Mental Health Day

The other day, I got a company-wide email from the head of HR at one of my clients. I've worked with this outfit for years, and have always had an internal email address. So I get to see this stuff, even if it doesn't apply.

The purpose of the email was to announce that Tuesday, November 3rd, was being declared a Wellness Day that everyone should take off. 

In her note, the HR head mentioned that this was what we used to refer to as a mental health day. And that, between the pandemic and (for U.S. employees) the election, everyone deserved one. So, a day off.

I was never a big one for taking a mental health day. The only time I can remember taking one was when I worked for Wang and just had a day when I could not bear going in. Amazing, given what a terrible place Wang was, that I only acted on this impulse one.

Other than the folks I worked with, who were wonderful - and working with great people does count for plenty - Wang was just god-awful. 

It was an extreme bureaucracy that made it nearly impossible to get anything done in an expeditious way. I was in an outlier group, dedicated to the financial services industry, and our products were software, not hardware. (They did run on Wang gear, of course.) But the entire product development and release process was built for hardware manufacture, which just didn't work for software releases - especially for those of us in a niche market. So we were always scurrying around trying to see what we could get away with without going through the Wang process.

We'd cut our own disks to ship to clients, we'd copy our documentation rather than have it printed, we'd go guerrilla to get marketing collateral created. 

I once enlisted two fellows in my group to pose as clients for a datasheet, as it was going to take months to get the professionals in on the act. This backfired a bit, as both of my models had five-o'clock shadow, a problem that the professionals might have used makeup to get around. Nonetheless, I got my datasheets printed within a couple of weeks, not the months it would have taken if I'd played by the rules. After all these years, I can still picture exactly what Jack and Charlie looked like on those datasheets. Thanks, guys!

A colleague once brought her hairdryer into work so she could fake "shrink wrap" the documentation for her product so it would look more like an official Wang release.

The bureaucracy was just one terrible aspect of Wang. 

The physical plant was terrible, and by end of my time there, Wang had pared down on niceties like emptying the trash and replacing burnt out lightbulbs. One day, while taking the staircase down a few flights, I nearly walked into a ginormous loogie that someone had hawked up. 

One of my male colleagues reported that he'd gone into a stall in the men's room and found a row of dried boogers lined up over the toilet paper roll.

It was that kind of place. 

Plus a terrible commute. Plus perpetual lay-offs. 

So it was amazing that I took only one mental health during the 2 years, 7 months, and 17 days I worked there. (Not that I was counting.)

Inevitably, me being me, I didn't enjoy that mental health day in the least. In fact, it made me sick. 

Still, it was better than being at Wang.

Anyway, Pink Slip will be taking a mental health day today, even though I may be in far greater need of one come tomorrow.

I will spend the day trying to avoid the news, and I'll be reciting the Biden mantras: Truth over lies. Science over fiction. Unity over division. Hope over fear. 

Everything else is a bunch of malarkey.