Speech Example (Evaluative and Situational Functions)

“For instance, the next day you plan something, get it done, and then the next two days are non-stop work. But here, it happens like this: you come home in the evening, thinking you want to do both this and that, you start, and then you realize you are just completely wiped out. On top of that, you still need to cook food.

Truth be told, I don’t really like cooking, but I have to at least stock up on something. In our family, my husband does most of the cooking, and we discussed this right from the start. He had already seen me cook, so for safety reasons (and to avoid kitchen disasters), we decided that I rarely do it.

Overall, the five-day work week doesn’t really suit me. Maybe if I had been working this way from the very beginning, it would have been easier to adjust. But I was transferred, and it threw me out of my usual rhythm—now I’m constantly trying to cram everything into the schedule and sort out my tasks, but it works out so-so.

The only thing that helps a bit is that lately, they started giving us the opportunity to suggest improvements. We hold meetings with the business development manager: we bring our ideas for process optimization, and he can push them further up. It’s nice because usually you see that ‘this part is bad,’ but you don’t know who to turn to. Here, you can come forward with a concrete proposal, and it will be reviewed.

I even thought about looking for a position within our company related to this, but the closest thing is an analyst role. And there, the tasks will most likely be handed down from above. Even for project managers, assignments come from external clients rather than being invented on their own. Plus, if you compare the salary to the amount of stress and hassle, the benefit is questionable. So I don’t have much desire to climb the career ladder within the company. There used to be more opportunities—you could move to second-line support or even further. Now everything is taken, and a promotion usually means ‘slightly more money, but a lot more responsibilities,’ and there’s no guarantee your bonus won’t be cut.

Our incentive system is simple: if the team’s metrics are good, you get a bonus; if they are bad, it gets cut. On the first line, an operator’s bonus depended on the number of processed tickets, but that is a fluid thing—you could work five days, yet someone else might get a higher workload in just two days. On the second line (the programmers), it’s pretty much the same—the bonus depends on the overall performance metric, and meeting deadlines is almost impossible because tasks pile up endlessly, and on top of that, they keep constantly switching priorities.

Before this job, I had experience working at a security checkpoint: you just sit there, issue passes, and don’t really do much. The work was mindless, but the money kept trickling in, and since I was doing a correspondence degree back then, I brought books along with me. But the boss there was strange: he tried to dump responsibility on us for things that didn’t concern us at all. For example, some car drove onto the neighboring facility (not ours), something got stolen there, and they started blaming us. They didn’t fine us, but the boss threw a massive tantrum. I decided I didn’t want to work in a place where you could get punished for someone else’s problems, so I left.”