When I was a teen and young adult I often worked off the clock. 40 hours wasn't enough to get done the things done that I needed to get done. I was committed to my work. I wanted to see projects through and keep my tasks up to date. It took more than 40 hours, usually. When I could get approved for overtime I'd take it but I often found myself working without pay to get caught up.
It's a strange mindset, to devote yourself so fully to commercial work as to do it without pay. I wasn't doing it for my bosses, they were often underpaid too and working salary exempt from overtime. A fast-food manager can put in 60 hours a week easy on a pittance of a salary. Because they have 'manager' in their title they can be considered exempt from overtime in the US. It's a system that rewards the capitalist class at the expense of the worker class. Managers in name only worked to the extreme.
I certainly wasn't doing it for the owners who only stood to profit off my free labor even more then they profited off my paid labor.
I did it for my coworkers, I did it for my employees when I was in a position of authority. When I was in charge of staff, as an assistant manager at fast-food or as a department head at Dave and Buster's, I worked off the clock to keep my staff supported. I needed to keep the department running smoothly so that at times nearly 30 other people would have consistent hours and work.
Balancing schedules for so many people was a nightmare of logistics. Each person with their own availability issues. Single mothers with daycare and babysitters to consider. Young men and women in college with changing schedules each semester. People with second and third jobs where they had inconsistent schedules.
My department had inventory to control and manage as well. We scheduled a weekly accounting process but it was never enough time. I'd almost always complete the accounting off the clock to get it done. Just the time it took to write the schedule often took several hours of off the clock work. Then there was the writing and updating of training materials and tests.
For most of my young adult life I 'worked' a 40 hour week on the books but I usually put in 50-60 hours of work. With most of that work being shift work my sleep schedule was erratic and changing. I got sleep when and where I could.
And through it all I wrestled with faith. Faith in a loving God tested daily by the trials of life I saw all around me. Exposure to the casual racism and sexism everywhere around me opened my eyes in a way I'd never known before.
I was exposed to people of all walks of life. Different faiths and beliefs, different mindsets and ideologies. I worked with homosexual and bisexual coworkers and staff. I comforted jilted teenage lovers who experienced break-ups for the first time. I helped a young lesbian couple schedule their shifts around a child they were raising together. I held a 19-year old as she sobbed in my arms. She had discovered she was pregnant and had been thrown out of her home. I consoled her and promised I'd keep her working 40 hours a week so she could try to make her ends meet as she debated whether to keep her pregnancy.
So many people touched by cruel ironies and twists of fate. So many young people facing adult consequences of childish indiscretions and mistakes.
I struggled to see God working in these people's lives. So many who came from broken and abusive homes, thrown into the world unprepared and immature. Legally adults but never given the tools and knowledge they needed to make their way in the adult world.
Exploitative workplaces and bad managers killed my libertarian ideology in its cradle. I read 'Das Kapital' and came out with a seething hatred of capitalism with no answer for what should take its place. Communism and Socialism were synonymous to Satanism in my upbringing - they were alien concepts to me.
Somewhere in that mix of haphazard sleeping patterns, working without pay, and managing a small army of teenagers and young adults I fully embraced my new religious identity.
I truly was agnostic now. I believed in a God of sorts, I thought. Now, however, he seemed as alien and unknowable as many of the strange faiths and cultures I'd become exposed to. Perhaps hidden in the Bible was some truth as I kept reading it, searching. It no longer seemed to be the truth though. Not anymore.
I became a seeker and turned to new books, new faiths. The Koran and Islam were read and considered, the Torah and Judaism too. They were similar enough to Christianity to offer comforting familiarity while still seeming exotic. Yet they held no better than the Bible in consistency and a God worthy of devotion and dedication.
So I found myself in the forbidden. The occult and esoteric. My world grew, larger, stranger, and weird as the foundations of reality dropped away.
I now felt something different for the Christian God. Something forbidden yet undeniable. Anger. Anger at God and all of his works and rules. His systems and plans. Anger at his seeming absence and quiet response to my prayers and pleadings.
It seemed like I felt anger all the time now. At God, at bad managers, at exploitative bosses and owners, and stupid kids and their dumb choices. At myself for letting myself be exploited. For doing it to myself. For making my own dumb choices. But it was God I was most angry with. The silent, judging deity who seemed to hold back from those who needed his touch and blessing the most.
Anger unchecked grows and grows and becomes something more, something worse.