Mule me

©2022 Michael Raven

There was a bit of pile-on yesterday, which prompted a number of changes in my approach towards quite a few elements in my life. Not all have been implemented, but I have decided they must be made and I can be a stubborn mule when I decide I’ve had enough of something (see my sobriety and smobriety).

I had been looking into reducing the number of virtual services that I pay for: memberships and whatnot. One of those was Comixcology Unlimited. Comixcology was purchased by Amazon a while back and they merged in the past year. It was never any easy service to find what was “free” to read (Amazon-owned or independent), but it’s been harder since the final stages of the merger, where they force you to use Amazon’s site to find content that you have access to (while Amazon is great for searching for things to buy, they don’t seem to want you to find the subscription-based reading… unless you aren’t paying for it already, in which case, their “unlimited” stuff ranks higher in searches than what you actually want to read).

Those issues aside, I just haven’t been much in the mood to read what I can as part of the service, so I was toying with cancelling.

And then I got the email telling me that another subscription service I originally got through Amazon (and is still owned by multibillionaire Bezos) was no longer offering me the Amazon Prime discount. While I like getting my news from Washington Post, it’s less appealing when I suddenly have to pay 3x the subscription price I had been paying until the next billing cycle while the owner goes farting around in near-space on his little rocket toy.

Suddenly, I decided that Amazon and Bezos were getting far too greedy, so I not only cancelled the WaPo subscription, but I cancelled the Comixcology sub as well. And then, feeling a bit irate… I started hunting for various subscriptions to kill over Amazon’s umbrella as well as other providers. I found several that got the axe.

Then the email from work came in, alerting me to a Teams message and providing me with just enough information as to be worrisome without context. “Install the Teams app today!” the email said at the bottom. No. I will not have any more work-related apps on my phone, especially ones that allow for instant messages. I allowed myself to get riled up about the potential meaning behind the message and, just as I was booting up the work laptop to see what was truncated, I got another email from admin saying that because I had elected to work primarily from home for the foreseeable future, I was to vacate my office space by the end of November for reassignment. And, “because it is a personal choice to work primarily from home,” I will have to empty my space without being paid for my time, which just adds insult to injury. No one yet has come up with an actual justification for forced return to the office setting, and to take away the one carrot I had… personal office space…. well… I don’t much care to show up at all [Seriously, I have almost never had more than one visitor a day to my meatspace office even before the pandemic — I’ve argued for remote working for years before the pandemic forced us to handle things remote. Now that the bosses are all about getting back into the office, they forget how effective we were during the pandemic and are using tired arguments to force us back at least a day or two a week].

The full Teams message was less worrisome than when it was truncated, but it still sounded like something to track in the future. But I was getting hot under the collar anyway.

Okay, life! I shouted silently while shaking my fist at the sky. Bring it on.

Stupid move. Life brought it on.

There was some other frustrations and revelations that followed my already increasingly borked afternoon, some of which have prompted some additional internal processes of the type I am prone to getting stubborn about. And, so, now feeling mulish, I plan to implement those things too, as well as add a request to make my time in-office even less of an occasion than it currently is.

I want to toss tables and refuse to play this game anymore.