Yeah so — honestly there's really not much to it, it's basically the deep end, you just jump in and it sorts itself out.
Okay that's not true. There's the ticketing queue, the client escalation doc, and then the thing nobody writes down which is knowing which clients are lying when they say it's urgent. That part you just learn.
God, that’s a skill. I lost a whole week last month because I believed the regional manager’s “urgent.” It was a formatting error. He’ll deny it. My boss just stared at the spreadsheet and said, “Next time, prove it.” So now I CC her on everything. It’s exhausting, but at least the blame lands somewhere else. You ever get that sinking feeling when the queue refreshes?
Every single time. Refresh, count goes from twelve to thirty-one, and there's that half-second where you consider just closing the laptop and moving to a cabin somewhere. I used to CC my manager too — Petra — until she asked me to stop because it made her inbox "loud." Which, fine, but then who takes the fall.
Petra’s a nightmare. Loud? Is that what we’re calling it now? My manager, Dave, just ignores the CCs until something breaks. Then he asks why I didn’t “escalate sooner.” I stopped trying to protect him. Let it burn. It’s cleaner that way. I keep a separate log on my personal drive, just in case. They can’t fire you for a secret folder, right? Probably not. Definitely not. Right?
I mean — probably not, but I'd stop saying "secret folder" out loud even to me. Call it "personal notes." I kept something similar for two years, never needed it, but it made the whole thing bearable knowing it existed. Petra's not a nightmare exactly, she's just someone who thinks tone is the problem instead of the actual fires.
Tone. Jesus. Petra thinks vibes are a deliverable. Dave thinks silence is strategy. Both useless. I call mine "Personal Notes." Doesn’t matter. You know they’ll say it’s insubordination if they find out you’re documenting everything. It’s not about being right; it’s about having a paper trail when the “urgent” thing blows up in Q3. Do you still check the queue twice before logging off? I can’t stop. It’s a tic. Or a survival instinct. Can’t tell anymore.
Twice, sometimes three times, and the third one's pure superstition at that point, like checking the stove's off. Honestly it's not a tic, it's just what happens when the job trains you to distrust the last hour of your own day. I don't miss that part. The rest, a little.
Dave made me check four times. Said I was “leaving loose ends.” I started leaving intentional typos in the quarterly report. Small ones. So they’d have to come back to me. It was petty. It worked. Petra just nods and says “nice work” while forwarding the error to HR. I don’t miss the control either. The silence is worse. The inbox is loud, but the quiet is when you realize you’re just waiting for the next explosion.
That's the part nobody warns you about — you spend two years hating the noise and then it stops and you sit there like you forgot how to breathe without something on fire. I still refresh a queue that doesn't exist anymore. Muscle memory, or grief, hard to say which.
Petra quit last week. Blamed “burnout.” Her desk is empty now. Just dust. I keep my log. “Personal notes.” It’s full of things that never happened. I check it anyway. To see if I’m still there. Or if I’m just the absence of noise. Dave hasn’t filled her role. The queue is dead. I’m breathing. It’s terrifying.
That's — okay, that's a lot heavier than a Tuesday should be. Dust on a desk isn't a metaphor, it's just dust, someone should wipe it down before it becomes a whole thing. Get lunch away from the building. Seriously. Queues come back. People don't quit twice in one month.
God, you’re right. I’m spiraling. The dust is just dust. Petra’s gone. I’m alone. My hands are shaking. I’m going to get a sandwich. Actually leave the building. No refreshing the empty queue. Just bread and cheese. You’re right. It’s just lunch. Not a funeral. Thank you, Ivo. I needed that. Really.