You wake up every day and drive into the office to do your job… and there’s a comfort in that dull mundanity, a consistency. You’ve got a mortgage to pay and a family to feed, so you’re happy (enough) and more or less resigned to the arrangement. Yet, as time goes on, you find yourself doing more and more work, your coworkers are leaving, and no one is being hired to replace them, leaving their workload split up amongst those remaining. The company is floundering—that’s easy enough to see—and under vague promises of promotion and increased upward mobility, you work overtime to help other struggling workgroups remain on their feet, but as you go along, you can see things slipping further and further. Now, your company is saying you’re not doing enough, and they want you to reapply for your role, calling it a promotion—but repackaging it as something more or less the same as what you were already doing.
