I am sitting up right now, nearly 3 in the morning when I have to work tomorrow because my husband has a cold and is snoring like a fucking freight train.
I am nearly in tears over it. The sound of someone snoring literally drives me up the wall.
I am filled with the desire to crawl out of my skin right now.
I know I shouldn't be, but it's always the reaction it's inflicted.
My mom was always a really bad snorer too.
And my husband never used to snore, but he has more and more lately. Usually it's little huffing or sucking noises in his throat as he sleeps and if I jostle him gently, he'll rearrange himself in his sleep and usually stop.
Not lately though. And the past two nights have been unbearable.
Sometimes it's intermitten and I can utilize 30 or so minutes of quiet to try and fall asleep.
But tonight it's been non-stop hardcore log sawing.
Listening to this sound drives me absolutely crazy and I am filled with rage.
I know it's totally selfish and irrational, but knowing that doesn't change anything.
I have to suppress the urge to elbow him in the face or violently kick him in the knee. It's so unkind to even let it cross my mind.
Some sounds just do that to me.
Crickets chirping. Clocks ticking. Faucets dripping. Dogs barking. Birds singing. Car alarms. Leaf blowers. Bad hip hop or dubstep with the bass turned way up.
Hearing these sounds fills me with dread and if it goes on long enough I start to feel like I'm actually going mad. Like, if a cricket is chirping somewhere outside and I'm trying to sleep, sometimes I can't even tell when/if it stops because I can hear the sound ringing in my head. I really have to concentrate or plug my ears sufficiently well in order to tell.
I just want to be able to sleep in peace.
Now I'm going to write about what I had originally meant to earlier tonight.
On Monday I left work early due to feeling like I was on the brink of a major anxiety attack and promising myself I could leave at my lunch hour was the only thing that got me through that first part of the day. I ended up having a good night because when I got home, me and the mister went and had dinner at our favorite Italian place, DeFalco's (an amazing joint in Scottsdale that is also a full deli and sells a small variety of imported groceries). I had stuffed shells and we shared a chocolate cannoli. Then we went to the nearby 'fancy mall' as I put it, because they have high end stores like Louis Vuitton, Prada and a Tesla dealership right inside the freaking mall. I only wanted to go because it is also the nearest Lush location and I wanted to give myself an inexpensive treat. I ended up buying a bright pink Rose Queen bath bomb and then we went to the Microsoft store where my husband decided he needs yet another computer (this would be his 4th functioning PC. He has a big powerful Vaio laptop for work, a smaller laptop that is just for running his soundboard and junk, and finally his Surface RT).
By leaving work and actually giving myself a somewhat nice night that I really needed, apparently I left the TTY station unstaffed.
For those of you who don't know (as if anybody is even reading this), TTY is a system that lets hearing impaired people call places like my work and communicate via text. It's exactly like instant messaging actually, just a bit more complicated. We only have two stations at my center and no on hardly ever calls it. But they're still required to have at least one open at all times. The TTY stations in my building are not for the Health Insurance Marketplace though. They're for our other major contract, Medicare. I came from the Medicare contract so I'm trained to use it.
I am rarely ever scheduled to be there, but this past Sunday I was scheduled for the entire day, which was amazing. No calls ever came in the 8 hours I was there, so I was just able to chat with my co-worker or play in MS paint all day. I was also scheduled to work the last two hours of my shift on Monday at the TTY station, which I was also looking forward to because it meant I'd definitely get to clock out on time for once.
Unfortunately, my stupid brain had different plans for me on Monday. I got to work and felt so completely shitty and anxious and just out of sorts that I could hardly bring myself to get on the phone. I was scheduled to do a few things right when I got there that weren't on the phone so I was able to put it off for a little while, but the time came for me to hit that stupid 'available' button and I was almost in tears.
I am relatively confident in my job, I feel pretty good about my knowledge level and think I usually do a good job. But most of the issues aren't in my or anybody else there's control and it gets so frustrating. You'd have to be living under a rock to have not have heard all the issues going on with the ACA Insurance Marketplace. The site is truly light years better than where it was on day one, but it's still not free of problems. The problems we're currently having have been really persistent and extremely hard to overcome. It also doesn't help that a lot of the temporary CSRs they hired are really shitty and stupid and refuse to do their job. I am internal support for them and have to take on calls when the caller requests a supervisor. So the majority of the callers I speak to are really pissed off for various reasons, and I'm usually pretty good at deescalating these types of calls, but as time goes on and only the really persistent problems remain, it gets harder and harder to make these people happy. A lot of the time, the call gets transferred simply because the CSR doesn't want to deal with them or doesn't know how to fix it and doesn't bother trying, OR they sound so ignorant that the caller just doesn't want to deal with them anymore. It's incredibly stressful.
Now if I had some kind of power or authority to fix these issues, I think I'd be a lot better off. But I just don't . They give us pretty much no authority even though we function as base level "supervisors" as far as the caller is concerned.
Just for example, today it took me over 30 minutes just to try to reset someone's password because the system is so cocked up and overloaded. It should have taken a regular CSR 2 minutes. Instead we wasted this person's time for probably close to 45 minutes at least (I don't know how long they were talking to the original CSR before they incorrectly dumped the caller on me).
On Monday, the prospect of all this really had me worked up, as it often does. The only way I could make myself get on the phone was to tell myself I only had to get through the first 4 hours and then I could go home. Fuck the 2 hours of TTY, because I'd never get though the first six.
When my lunch time came, I left and used the call out procedure and figured they had a backup TTY operator, considering they way over scheduled the day before and we had 1 - 2 extra people just waiting to cover the two of us who were logged in.
Today, I was walking to the break room for my last scheduled break and was stopped by one of my old supervisors who just happens to know everything there is in that building and is the unofficial point of contact for us TTY trained agents when we're scheduled. He's this somewhat crusty old New Yorker who loves golf and has a really dry sense of humor. He and I get along pretty well and he usually kids around with me. He stopped me and gently scolded me for not alerting him to the fact that I was leaving early on Monday cause they hadn't scheduled a backup. He says 'I know you weren't feeling well, but you have to let one of us know so we can figure out someone to cover you.'
I acknowledge what he says, and just to clarify, say 'I wasn't feeling sick here' as I point to my stomach, 'I'm sick here', I say as I point to my head. I as trying to be lighthearted about it, but letting him now I wasn't sick in the way that he meant, but that it was more of a mental health day.
He just shook his head and matter of factly said 'no you're not.'
'Seriously, Leo. I was on the brink of a panic attack', I tell him, dropping the light hearted tone in my voice and joking look on my face.
He just shakes his head again and looks me dead in the eye and says 'No you're not', and moved on the conversation.
I went to break and it didn't sink in for a few minutes, but it really pissed me off how he just brushed off my mental health. He has no idea what I go through, and yeah I'm not as bad off as a lot of people, and I can usually get myself through from day to day. Anxiety doesn't cripple me completely. But it takes its fucking toll and he has no right to make assumptions about my mental state. I hide my anxiety because I really can't afford to not. I have to do my job and most days I'm miserable and it goes from call to call and sometimes it's all I can do to not break down in tears between a constant barrage of insults and idiocy I deal with all day long.
Just because I'm not medicated or always visibly breaking down doesn't mean I'm ok.
(this is how I feel inside 90% of the time)
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