I hate pdfs. I hate dead links. I also hate disorganization in the workplace and not having the tools nor collateral that we should. Yet, there I was sitting at my desk listening to a horror gameplay while reviewing the emails in my inbox and reading the slack messages from co-workers.
It was just a stream of questions asking about how to do this? When do I get that? I can’t log in! Can you please help me? All of the links on the attached pdf are dead!
Mind you the pdf isn’t mine, it’s a corporate document that looks so bad that even a first grader with a handful of torn coloring book pages and a box of markers could do it better.
The emails? Misdirected. These should be going to the actual person who assisted you, not me. I did one step one step in the middle which is 10% of the process. Yet, the emails, the texts, the never-ending frustration pinging through slack messages made me want to do something. Not that this is rare, but corporate life is not a reward. More work means even more work. I don’t want that and I especially don’t need that after last quarter killed all of my healthy lifestyle progress. I was doing so fucking well.
After a few more days of ignoring it and my inbox filling up with the lost and clueless, I gave up and started thinking of the easiest way to get the information the client needs without rocking the corporate boat. I’m lying. This place is running on the finest source of gaslighting provided by the Wizard of Oz.
A company of innovation, but no actual tools to do the job. The internal tools? Microsoft 365 web edition emails are viewed in a web browser. The external clients? They’re provided with Vue projects lifted off of Code Pen and cloaked as a dashboard along with a white label social media platform that the Dev team slapped a logo on and took credit for developing the entire thing.
They even crack jokes about waking up early just to finish coding so that they could share their amazing project. It’s all hilarious because even when you’re pretending to be a Developer, you have to do some sort of Developer work and that source code, babe, is straight calling you a liar.
If you do anything that solves the problem or give actual solutions you will be given the grand prize of opening up slack to see a message from the top reminding employees about compliance which is laughable when you see that they’re whole corporate website is exposed under the hood. Yet, despite all of that I have this serious problem that I hate. I really need to go to therapy for it, but I swear I’m doing better. The problem is.
I like to help, but I love fixing things.
This should be easy, right? Give the external clients the information they want. Make it digestible. Make it clean. Make it so that you never have to read these stupid fucking emails again or at least make it rare.
Now, here’s the other problem — Money. Not that I don’t have any, but I’ve spent more than enough money on tools and subscription services to use the correct tools to do my job. This is infuriating because they could actually supply us with the tools needed if they weren’t so gung ho about being as ridiculously inefficient as possible.
I debate on tools and start clicking around. Coda? ClickUp? Trello? Anything in Google Workspace? Ok! I got it! Maybe Canva? They now have docs in there, right? Eventually I settled on Notion.
I’m not a fan of Notion. I think Notion is for the children, but this workplace is full of children so this is perfect. I sign up and I start cranking out these guides so that I can give the poor people in my inbox some sort of direction.
I’m happy. I’m glad. I’m devasted because as quickly as I fixed the problem I got hit with a demand for rent from Notion.
I made a mistake. I added my non work account as another user nothing much of it and even after removing my additional account since I had 3 pdfs that were over the 5MB upload limit I would have to move to a subscription.
Notion, I’m not paying you $12 a month. You have so much money that you’re able to sponsor multiple youtubers that have only used your product once. I went over by 2MB and now I’m basically paying a $6 per megabyte overage fee like this a Verizon Wireless data plan.
Instead of spinning myself into a hurricane of annoyance or doing what I usually do and say, “Oh, it’s just $12 a month.” and talking myself into it. I decided to do the one thing I should’ve done from the start.
I ran and logged into my web hosting account. Entered my credentials and started creating blog categories that are named by each department within the company, installed two plugins and began copying all of the content that was on Notion over to WordPress.
I don’t need another subscription in my life and I especially don’t need another subscription that is a reminder tax of how fucked the workplace is. Also, I’m so done with every single app having monthly/yearly subscriptions and they all start at $10 a month. $120 a year for a nice digital notepad and keep in mind that most people that purchase apps aren’t just buying one single app it’s at least two or three which is about $360 a year on apps that we most likely had to purchase because our workplace thinks that all we need are SharePoint Sites that they never update and Microsoft Word Documents to share. It’s so embarrassing, but what can you really do? Well, you can be like me. Be helpful, but stay mindful. I made a pledge to stop purchasing apps for work and you should, too!
I’m quite pleased with the decision I made. No money was given to Notion and another subscription was averted. I do wonder about what else I could use this WordPress website for though, if you’re using WordPress for work what are you using it for? Let me know because I would to hear it! xo – Kirby
The featured image was provided by Team Noco Loco and the middle photo was provided by Isaac Smith. Both photos can be found on Unsplash.
