wizardbeard

Been there, thankfully for only four years (if I remember right) I unfortunately hit burnout right after I signed a contract for a house, so I was stuck. Internal IT support. Due to turnover and company acquisitions I went from the second newest member of my team to the third most senior in two months. The userbase we supported quadrupled while we shrunk to 1/4 of the department size when I was initially hired. Then we had over a year where no new hires lasted longer than 6 months. They didn't add new slots for additional headcount until after I left.

Things that helped (but to be abundantly clear they did not solve the problems):

• Most companies have something somewhere in their employee handbook or company cult-ure stuff about being honest. So start being more honest than they want you to be. Don't name names, don't be an ass, but set expectations. "I understand your frustration, but we are severely understaffed. We have not had an increase in headcount for the last five years. I will handle this as soon as possible, but it will take at least [amount of time]." "I apologize for the delay. We only have three people on the team who have been here more than a month. We handle all internal IT support calls, routing tickets in the ticketing system, and manually handle almost every access change request for the company. If you are unsatisfied with the speed of our service, please contact [manager or hiring person].” If you make them have to listen to all the shit you're responsible for, some people will stop treating you like the only thing on your plate is their problem.

• Never ever ever go above and beyond. If your shift is over you are out. If that means something doesn't get done "on time", you make that shit the responsibility of the next person up your management chain and let them know. "What is more important, taking calls, properly logging the ones I took, or setting up accounts and access for new hires?" that sort of shit. That means being very outspoken about the amount of time things take, and proactively warning management as soon as it is obvious that you can't accomplish everything. Remember the magic phrase "How do you want me to prioritize this?" if they give you some wishwashy "it all has to be done" bullshit? "I appreciate your trust in my abilities to prioritize my workload. As previously stated, there are not enough man hours to meet every deadline. I will let you know what deadlines will need to be adjusted."

• Lack of staff to meet business needs is never the fault of the staff trying to meet the needs. It is always the fault of the people not properly staffing. Chances of change are slim, but change will never happen unless you allow the people responsible for the mess to feel the pain of their poor decisions.

• Heroic efforts to get something done never go unpunished.

• Get everything in writing. If they won't put it in text, then you do it. "To confirm our verbal discussion: [shit they said out loud that they know would make legal's head spin, like telling you to stop logging the overtime hours]"

Beyond all that, like others have said, do the bare minimum and start planning your exit. Do not take any of the stress home with you. You've already said they do everything to avoid paying severance, so turn it into a game of chicken so you can keep your pay while you apply elsewhere. With ten years experience, you have them by the balls.

Extra points if you can align things to put yourself on some project where you have an excuse to stay off answering the hotline. That was the biggest contribution to my bad mental state: taking calls from people who are always mad and see you as a safe outlet.

None of the anger of the users you support is your fault. If they have complaints, it's management's fault for not properly hiring enough manpower, and not setting proper priorities for the team. Just keep track of what you're doing and when so they can't claim you weren't working.

CBT as cognitive behavioral therapy, not cock and ball torture.

It's great!

Blocking the kind of unhinged people who dredge through someone's comment history for something to take out of context, comment personal insults, then edit the insults into image spam is still viable.

Don't feel dumb! This is just normal learning!

Symlinks are possible in Windows (at least in NTFS filesystems) but to my knowledge they aren't used by anything official.

Windows's weird "psuedo folders" thing it does with "Documents" etc is something else entirely.

This is thematically similar to an idea I brainstormed with a bunch of college friends ages ago.

Instead of an RPG with a fishing minigame, a full fledged fishing game with a semi-hidden JRPG side mode. Like one of those weirdly detailed Dreamcast fishing games, then halfway through you start fishing up vaguely Lovecraftian things. Things get weirder until someone dies in an accident during a tournament, and when that lake reopens you fish his undead body out and start some JRPG shit with Cthulhu and Atlantis. Complete that and it goes back to fishing game like nothing happened.

This was before the trend of "secretly a horror game" indie games, and the tone was more goofy than it sounds.

Anyway, I'll have to check this out!

Speedrunning terms are a gold mine for this sort of thing.

Most obvious one is "gay baby jail".

What part of it? The app itself? There are alternative clients. The protocol? It's made for people to host app repos, not to ensure everything hosted in an F-Droid compatible repo is safe. The fact that reproducible builds arenct enforced? There's always a gap where you're trusting a third party unless you're building everything from source yourself.

It's the android equivalent of a package manager.

F-Droid is like any other place you get apps and programs to run on one of your devices: caveat emptor. At least all packages are open source so you can review yourself.

This is as absurd as saying you don't use linux because someone could typosquat a fake repo or app through the package manager.

Would be nice to have some more content there leaning more into the weird than the depressing.

Of all the jokes C&H could do about "mouthful mode", this is far tamer than I was prepared for.

I can see the logic. The realities of day to day life and managing a household together are a considerably larger presence than most people realize until they're shoulder deep into adult life.

We can filter out NSFW work

[citation needed]

I have that turned on, and I heavily lean on blocking communities and users, and I still get NSFW shit fairly regularly.

Maybe make use of the existing blocking features, and use a client that has keyword filtering?

I've been able to get my experience pretty damn close to as filtered as I want it just with community, instance, and user blocking.