Saturday, June 9, 2018

Why I am retiring at this time after only 15 years of service.

  After much thought and consideration, tears, prayer, number crunching, estimates, experimenting with the idea of different dates, I decided to retire effective June 13.  I have only two more working days!

  When I started working at Parks 11 1/2 years ago, I thought I would put in my twenty years and retire with full benefits.  A little foolish as I was 55.  For almost 10 years, I was very happy working in Parks.   A couple years ago I realized that I am slowing down and I decided to start taking it a little easier and start taking more time off.  Then changes at Parks.  Personnel changes at all levels. Last year we started changing accounting programs.  It has been terrible.  

  Then in my misery I remembered that my mother died at 70.  Her mother died at 68.  I will be 67 in September.  The toxic workplace was pushing me to join them.   

   In April I was so stressed and unhappy, I went to CalPERS ready to retire IMMEDIATELY, but they told me that I could buy back the service time from before I went home to raise my children. It would change my time from 11 1/2 years to 15.   It will increase my medical coverage from 55% to 75%.  It will increase my retirement check and they will take payment for the service time out of the increase.  I still come out a little ahead.  I decided to try to wait for the paperwork to be completed which they said could take 90 days. If necessary to save my sanity, I would "separate" without retiring and live off my savings until it was ready. Fortunately they were much quicker. 

It was hard to decide when to leave my coworkers whom I like and respect.  Arishma left the unit in April after a 2 week notice and they still have not even advertised the opening, let alone replace her.  So with the workload more than doubled, the unit is short handed.  In July, Marina will be off for 3 weeks to visit her mother country Russia. When I go, the unit will be 3 short.  But I have been miserable.  It is sucking the life out of me. I will never get my desk caught up. I cannot really make my coworkers have to work any harder - they are already working as hard as possible and extra hours.  The piles will just get bigger.  The employees we serve will have to wait longer - which does bother me.  But my peers have been amazingly supportive of my decision.  If you cannot save the others, save yourself.  The whole mess is not of my making and I cannot fix it. 

    This is the letter I am emailing to the Deputy Director, Human Rights Office, and my section chief on my last day.   It has been toned down considerably from when I started writing it. I could have said a good deal about the poor management in our unit, our section, and above. They do not seem to care about Parks or Parks employees.

Why I am retiring at this time after only 15 years of service.
I am getting old and tired.  The women in my family die young and I am approaching that age.

Fi$Cal is a major part of it. Partly Fi$Cal and partly how it has been handled.  
I seem unable to become proficient in Fi$Cal. This is a constant source of discouragement and frustration.  However, I know I am not alone. People throughout the office and throughout the Parks system are struggling. Fi$Cal is far from user friendly. At district level and at my level, it greatly increases work rather than simplifying. Working Fi$Cal is slow and frustrating. There are many, many new rules and they keep changing.

Fi$Cal itself is bad enough, but the transition has been poorly managed. Inadequate training, too much pressure to get more done than is humanly possible. Unrealistic, impossible deadlines. Our work has probably tripled.  We appear to have been in a state of emergency for nearly a year now.

The workplace atmosphere has become unhealthy and unhappy.. Every day I feel sick to my stomach coming to work. Nearly every day I and / or another co-worker is in tears because of exhaustion, discouragement, frustrations, unrealistic expectations pushed on us,  or treatment by management or (in some cases, not me) co-workers,. Here are two examples:
  • My unit asked for team training so we could help and learn from each other to better work in Fi$Cal.  We were told no.
  • Last week a co-worker was called in because she had been seen crying. Concern for her well-being? Offer support and counsel? No, to rebuke HER for creating a negative office atmosphere.

Parks in general and this office in particular was once a great place to work with an atmosphere of mutual respect, reasonable expectations, encouragement, and support.  The feel was of being a Parks family, with purpose and a feeling of being part of something good. I still love Parks and many Parks people, but our unit and the whole department has a different feel. I like and highly esteem the Travel staff - pleasant, smart, hard-working, helpful, team spirited, supportive. If not for them, I would have left much sooner. The unit atmosphere, however, is unhappy, stressed, and anxious.

By the end of the day no matter how hard I work even if I work extra time,   I am further behind than when I started. More work comes in than I can possibly do, not to mention the catch-up and backup. Some of my duties are almost totally neglected – mainly overseeing and working with Petty Cash accounts - which Fi$Cal is unprepared to handle - and reimbursing revolving fund. I cannot do enough.
Before all the changes here, I was a reasonably competent worker who enjoyed my job.  One of my former supervisors actually recently told me I was one of her best employees.. Now I am miserable and feel stupid and worthless.  I have reached the point now where even if the atmosphere changed and the workload became reasonable, I need to retire, but I want this to become a better place to work for those who stay and those who come in.  I want Parks to prosper and become a good place to work again before work place misery ruins the health and lives of workers, drives out too many good workers, and ruins our physical Parks that we are here to support