Current Events > You ever realize your job is bullshit

(+) Yeah! (+)

I work for a pharma company that contracts themselves out to drug manufacturers in order to provide medical information services, among other things. Right now, on paper at least, my job is to help evaluate patients and test sites for clinical trial eligibility.

What I do most of the time, though, is filter through an enormous amount of people who end up on my phone line by mistake, because the phone tree is very poorly structured and they're looking for our patient financial assistance program. It is really, really annoying. So yesterday during a meeting with some higher ups, I ask them what we could do about fixing the phone tree. And they say "nothing"

Not because it can't be done, but because the trial work we do barely ever leads to anything (because it's very hard to find patients for rare disease trials) and the company has become so dependent on the revenue from billing these call transfers to the manufacturing company as cases that if we fixed the phone tree, my entire department would lose their job. For reference, in the time it took to write this post out to this point, I had to stop to do three of these transfers. I haven't had a patient qualify for a trial in the last two months, which also means trial site evaluations are paused because they aren't necessary.

I'm making the best money I've ever made in my life, more than I could have ever dreamed of while I was busting my ass in long term care facilities or retail pharmacies actually helping people get medication, or later on in federal health centers helping underprivileged people navigate the system to afford mental health care. But it just hit me like a ton of bricks that it would take a few hours of re-recording phone messages for clarity to make my entire job obsolete. My job SHOULD be obsolete. I provide absolutely nothing of value to the world through my work, literally 1/3rd of my entire life is devoid of meaning. But when I did something that felt even slightly worthwhile I could barely afford to feed myself. Now I have a wife and a family to worry about. But I can't shake the feeling of complete hopelessness that comes from realizing your work brings absolutely nothing to the world. I'd rather make people burgers at this point, at least I'd be feeding them.

I don't even know what this topic is for. Guess I'm just wondering if anybody else is in this same total existential crisis/doom spiral.

I work pharmacy/customer service.

As of yesterday, we had a 33% increase in customers due to Texas going live and we've been told that technicians must now handle narcotics instead of transferring the caller to the narcotics department.

I'm not really trained for that, so it's a bit like asking the electrician to fix any plumbing problems that may arise.

<_<

I work for a financial services company where I can see tens of thousands of investment portfolios and it just makes me sad because I have like $4000 invested and these rich bastards have millions/billions that they're just sitting on

:(

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Are they currently hiring?

I'm a picker in a distribution center, my job could be done with the right automation set up, but for now they still need human to pick the exact quantity of a product to put into one of those boxes that then go to the delivery trucks that go to the stores and are returned to the distribution center.

Reason #394494949 our healthcare system is broken garbage.