A) For the record, I don’t have a dog in this fight.  I’m employed or influenced by neither CBC or Bell.

B) Holy shit, that’s a dirty move by the CBC, and I kind of like it merely because they’re disruptive dicks for clicks.

C) I don’t discount any of these people who threw up blood and shit their heads off after working for a telco.  Especially a big one.  I get it.

The CBC knows what works and tapping into the goodwill of a public corp using all their properties to bring awareness to mental health issues is either cheap AF or Machiavellianly brilliant.

The mental wellness of employees in a company that employed 52K people between 2011-2017 offloading people for the singular purpose of ‘Headcount,’ doesn’t make people feel valued.   When the rides over (some) employees have extreme reactions; some of that’s real, some of it fraudulent.  Some people can’t handle the unfair pace of offloading headcount responsibility, and they quit for their mental wellness.  There’s no way you can generalize any of the people in this article as fraudulent, but if you want to do a hit piece on #BellLet’sTalk, you talk to people who were fired or downsized.  People with real issues I don’t discount, one bit, but it’s a skewed sample:

Source: “I was on the verge of panic attacks. Just overwhelmed,” Jessica Belliveau, who worked for three years at a call center in Moncton, N.B., said in an interview. The call center was run by Nordia, a former Bell subsidiary that was recently sold to a Toronto investment firm.

Belliveau says sales were based on the number of workdays in a month, but if she had the flu and had to miss work, her targets wouldn’t be adjusted. She quit two weeks ago, despite fears of unemployment.

A Bell Mobility sales manager who is on stress leave says the pressure to meet sales targets was so intense that he lost 40 pounds in a few months. CBC is not identifying him — or several others — because they fear speaking out will affect their employment. “I had sales targets that kept going up,” the sales manager says. “But I had no idea where they came from. It was so stressful, I was throwing up blood.”

“My manager sent emails at 2 a.m. comparing my sales stats to the rest of the company,” he says. “Or he would call me at 3 in the morning to ask why I was off my sales targets. It was relentless.”It upsets me that Bell makes such a big deal about mental health awareness and takes a lot of credit for bringing that awareness to the general public,” he says.

Dan Breffitt, a former employee who managed projects for Ottawa’s Bell Business Markets team, says the stress of dealing with an ever-growing workload contributed to an anxiety attack that sent him to hospital last fall.

“I had severe anxiety and depression,” he says. “There wasn’t an hour in the day where I wasn’t worrying about how I was

going to meet all the expectations at work.”

Now, I have a couple of issues with this article.  First and foremost, any organization that sanctions taking a giant shit on raising millions of dollars and awareness for mental health shouldn’t be propped up with taxpayer dollars: complete bullshit, shortsighted use of a vast platform to drive a wedge into a critical day for ‘clicks’.  I know the general CBC listener is a right-fighting, bearded, tea drinker, who only smokes organic cannabis but c’mon.  Forrest through the trees, meatheads.

Second, companies who employ 50 thousand people are going to have managers who treat employees like shit.  I’ve worked for CORUS and ROGERS.  True in both cases.  Big ass companies who aren’t immune to contraction and the pains of passing that on to their employees.  Those pains come in the form of increased workload for the same pay or a package calling your life’s work “Headcount”.  Fuck you very much.  It’s what every company calls the cost of doing business.   It’s the hardest part of the whole package to swallow.

And who can’t find a reason to shit on the cable/cell phone guys on social media? Fish in a barrel.  So as a result other ex-employees see this stuff, pile on and now we have a “SAYNOTOBELLLETSTALK” movement, and no one wins.

MSM tries to prey on your hippie/advocate bone, and while I respect it from a competition perspective, it’s just CBC’s cloaked way of piggybacking off a crucial issue for clicks.

You’re mental well being.

While you can say BELL gets every penny of the 10 million they’ll raise through the goodwill associated with their brand, it doesn’t really matter.

#BellLet’sTalk has brought in close to 90 million since its inception several years ago, and I feel like I can talk about my anxiety and journey to mental wellness through therapy and medication because of the power behind talking.

If I remember, CBC turned a blind eye to years of Jian Ghomeshi’s continued abuse of employees (mostly women) which lead in large part to the fucking #METOO movement and a shit pile of managers being fired a while ago.

Maybe they should start a fund for people Jian rubbed up against or employees who were ignored by managers when victims complained.  The pics of crowded workspaces and a link to contact the author if you were ‘wronged’ was cool though.  Subtle gaslighting of a great cause.  Sounds like a supportive crown corporation.

Hot, right?  Calling it the ‘Go Public Team’ really cements this as one of the all-time troll moves.  Well done, donkeys.

Good for BELL.  A wonderful day for Mental Health and don’t be a “CBC”.  Focus on the attention today brings to dark corners of the prison of mental illness, and the benefit of talking about how you really are.