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apropos of nothing, completely separate from anything else, but an unnamed esports company who made a game that can be abbreviated similarly to "laughing out loud" was a customer of a certain hosting company i worked for around a decade ago.
the company was small, i worked second shift, 2-10:30PM, and would regularly have to put in extra hours. as a salaried employee. around 11:30 on a friday night, after i'd been off-shift but catching up random shit, someone from the esports company calls our support line.
support line is officially urgent, production down situations only. third shift lead is busy, gives them to me thinking it'll be a "we can discuss next week" kind of thing. esports company has a tournament, saturday afternoon and evening. they need 20 servers. less than 24 hours.
"i don't have 20 servers i can rack and stack and configure tonight, you guys are windows customers & i'm a linux guy. this isn't going to happen." i have like 6 servers in the warehouse iirc, they've already been earmarked for someone else. guy is pissed, threatens me, hangs up.
i'm worked up, as you'd imagine. then the phone rings again, this time it's the CEO of my company telling me to get the esports guy 20 servers. "no, i can't, we don't have them." do it, is the answer. i repeat myself, he calls the esports guy back and they "compromise" on...
me installing 10 servers - that we don't have - getting their extremely customized windows server images deployed and turning over for smoke test before breakfast. haha! i was told in no uncertain terms i can't say "no" to a customer, regardless of how ridiculous the request is.
spent the majority of the next 4 or 5 hours unboxing new servers, assembling the "missing" servers from spares, racking all of them, networking, getting hypervisors installed, starting the windows server deployments, wrapped up a bit before dawn.
turned over the last bits to the ass end of third shift and first people to come in on first shift, who already had too much work to do, but i'd been working for something like 16 hours straight and was fried.
on monday i get a few "thank yous" but, more importantly, i get a $50 amazon gift card! yay! and also told that if i ever tell a customer no again - this was the second or third time i'd called bullshit on this - i would be "made uncomfortable." i.e., fired or moved to 3rd shift.
this was a failure of management on the part of two companies. yet of course i carried the failure - somehow this was my fault. my life completely fell apart a few months later due to overwork, stress, depression, etc. from this situation, yet i still carried that.
i still do. i am lazy most days, unapologetically so in a lot of cases, and i try to keep my head down in most every professional situation because the fact you can be recognized as "a doer" leads to people taking advantage of you, and sometimes, outright abuse.
that abuse is a symptom, and a tactic, it is infectious and endemic. dehumanization is part of the design of capitalism, it is injected at every step to literally and metaphorically remind you who the boss really is. it's hard to be shocked it's rampant at every level of an org.
i don't have an answer. there's no moral, other than be vigilant and be vindictive because whether or not you know it, you've earned that. a system designed to use us - people - as interchangeable commodity is never going to be forgiving, and humans cannot be treated that way.
anyway enough serious posting. i hate threads. pee pee poo poo
