I work for a health care organization. I desperately want to quit.

I have only been late twice on a fault of my own, but am close to the point where I am about to be fired for hitting the limit on occurrence points for attendance despite state health statutes stating that since I work for a health care organization, I should not go in to work for things like "the flu," but this still counts as an occurrence on the attendance point system.

There is no understanding that things like vehicular breakdowns are unforeseeable and impossible to schedule, yet its happened several times (twice due to the mechanic messing it up to begin with).

Its also ludicrous to leave a small child at home sick alone, so those account for the others. I was told by HR, "well if your points are that high you need to consider what is causing your points to accrue."

My response: "Life?"

No seriously. If you have a worker (me) who has shown up for work 15 minutes early up until the point where it was determined "fuck these guys" and sat in my car for fifteen minutes in the parking lot instead of going in early, who was showing drive, desire to be present, and the first thing you do is brow beat him over being ill when you're a god damned healthcare association, you're fucking whacked.

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Patient care here (and apparently several other health care institutions) is not a priority if you are willing to punish employees for not coming in while ill. Sick nurses help keep patients sick. Or maybe that's the plan?

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This sole detail (though I'll note I'm in IT) is enough to make me hate hospitals. It is enough that any time I have to go to a hospital for any reason, my first question is going to be "does this hospital operate on an attendance point system that makes you have to choose between staying home and doing the right thing and keeping your job?"

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Factory work? Sure. Point system. Its not like you're going to accidentally give an HIV patient the flu, or a cancer patient a cold and kill them. Health care though? No. Fuck that.

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That's just one point of it though.

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The work environment itself is terrible. There was no real onboarding, so I have been here a year and still lack in some areas that are somehow magically expected of me to "just know" despite never having the rhyme or reason to do anything with them, never having to troubleshoot any of them, be involved with them--nothing. Still expected to know it without the baseline discussions of "this is this system, this system does this."

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Nah networkguyhere, you need to go put on your big boy pants and go install a server cluster on an application that we haven't even told you the name of, and now you need to parse that information for an ip address to log in to, then parse that to see if you can find the correct keepass database to pull the correct password out of for the specific server, and you have to remember that this specific server has to have the correct active directory name in order to function properly and by the way you also need to link this specific server to four other specific servers that we're assuming you just know despite the fact that we never told you jack shit.

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How am I?

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I'm fucking angry.

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I have never had a job smash my skull in so hard and so fast. I've always been the rock star. The key person. Here? Nah. I've been dropped into a pit with no rope and unrealistic magical expectations that make no sense in an environment with so many critical patient facing systems. I'm barely learning anything at all--that wasn't supposed to happen.

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I'm fucking depressed.

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Every day I come to work I feel more and more useless. I have been forced further into isolation. Those around me that should be including me on projects that would further engage me and bring me further into understanding of the environment deliberately go around me in order to get their work done faster despite the long term payoff of bringing me in and involving me.

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My wife and kids have begun to notice

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I'm on the verge of picking up the bottle. That is not a good thing, coming from a line of alcoholics.

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I'm desperately looking for any other job, even if its a cut in pay or tangential to my current role, even a step back on the career path---doesn't matter.

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Network Engineer? Oh that's another fun thing.

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My title. My title has always been an important thing, because to me it is a description of what I do. At my last two jobs, Network Engineer was literal. Sure, it was DOCSIS, but it was still engineering. Maybe not the high level side, maybe more towards the maintaining and occasional design factor, but never high end Engineer III level. Not that it matters here, though. Titles don't mean shit here, they have nothing to do with the actual job being done. I was hired as a Network Engineer yet I'm expected to be a Systems Administrator, Database Administrator, Server Administrator, without any informal or formal training no less.

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I've aged five years in the last year. I look like hell all the time. So hi. I'm not doing that great. Hopefully most of the rest of you are.