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gendereuphoriaa · 4 years

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vetting for my new job

this is horrible.

trigger warnings: gender dysphoria, bureaucracy, legal name change and gender marker, covid, HR

it is really triggering my gender dysphoria and it has been for so long.

basically for my new job they’ve outsourced their vetting process overseas. the company which is doing it has a very scary name and they continually deadname me over and over and over again.

it’s a really horrible situation for me. i initially sent them my deed poll which i made myself and they said they needed one registered with the local council/authority. i didn’t have this at the time. so i told them just to think of me as my deadname instead to make the process quicker and easier. IT DID NOT. AT ALL.

now i have a deed poll but i’m not sure whether it is registered or enrolled. i paid for it and got it signed by a lawyer so it is all official.

so i’m now thinking maybe i should just send them my deed poll?

the trouble is there is just no real human to speak to. every time i get an automated email from a different person at defense guard dog. it fucking sucks.

also it’s NYE today and a thursday. that means people probably aren’t working. and tomorrow is a bank holiday so it’s basically a friday so there’s no one in the fucking office. also everyone’s working from home so that’s fucked. and it’s covid so everything’s slower.

my start date is monday but because of all of this i’m not even sure when my start date is.

i think the best thing for my mental health is to wait and revisit this in the new year. just accept that i am not going to be starting on monday. they haven’t even sent me my laptop yet. and i haven’t had any official welcoming email. the whole thing has just been an ABSOLUTE shit show on the company’s part. Genuinely humiliating and a failure for them.

it just gives me such a sour taste for working for them. while before i was excited about it, now i am completely dreading it.

URGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH I HATE THIS.

it’s just really difficult too because i feel like i’m completely out of control.

if they were a boy, and i had been putting in all the effort for weeks, and they were messaging back days later un-enthusiastically, i would ghost them and see if they put in the effort.

that’s what i gotta do for the company. right now they know i need them and i’ve just been so desperate. we’ll just see how they feel on monday when they look around for their new starter and can’t find her because HR have fucked up. that’s when they’ll rush around to get me in the door. and if they don’t i guess they don’t want me and then we know.

so i am gonna ghost them until monday and just see what happens (maybe even tuesday). i mean they haven’t even sent me a fucking laptop what am i meant to do hahaha

it feels like my whole life has become a bureaucratic nightmare and i need to escape.

It is the perfect HR storm 1. Christmas holidays 2. Global pandemic 3. Name change and gender marker currently in flux legally 4. Starting a new job 5. Everyone working from home 6. Brexit 7. 3 day working week 8. Bank holiday tomorrow

Honey you need to go on holiday fuck this. if you start on the 4th Jan I will eat my fucking hat. there is no way. they haven’t even sent you a laptop yet hahaha.

you need to give HR some time to play catch up.

#fucksake #bureaucracy

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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UK’s accidental savers: Poll shows many are better off in lockdown

Thousands of us have picked up a surprise savings habit in lockdown, a Money Mail survey reveals today.

The coronavirus crisis has inflicted job losses and pay cuts – and still threatens to kill off many struggling businesses.

But despite the doom and gloom, many Mail readers have found they are saving hundreds of pounds thanks to lockdown, and becoming more financially secure as a result.

Spending cuts: Despite the doom and gloom, many readers have found themselves saving hundreds of pounds thanks to lockdown and becoming more financially secure as a result

Large expenses such as holidays, commuting costs and entertainment have vanished following unprecedented social-distancing restrictions – giving households the chance to set aside money during an economically uncertain time.

Exclusive research for Money Mail by Consumer Intelligence today suggests 16 per cent of people now feel financially better off. Almost half are spending less since social-distancing restrictions were introduced, with 38 per cent saving more.

Nearly four in five families say they have more money to spend since lockdown, with a quarter having between £200 and £500 more in disposable income each month.

The findings come as figures from the Bank of England yesterday showed the nation saved £16.2 billion in April. In the six months to February households saved an average of £5 billion every month.

What is more, households cleared an astonishing £5 billion of credit-card debt, which was more than double the previous record of £2.4 billion paid off in March. In a standard month the nation would usually clear £300 million of credit-card debt.

Becky O’Connor, personal finance specialist at insurer Royal London, says: ‘A financial divide has opened up during lockdown.

‘While some are really struggling on reduced incomes, there’s another group whose experience has been almost the exact opposite.

‘If you are in a position to do so, there might never be a better time to ‘build back better’ and save.’

Here, Money Mail meets some of the nation’s new ‘accidental savers’.

At last, I’ve managed to build a little nest egg

By HENRY DEEDES

All my life I’ve been a spender rather than a saver. Whatever I’ve earned during my career, my bank account has always puffed and wheezed its way through to pay day.

I’ve tried to be sensible. I’ve opened saving accounts, dabbled in Isas. I even bought Premium Bonds once. Much good it’s done me.

You see, any disposable cash I’ve ever had has this annoying habit of winking at me through the computer glass, urging me to go out and enjoy it.

Terrible, I know, but there’s something innately therapeutic about rewarding yourself after a busy week with a little something.

A case of wine, something new to hang in the flat. Perhaps another ill-advised addition to the summer wardrobe from a tempting online emporium.

Invariably, no sooner have I clicked the purchase button and the boiler will suddenly crank to halt and there’ll be nothing in the cookie jar to pay for a repair. I never learn.

Lockdown has changed all that. Like a lot of people, I imagine, being trapped inside an apartment for the best part of three months has brought about a vast reduction in expenses.

No need now for expensive Travelcards, pricey gym memberships or all those overpriced cups of coffee every day.

And that’s before you’ve taken into account what I used to spend going out to see friends.

Remember socialising? Drinks rounds, restaurant bills. I dread to think how much I used to splurge on late-night Uber journeys during normal times. But it was a lot.

And so with all these weighty charges lifted from my balance sheet, I’ve started to experience a novelty.

When I check my balance at the end of the month, there’s now actually something left in the kitty. In the past I’d have been tempted to do something extravagant. ‘Why not?’ would have been my attitude.

But in these times of enforced isolation, that thinking has been replaced with what’s the point?

Instead, I’ve been putting it in an online investment Isa with savings app Moneybox. I pay a set amount in each month, as well as any additional funds I might have left over.

It also has a nifty feature which rounds up all my debit card transactions to the nearest pound and automatically squirrels away the extra cash.

H ow satisfying it has been, how oddly empowering. Each time I check to see how my savings are accruing I now get that same whoosh of excitement I used to get when an Amazon parcel would plonk through my letterbox.

It would be nice to think that when this is all over, when the High Street tills begin to ring again and when the beer pumps start flowing, I will be able to maintain this spirit of restraint.

If nothing else, this pandemic has taught us how quickly life can go south. In bleak times it pays to be prudent.

Doubtless this is the last thing Chancellor Rishi Sunak wants to hear. As we re-emerge from lockdown, he needs as many idiots like me as possible flashing their plastic around with reckless abandon to get our ravaged economy moving.

But if this crisis does make some a little more financially responsible, surely that’s no bad thing in the long term.

I have cleared my credit card

Olivia McCulla, who works in PR, has saved by moving back in with her parents

By moving back in with her parents, Olivia McCulla, who works in PR, has saved enough to pay off her £1,000 credit card debt.

She still pays £775 a month in rent for her flat in North-West London but gets £100 back that would usually go on bills because she isn’t there.

Her £120-a-month travel costs and £150-a-week work lunch habit have also disappeared while she works from her parents’ home near Leeds.

She has also saved thousands after the two hen-dos and four weddings she was supposed to attend this summer were postponed.

However, she now has eight weddings in the diary next year to budget for.

Olivia, 29, who wants to buy a property in the next few years, has opened a new savings account.

She says: ‘It feels more important than ever to have a rainy-day fund with things being so uncertain.

‘In London I was paying £9.50 for a gin and tonic and through the nose for a very small flat I dread going back to.

‘Lockdown has made me question if I even want to buy in London.’

Before the coronavirus crisis, Olivia was saving about £100 a month.

Her father Bernard, 65, and his wife Susan, 66, have seen their household costs rise slightly since their daughter moved home but are also saving money each month.

They previously spent £100 eating out each week, so their bank balance is boosted by £400 a month. And instead of paying a tradesman £2,000 to replace his patio with a flower garden, Bernard did it himself and slashed the cost in half.

Before social-distancing regulations were relaxed, Bernard was also saving £180 a month on his golf and walking-football memberships.

He says: ‘We are very fortunate. Lockdown has made me think we should live more for today and enjoy our pensions more.’

I feel guilty I’m better off

Quids in: Ashleigh Meale is saving between £500 and £700 a month

Ashleigh Meale says her ‘stripped-back life’ means she is now saving between £500 and £700 a month.

This is despite her grocery bill doubling to £400 a month and signing up to a TV and film- streaming service costing £60 a year.

Before lockdown, the 27-year-old recruitment consultant, who is currently working from home, was putting away between £250 and £500 but would spend hundreds of pounds a month socialising with friends at expensive bars and restaurants.

Now, she and her boyfriend Rob, 38, cook their meals from scratch at home.

Ashleigh, who lives in Sheffield, is also saving £70 a month by working from home and not having to pay to commute by bus.

She has also been unable to spend money on holidays since the Government warned against non-essential travel.

Ashleigh admits that, while she is not a natural saver, she has now realised how much she spends unnecessarily and hopes to remain mindful about what expenses she reintroduces when restrictions are finally lifted.

She says: ‘Feeling better off financially during this time is a strange position to be in and it does make me feel guilty when so many people are struggling. But it has given me time to re-evaluate things, and I have no intention of blowing what I’ve saved.

‘I don’t need to be out all the time spending money on eating out and drinks when I could be just as happy with a barbecue in someone’s garden. What I have missed the most is my friends — not the expensive socialising.’

Pay cut but £400-a-month saving

Sally Walsh is saving an extra £400 a month on top of £200 she was already setting aside in a help-to-buy Isa

Sally Walsh was worried when she was told she would have to take a 10 per cent pay cut in March.

But despite the shock announcement, the 24-year-old engineer has found her finances have improved during lockdown.

She is now saving an extra £400 a month on top of £200 she was already setting aside in a help-to-buy Isa.

Since working from home, Sally has saved around £200 a month by not having to commute to central London, and a further £200 by not eating or drinking out after work.

The only bill to go up is her food cost now she cooks almost every meal at home.

Sally, who has lived with her parents in Bromley, South-East London since graduating, is determined to continue saving even after lockdown lifts.

She says: ‘My goal is to move out as soon as possible. I feel like I am closer to it now.

‘I don’t have to spend so much on going out. I hope I will soon be able to have people over and cook for them.’

Childcare cut by thousands

Claire Jarrett and her partner Jon Howell are saving £50 a day in train fares alone

Claire Jarrett and her partner Jon Howell have saved enough since lockdown to pay for renovations on their home.

The couple need to fix the roof on their house in West Malling, Kent, and want to make the garden more child-friendly for their one-year-old daughter, Eleanor, to play.

Claire, 31, had only been back at work for two days after returning from maternity leave before staff were told they had to work from home.

With Jon, also 31, working from home too, they are saving £50 a day in train fares alone by not having to commute to the insurance firm where they both work in Bromley, South-East London.

They are also saving around £5 a day on lunches at work, £80 a month on petrol and £200 a month by not eating out.

But their biggest saving has been on childcare.

It usually costs £800 a month to send Eleanor to nursery — but the couple have not had to pay since March.

It has helped the couple to replenish their savings after Claire’s maternity leave and move their renovation plans a bit further forward.

However Claire says their financial gain is likely to be short-lived.

She says: ‘Lockdown has made us realise we do not need to go out as much but lots of the costs will be re-introduced when life goes back to normal, unfortunately.’

Not relying on investments

Retired Gerry Short is making savings by not playing golf, employing a cleaner or taking weekend theatre trips

Retired Gerry Short has seen such a drop in his spending that he has decided to stop withdrawing income from his investments for the next couple of years.

Gerry, 61, a former college principal, has two pensions that pay £20,000 a year. He gets a further £16,000 a year from investments.

After the pandemic hit the stock market, his investments plummeted. While they have recovered slightly, he wants to give them time to recover.

His reduced outgoings mean he can do this as he is making savings on weekend theatre trips which can cost up to £100 a time.

He was refunded £60 of his golf-club membership. He also stopped spending £20 on drinks three or four times a week after games.

The father-of-one, who lives in Leicestershire, also no longer employs a cleaner, which cost £100 a month.

He says: ‘I was aware I was spending a lot as a distraction after my wife died and knew it couldn’t continue. Lockdown has given me time to plan further in the future.’

Windfall from lost holiday

Dannielle Phillips has had to put expensive holiday plans on halt

Dannielle Phillips, 32, spends most of her spare cash on trips away.

But since lockdown kicked in, expensive holiday plans have ground to a halt. She has already got an £870 refund for a trip to Mexico that was supposed to take place in April.

And she has received a £500 voucher she can use to re-book her holiday to Portugal in June for next year.

Dannielle, a senior marketing consultant, had always put £250 a month into Premium Bonds, but has since increased this to £750 a month.

Since lockdown began, she has saved around £2,500 in total, which she says would have been impossible for her before.

She has always checked her banking apps frequently, but is definitely more aware of incoming and outgoing transactions now.

Dannielle, who lives in Croydon, South London, says she also feels very lucky it worked out like this because she had originally handed in her notice in February and was planning to leave after finishing a project six weeks later.

But the new job she had been offered fell through so her company agreed to rehire her.

Dannielle says: ‘I am looking forward to lockdown ending but also dreading it because I will need to rebalance old habits.

‘I’m going to try to budget more at the weekends because I want to keep saving to buy a house.

‘Building up my savings has become more important to me because the future feels so uncertain.’

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whitelabelseoreseller · 5 years

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Kindness as Currency: How Good Deeds Can Benefit Your Local Business

Posted by MiriamEllis

“To receive everything, one must open one’s hands and give.” - Taisen Deshimaru, Buddhist philosopher

A woman stands in a busy supermarket checkout line. The shopper in front of her realizes that they don’t have enough money with them to cover their purchase, so she steps in and makes up the balance. Then, when she reaches the checkout, her own receipt totals up higher than she was expecting. She doesn’t have enough left in her purse.

“No problem,” says the young clerk and swipes his own debit card to pay for her groceries.

A bystander snaps a photo and posts the story to Facebook. The story ends up on local radio and TV news. Unstructured citations for the grocery store start crackling like popcorn. National news takes notice. A scholarship foundation presents a check to the clerk. When asked how he felt about it, the clerk said:

“Personally, I think it’s undeserved attention. Because she did something so good … I felt like it was my responsibility to return the favor.”

In the process, if only for a moment in time, an everyday supermarket is transformed into a rescue operation for hope in humanity. Through the lens of local SEO, it’s also a lesson in how good deeds can be rewarded by good mentions.

Studying business kindness can be a rewarding task for any motivated digital marketing agency or local brand owner. I hope this post will be both a pick-me-up for the day, and a rallying cry to begin having deeper conversations about the positive culture businesses can create in the communities they serve.

10+ evocative examples of business kindness

“We should love people and use things, but sadly, we love things and use people,” Roger Johnson, Artisan

As a youngster in the American workforce, I ran into some very peculiar styles of leadership.

For instance, one boss gruffly told me not to waste too much time chatting with the elderly customers who especially loved buying from me...as if customer support doesn’t make or break business reputations.

And then there was the cranky school secretary who reprimanded me for giving ice packs to children because she believed they were only “trying to get attention” … as if schools don’t exist to lavish focus on the kids in their care.

In other words, both individuals would have preferred me to be less kind, less human, than more so.

Perhaps it was these experiences of my superiors taking a miserly approach to workplace human kindness that inspired me to keep a little file of outbreaks of goodwill that earned online renown. These examples beg self-reflective questions of any local business owner:

If you launched your brand in the winter, would you have opened your doors while under construction to shelter and feed housing-insecure neighbors?

If a neighboring business was struggling, would you offer them floor space in your shop to help them survive?

Would your brand’s culture inspire an employee to cut up an elder’s ham for him if he needed help? How awesome would it be if a staffer of yours had a day named after her for her kindness? Would your employees comp a meal for a hungry neighbor or pay a customer’s $200 tab because they saw them hold open a door for a differently-abled guest?

What good things might happen in a community you serve if you started mailing out postcards promoting positivity?

What if you gave flowers to strangers, including moms, on Mother’s Day?

How deeply are you delving into the season of giving at the holidays? What if, like one business owner, you opened shop on Thanksgiving just to help a family find a gift for a foster child? You might wake up to international fame on Monday morning.

What if visitors to your community had their bikes stolen on a road trip and your shop gifted them new bikes and ended up on the news?

One business owner was so grateful for his community’s help in overcoming addiction, he’s been washing their signage for free. What has your community done for you and how have you thanked them?

What if all you had to do was something really small, like replacing negative “towed at your own expense” signs by welcoming quick stop parking?

What if you, just for a day, you asked customers to pay for their purchases with kind acts?

I only know about these stories because of the unstructured citations (online references to a local business) they generated. They earned online publicity, radio, and television press. The fame for some was small and local, for others, internationally viral. Some activities were planned, but many others took place on the spur of the moment. Kindness, empathy, and gratitude, flow through them all like a river of hope, inviting every business owner to catch the current in their own way. One easy way for local business owners to keep better track of any positive mentions is by managing and monitoring reviews online with the New Moz Local.

See your online presence

Can kindness be taught in the workplace?

In Demark, schoolchildren learn empathy as a class subject. The country is routinely rated as one of the happiest in the world. At Moz, we have the TAGFEE code, which includes both generosity and empathy, and our company offers internal workshops on things like “How to be TAGFEE when you disagree.” We are noted for the kindness of our customer support, as in the above review.

According to Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, people “catch” cooperation and generosity from others. In his study, the monetary amount donors gave to charity went up or down based on whether they were told their peers gave much or little. They matched the generosity or stinginess they witnessed. In part two of the study, the groups who had seen others donating generously went on to offer greater empathy in writing letters to penpals suffering hard times. In other words, kindness isn’t just contagious — its impact can spread across multiple activities.

Mercedes-Benz CEO, Stephen Cannon, wanted employees to catch the kindness bug because of its profound impact on sales. He invited his workforce to join a “grassroots movement” that resulted in surprising shoppers with birthday cakes, staff rushing to remote locations with spare tires, and other memorable consumer experiences. Cannon noted:

“There is no scientific process, no algorithm, to inspire a salesperson or a service person to do something extraordinary. The only way you get there is to educate people, excite them, incite them. Give them permission to rise to the occasion when the occasion to do something arises. This is not about following instructions. It’s about taking a leap of faith.”

In a 2018 article, I highlighted the reviews of a pharmacy that made it apparent that staff wasn’t empowered to do the simplest self-determined acts, like providing a chair for a sick man who was about to fall down in a long prescription counter line. By contrast, an Inc. book review of Jill Lublin’s The Profits of Kindness states:

“Organizations that trade in kindness allow their employees to give that currency away. If you're a waitress, can you give someone a free piece of pie because the kid at the next table spilled milk on their foot? If you're a clerk in a hotel, do you have the authority to give someone a discounted rate because you can tell they've had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day?”

There may be no formula for teaching kindness, but if Zaki is right, then leadership can be the starting point of demonstrative empathy that can emanate through the staff and to its customers. How do you build for that?

A cared-for workforce for customer service excellence

You can find examples of individual employees behaving with radical kindness despite working for brands that routinely disregard workers’ basic needs. But, this hardly seems ideal. How much better to build a business on empathy and generosity so that cared-for staff can care for customers.

I ran a very quick Twitter poll to ask employees what their very most basic need is:

Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents cited a living wage as their top requirement. Owners developing a kind workforce must ensure that staff are housing-and-food-secure, and can afford the basic dignities of life. Any brand that can’t pay its staff a living wage isn’t really operational — it’s exploitation.

Beyond the bare minimums, Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2019 Survey of 7,300 executives, HR experts, and employees highlighted trending worker emphasis on:

Flexibility in both hours and location to create a healthy work/life balance

Ethics in company technology, practices, and transparency

Equity in pay ratios, regardless of gender

Empathy in the workplace, both internally and in having a positive societal impact with customers

It’s just not very hard to connect the dots between a workforce that has its basic and aspirational needs met, and one possessing the physical, mental and emotional health to extend those values to consumers. As I found in a recent study of my own, 70 percent of negative review resolution was driven by brands having to overcome bad/rude service with subsequent caring service.

Even at the smallest local business level, caring policies and initiatives that generate kindness are within reach, with Gallup reporting that SMBs have America’s happiest and most engaged workers. Check out Forbes list of the best small companies of 2019 and note the repeated emphasis on employee satisfaction.

Kindness as currency, with limitless growth potential

“I wanted a tangible item that could track acts of kindness. From that, the Butterfly Coin emerged.” Bruce Pedersen, Butterfly Coins

youtube

Maybe someday, you’ll be the lucky recipient of a Butterfly Coin, equipped with a unique tracking code, and gifted to you by someone doing a kind act. Then, you’ll do something nice for somebody and pass it on, recording your story amongst thousands of others around the world. People, it seems, are so eager for tokens of kindness that the first mint sold out almost immediately.

The butterfly effect (the inspiration for the name of these coins) in chaos theory holds that a small action can trigger multiple subsequent actions at a remove. In a local business setting, an owner could publicly reward an employee’s contributions, which could cause the employee to spread their extra happiness to twenty customers that day, which could cause those customers to be in a mood to tip waitstaff extra, which could cause the waitstaff to comp meals for hungry neighbors sitting on their doorsteps, and on and on it goes.

There’s an artisan in Gig Harbor, WA who rewards kindnesses via turtle figurines. There are local newspapers that solicit stories of kindness. There are towns that have inaugurated acts-of-kindness weeks. There is even a suburb in Phoenix, AZ that re-dubbed itself Kindness, USA. (I mentioned, I’ve been keeping a file).

The most priceless aspect of kindness is that it’s virtually limitless. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be quantified. The Butterfly Coin idea is attempting to track kindness, and as a local business owner, you have a practical means of parsing it, too. It will turn up in unstructured citations, reviews, and social media, if you originate it at the leadership level, and share it out from employee to customer with an open hand.

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theinjectlikes2 · 5 years