for the higher wage or something? I can’t imagine why someone would want harder and more stressful tasks to do at a job that you don’t want to be involved with in the first place.

The sole thing I regret of not spending more time at that company is that I had a crush on one of the workers. I wouldn’t go as far as call her a coworker; there were like forty people in that large office, and I had no clue what she did. She was a beautiful, kind redhead who was dating another employee. You still remember these things, it seems; I have a picture in my mind of that young woman seated at her workstation and looking up at me with beautiful eyes and a smile that I likely didn’t deserve. She must be like forty now. I bet that if I reach my eighties, I’ll still recall these still photos of beautiful girls from my youth.

After I walked out of that office building for the last time, I recovered by remaining unemployed, and probably doing very little of anything, for a few months. Perhaps it was one of those periods in which I showered once a week, if even that. Ultimately, whatever. The older you get, the more memories you amass, even if, as in my case, you try to control what you are exposed to, just in case I end up merely feeding awful stuff for my OCD to exploit via intrusive thoughts.

Abrupt ending.