the fiery stabby lancey kind of pain
Apr. 16th, 2011 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I am in a just plain stupid amount of pain today. I pretty much wrecked both shoulders this week. But here's the backstory: I have really stupid shoulders. I think I've mentioned it before. They're hypermobile, meaning that they don't stay in the sockets-- my normal range of motion involves dislocating them. That's just how they move. (It surprised me recently to find out that other people can't pop them in and out. That's not normal? I really honestly thought it was.) The problem is that because of derby, I keep falling and landing on them, and when the rink floor is as filthy as it's been lately, slick with dust, my arms go flying out at weird angles and before I know it, the shoulder's out and then my whole body weight comes crashing down. And that's the thing-- my shoulders can be partway out of the sockets just fine, they're designed to do that, but they're most definitely not designed to bear weight while they're like that. They come out so I can, y'know, fasten my bra, or itch my back, not so I can land on my wristguard full-force.
So I've subluxed both (one on Tuesday, one on Thursday), both to the point of losing feeling in my fingertips afterward, and that totally sucks. And worse, I tensed up all my neck muscles as this was happening, or afterward, and now I've got pinched nerves in like eight places. And then while doing a jammer/blocker drill, I twisted to evade a hit, like a fucking moron, and got popped by the blocker who was doing her job, and wrenched the shit out of one of my lower back muscles. I know which one it is, I just don't know what it's called; I tore the same one on the other side a couple of years ago, and wound up in the ER cuz it hurt so bad I thought it was kidney failure. (Have some ibuprofen, they said. That'll be $700 please.) Apparently there's three layers of lower-back muscle, and the innermost one connects your hip to your back, and that's the one I keep fucking with while skating. Well, twice in five years isn't bad.
But it just means that, while I'm not seriously injured and I'm very grateful for that and know how fortunate I am, I'm still one big useless ball of pain. On top of that there's a work fuckup that's got me furious-- basically dicking around with my schedule. Last week Friday I was told that I was working Saturday. The schedule had been updated via the online interface, which doesn't load on my computer reliably, and usually crashes on my phone, but the printed out version hanging on the wall in the store, which everyone looks at every day, hadn't been. I don't often work Saturdays, because I have derby events on two or three out of four Saturdays in any given month between January and July. So I worked six days last week, dropped everything and postponed everything and didn't get any rest and exhausted myself.
And then yesterday as I'm about to leave work someone says, "See you tomorrow!" and I laughed until I realized they were serious. Yes, again, the schedule had been updated online, but the printed-out copy? Still hadn't. And what's more, this time it wasn't that I'd been taken off another day and not realized; I actually had just straight-up been scheduled to work six days in a row. Which if I did, I'd get howled at for getting unnecessary overtime.
So I said no. And now I feel bad, and I'm going to be thought of as the unstable bitchy prima-donna who's just too good to work weekends, so I'm feeling like a total piece of shit about that. But I can't work six days in a row two weeks in a row! I dropped everything last week to come in, with no warning or notice, I pushed everything I'd planned on doing back, rescheduled things, left the house in a ruins and a shambles. (I don't have Sundays off; I have them off from work, but I usually spend 4-6 hours on derby on Sundays. Last week I spent 8.) And I wasn't thanked. I wasn't rewarded. No one recognized that I'd done anything out of the ordinary. Not like I'm a glory hound, but I felt like I'd been put in a really rough spot and had come through doing the right thing and had certainly not been the one in the wrong or who had made a mistake, but had done all the suffering for the mistake that had been made.
I'm not going to do it two weeks in a row. I'm just not. I'm going to have to be the bitchy jerk prima-donna. Because being the nice person who pulls it together and makes things work? Just means the people making mistakes can just, consequence-free, keep making them with no problem. I have a bad feeling that the poor girl who asked for the day off as she was supposed to is the one who got punished, being pulled in to work today and miss the family event she'd been meant to go to today-- and that's a shame, because it wasn't her mistake either. But it definitely wasn't mine, and it isn't my problem. I am in a ton of pain, I am exhausted, my life is in fucking ruins and I will never ever manage to catch up on all the shit I'm already behind on, and they pay me nine fucking dollars an hour at this job and I know no matter how many extra responsibilities I take on myself and whatever else I try to do, I will never get a raise or manage to transition this into a "career". It's a dead-end fucking retail job, which I do far better than it warrants, which I enjoy inordinately and appreciate that I'm learning about things that interest me from, but it's still a dead-fucking-end job and there is no rocket science required in printing out a new copy of an updated schedule and letting someone know that she is working very unusual hours, namely, six days in a row two weeks in a row. And it seems to me like, since the stakes here are kinda low, asking her first might be kind of a, I don't know, nice thing to do.
BUT I WOULDN'T KNOW. Because I am only the kind of loser who is 31 and works a dead-fucking-end retail job; it's not like my time is important or my life is worth any kind of consideration.
AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.
So, pretty much, the entire world can fuck right off.
So I've subluxed both (one on Tuesday, one on Thursday), both to the point of losing feeling in my fingertips afterward, and that totally sucks. And worse, I tensed up all my neck muscles as this was happening, or afterward, and now I've got pinched nerves in like eight places. And then while doing a jammer/blocker drill, I twisted to evade a hit, like a fucking moron, and got popped by the blocker who was doing her job, and wrenched the shit out of one of my lower back muscles. I know which one it is, I just don't know what it's called; I tore the same one on the other side a couple of years ago, and wound up in the ER cuz it hurt so bad I thought it was kidney failure. (Have some ibuprofen, they said. That'll be $700 please.) Apparently there's three layers of lower-back muscle, and the innermost one connects your hip to your back, and that's the one I keep fucking with while skating. Well, twice in five years isn't bad.
But it just means that, while I'm not seriously injured and I'm very grateful for that and know how fortunate I am, I'm still one big useless ball of pain. On top of that there's a work fuckup that's got me furious-- basically dicking around with my schedule. Last week Friday I was told that I was working Saturday. The schedule had been updated via the online interface, which doesn't load on my computer reliably, and usually crashes on my phone, but the printed out version hanging on the wall in the store, which everyone looks at every day, hadn't been. I don't often work Saturdays, because I have derby events on two or three out of four Saturdays in any given month between January and July. So I worked six days last week, dropped everything and postponed everything and didn't get any rest and exhausted myself.
And then yesterday as I'm about to leave work someone says, "See you tomorrow!" and I laughed until I realized they were serious. Yes, again, the schedule had been updated online, but the printed-out copy? Still hadn't. And what's more, this time it wasn't that I'd been taken off another day and not realized; I actually had just straight-up been scheduled to work six days in a row. Which if I did, I'd get howled at for getting unnecessary overtime.
So I said no. And now I feel bad, and I'm going to be thought of as the unstable bitchy prima-donna who's just too good to work weekends, so I'm feeling like a total piece of shit about that. But I can't work six days in a row two weeks in a row! I dropped everything last week to come in, with no warning or notice, I pushed everything I'd planned on doing back, rescheduled things, left the house in a ruins and a shambles. (I don't have Sundays off; I have them off from work, but I usually spend 4-6 hours on derby on Sundays. Last week I spent 8.) And I wasn't thanked. I wasn't rewarded. No one recognized that I'd done anything out of the ordinary. Not like I'm a glory hound, but I felt like I'd been put in a really rough spot and had come through doing the right thing and had certainly not been the one in the wrong or who had made a mistake, but had done all the suffering for the mistake that had been made.
I'm not going to do it two weeks in a row. I'm just not. I'm going to have to be the bitchy jerk prima-donna. Because being the nice person who pulls it together and makes things work? Just means the people making mistakes can just, consequence-free, keep making them with no problem. I have a bad feeling that the poor girl who asked for the day off as she was supposed to is the one who got punished, being pulled in to work today and miss the family event she'd been meant to go to today-- and that's a shame, because it wasn't her mistake either. But it definitely wasn't mine, and it isn't my problem. I am in a ton of pain, I am exhausted, my life is in fucking ruins and I will never ever manage to catch up on all the shit I'm already behind on, and they pay me nine fucking dollars an hour at this job and I know no matter how many extra responsibilities I take on myself and whatever else I try to do, I will never get a raise or manage to transition this into a "career". It's a dead-end fucking retail job, which I do far better than it warrants, which I enjoy inordinately and appreciate that I'm learning about things that interest me from, but it's still a dead-fucking-end job and there is no rocket science required in printing out a new copy of an updated schedule and letting someone know that she is working very unusual hours, namely, six days in a row two weeks in a row. And it seems to me like, since the stakes here are kinda low, asking her first might be kind of a, I don't know, nice thing to do.
BUT I WOULDN'T KNOW. Because I am only the kind of loser who is 31 and works a dead-fucking-end retail job; it's not like my time is important or my life is worth any kind of consideration.
AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.
So, pretty much, the entire world can fuck right off.
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no subject
Date: 2011-04-18 03:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-18 11:33 am (UTC)Thing is, I make so little at this job that if I got fired it would be a blessing. I'd make more working fast food-- they give you raises at Mighty Taco every so often-- so really the sole reason to work there is because I'm interested. Ugh.
(Slightly separate concern is that I'm having one of my periodic bits of total despair; why is it that other people manage to have careers when I haven't even caught on to the concept yet?)