Bureaucratic Athletics

I am readying myself for a surgery later this month. This is a difficult enough proposition, emotionally and otherwise, because these things typically hurt real good. Adding to the excitement, then, is the whole employment issue -- as in, keeping myself employed and my monies coming into my bank throughout it all.

See, you can't just get yourself all messed up and get some operational healing and come back to work when you damn well feel like it. That'd be too easy an explanation of what actually happens. In this "reality" of job-centric living, though, your employer believes it has to "approve" your time off.

"Hi boss, I won't be at work today, I'm getting surgery on my neck."

"The hell you are. You'll be in by 7:30. Bring me coffee too, the one kind with the cinnamon I like."

So what, do you cancel the surgery? Right.

If you want to get paid for the surgery, you have to bend over to let them tickle you some before it all goes down. The paperwork is of course quite pointless -- because as is becoming redundantly clear, if you need surgery, you need surgery, and everyone damn well knows it. So you go through a bureaucratic circus full of permission slips and notes from every "involved" party who, in reality, have no actual involvement in the point of the surgery to begin with: fixing ish so you can work without pain.

And hell, I want to get paid and maybe even retain my job when I'm done healing.* So I fill out the form, I tell so-and-so and such-and-such a bunch of ish, I get told they are getting two temps to replace me (damn fucking straight they are), and by the end of the whole exhausting process...I'm still only getting approval to get off work for surgery. Yay.

Do they make t-shirts for that? "I jumped through hoops to get off work, and all I got was this t-shirt and a shitty neck scar."

* Which, theatrics aside, I'm not real worried about, because my job and me are squared away something good.