in which i talk about my day job in a very long post
i'm a photo lab tech/order fulfillment manager at a small photo lab. i print photos, put those photos into envelopes, make magnets, buttons, etc. half of our business is developing film and printing photos for analogue film, the other half is producing photos for local youth sports and local high school sports teams.
during the spring and summer season, we got unbearably busy. i don't know if you know how many kids are in some of those local youth sports leagues, but at least in my local metro area, it can be anywhere from 100-1000+ kids and that's not even an exaggeration. all of our jobs have a contracted 3 week turnaround time, regardless of how many orders we receive for sports orders. so a 50 order bunch (typical for a high school sports group) has the same turn around time as a 500 order bunch (typical youth sports league). this already sucks, however if we only had that 500 order bunch for that 3 weeks, we could do it! but like any business we are processing multiple groups of orders at the same time. there's a lot of spring and summer sports. at a point we had 4-5 500+ order jobs and 2-3 100-300 order jobs. we got 2 months behind on orders.
customers were mad their orders were not coming when they expected. customer service was mad at my department because customers were mad at them. the creative department was mad at my department because they saw what they perceived as just buckets of orders sitting around and not being dealt with.
the fulfillment department has technically 6 fully equipped stations. we pulled people from other departments to have at least 8 people working in the fulfillment department during that time and it still wasn't enough to stay ahead. i did literally everything in my power to get ahead of these orders, i made sure we didn't have to do many redos, i organized all of the paper receipts, i delegated what needed to be done sooner than later, but it just physically was not enough.
we managed to get through it though and with some needed changes to process we survived. creative department head tried to think of ways to not let that happen again and the one thing we came up with was outsourcing. which is fine, there's a lot of printing presses around the state that are actual industrial printers vs our in-store one that we had been relying on for both our photo developing half of the business and the sports orders. we physically cannot print photos fast enough to keep up with our busy season sometimes because i, the person who prints photos, cannot dominate the printer for hours upon hours even when i come in before we open the store and the customer service team arrives for work.
so we started adopting this new ordering software that sends the orders to another printing facility in the state and then ships orders from there or ships them to the store for us to do final processing or whatever. it's a messy transition. it kind of fucking sucked.
the creative team put all of our eggs in one basket, when we started using that software a month ago we now have every single sports photography job being processed through the outsourcer.
which has completely eroded the need for the fulfillment department.
currently, there's only 3 people working in the fulfillment department: me, the fulfillment manager, my co-worker (who i call my manager) who technically is also the fulfillment manager but we split her job responsibilities in half so i now do half of what her job was, and one part-timer. my co-worker manager is the only one who technically has work to do these days because she does other things like minor photo editing, sublimation printing, and banner compositing for sports league coordinators and what not.
i don't think i need to beat around the bush when i say i'm autistic and while i sure look like it, i'm not actually a high-functioning autistic person. i think the verbose nature of how i speak in text and verbally with people i'm comfortable with betrays how difficult it actually is for me to speak on the daily. i'm not anywhere near non-verbal, but the number one way that my autism affects me is how much energy i can put into expressing myself via words. i also don't stim in the "classic" ways, i stim by moving and working with my hands, hence why sewing is a really good task for me to do because both of my hands are occupied during it.
i liked this job a lot, because whether my old boss knew it or not, he was providing me with disability accommodations by having me work in the fulfillment department where i'm not customer facing and accepted my request to never have to make phone calls. he appreciated the work i did a lot and he's probably one of the best bosses i've ever had in my entire life because i didn't need to explain that i have an invisible disability to allow me to work in the way i did. if it's any indication, i got promoted to keyholder and to manager basically within 3 months of working there. i am fucking good at this job.
i am an incredibly meticulous person and me just doing what i like to do and keep as many physical records of work i complete led to some real good efficiency changes in the fulfillment department. i know where almost every order that passes through that department is or have a reasonable idea on where it could be. i have a really good memory and when some orders go awry or have specific needs or get misplaced i will almost always know what happened to it. my boss saw this in me, and that's why i got promoted so fast.
but my old boss is actually old and in his 70s, and has decided to retire and sold the company to a guy who has another local photography business. he knows what he's doing and that's grand, he's a nice guy i appreciate him stepping up into this role.
i'm afraid of my job security now. my co-worker manager said that me and her will probably be moving into working more with the creative department team. today my new boss hired a new photo editor. i don't want to edit photos.
i don't want to move into a full customer service role either. i picked up answering customer service emails after the end of our spring/summer rush because i knew where most of the orders were. due to the changes in the new ordering software requiring interfacing with the outsourcer's customer service team i've had to forward along a lot of the orders i couldn't personally solve from my computer. yesterday we switched to a new email server. the emails for our new order software no longer route to the email i maintain. it routes to the customer service team's emails.
my housemate expressed concerns that it sounds like i'm being iced out of my job. i will not deny it does. i don't think that anyone wants me to quit or lay me off or have my leave, my coworkers like me and appreciate me still. i am very good at working at that store and i can solve basically any problem presented to me, given the tools. my old boss saw that and that's why i was successful in my role. but now my role feels like it's going away.
the fulfillment department used to have someone working there who was in her 70s. she was obviously a little bit of a slower worker due to her age, but she and i were performing the same tasks and were good at it and got paid to do it. i'm no where near the physical/emotional/psychological needs of a 70 year old, but the fulfillment department was a place where less than able-bodied or people with really variable schedules could work and still have a job. (this woman had to eventually quit because of a covid scare at our workplace and felt it time for her to finally leave the workforce completely and actually actually retire)
i will talk to my new boss, it will be hard, but i will lay out my concerns about what my role is and will become while the company transitions into it's new era. i don't just want the fulfillment department to keep existing for me, but i want it to keep existing for people that can't do other work too.
i bought something off of an ebay store based out of japan for my birthday. it's the international/digital storefront for this hobby store. included in the package was this article that actually ebay themselves published about this guy and his hobby store. there was a section in it during an interview with the owner about how he talked about wanting to support his community too and tried to work with people with disabilities that could only do menial labor. he cited one of his employees specifically that had problems emotionally connecting and speaking with people, but with him they still had employment doing things like packing orders, folding paper cranes (the one i got from my package is still on my desk), and other menial labor tasks that don't require interfacing with customers or other large situations.
back in july, when i read that article, i thought it was a little silly but i appreciated the intention, especially due to my own circumstance.
now in october, i don't know anymore. i have job security but without knowing what that job is. and that just feels like poison in my brain.
it isn't anything new or revolutionary to say that capitalism discards anyone that isn't able-bodied or sound-minded. i'm technically not either of those two things but i can't apply for things like disability. i can do so many things even the way i am, but i'm missing the exact pieces that are required for me to work in so many industries.
what i'm most upset about is that i thought i had finally found a job i could stay at for longer than 2 years. i've had to leave my previous jobs due to health reasons that were getting exasperated by the job and even as stressful and busy this job can be, my health has not declined. i was hopeful. but fuck man. it's just. i don't want to begin my mourning process for my job when i haven't even tried to fix the situation but it's a little hard not to be upset by all of this.
anyway. thanks for reading.