What a week
I had a weird week. I started a new job last monday. Nothing too radical. Software contracting to make a little money for now. It didn’t go well.
There was nearly a fist fight in the office on my first day. The next morning, one guy got fired. And another that evening.
One of my coworkers seemed very comfortable making jokes that made me very uncomfortable. For example, pointed out jocularly that software branch “master-seperated” sounded suspiciously similar to “master-baited.”
Later, he was talking to the lead developer, the only other dev in the office, about all the guns he owned, and proclaiming how no one would ever take them away.
Somehow this turned into how he would never even consider wearing a mask due to a medical condition he described as “common sense.”
The lead dev vehemently agreed, and expanded on it by educating the office on the dangers of covid vaccines. “You don’t even know what kind of nanotechnologies they have in there.”
I was annoyed, but a little unsurprised to witness this at an in person office job in Florida.
Thursday was a relief. Both of them worked from home.
On Friday, just after I had made my morning coffee, but well before I had started being productive. The lead dev brought up the ship stuck in the Suez Canal. I was the only other person in earshot. “It’s pretty wild,” I said. He replied, “Yeah, and especially since it’s tied to the Clinton Foundation.”
I won’t recount the rest of the conversation. He got through two or three anti-semitic comments before I fully realized what was happening and shut it down. I didn’t talk to him much the rest of the day.
Our boss, who happens to be the CEO of the company, was on vacation until Tuesday and I spoke to him as soon as I could. He was incredibly apologetic for everything that happened last week, and asked for an opportunity to make things right.
Step one of that process involved bringing the dev lead into his office for what I assume was a stern talking to. The lead was noticeably different coming out of that meeting. In an apparent effort to start making amends, he asked me out of the blue if I was uncomfortable with him refusing to wear a mask. “Yeah,” I muttered shyly. He responded by explaining that he knows the science, and knows that it’s actually more dangerous to wear a mask, and he knows nurses who say he shouldn’t wear a mask, and he knows that the coronavirus isn’t actually as dangerous as media and some politicians make it out to be, and he knows that he’ll never even catch the disease since all he does is come to work and go home, so he knows he couldn’t pass it to me.
The other dev reiterated that he was precluded from wearing a mask, due to his CS, or common sense.
Before I left that evening, I told the CEO that I quit.
The last time I quit a job, I got food poisoning on my first unemployed night, so on the whole I’m doing a lot better this time. Last night I went downtown to walk around and watch the sunset. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a sunrise in months, so I decided to come back this morning.
It was a lot easier waking up than I expected.
