The office: Chatter about your job

I am so frustrated with work. 80% of it is a great job, but they have some serious organization problems with schedules. There is apparently an app they use for figuring out availability and scheduling which NONE of the four managers told me about—I had to hear about it from a coworker who asked me why I was still asking for printouts of my schedules.

A manager also got frustrated with me for not using the app. Which makes me wonder why said manager, or ANY manager, never told me about it in the entire MONTH I've been working here.

Then, I look at next week's schedule to find that they have scheduled me at a time I specifically said I was unavailable to work—AGAIN. This is the third time it's happened.

I know the right thing to do is bring it up. It's unfair to keep a new employee in the dark, and then get mad at them for something they didn't know, and then keep making the exact same mistake. But it's still terrifying. I don't have any savings and I haven't had any time to look for a new job.

edited 7th Oct '16 1:35:38 PM by Leradny

Got a pay rise since I'm no longer on probation!

The other staff here do the requisite complaining about the boss. To be honest I try not to join in, because he's by no means the worst boss I've had. I mean, he's yet to drive me to tears and then stand over me demanding to know why I'm crying when 'tears don't solve anything'. So, already up on second boss. And my third boss was an exercise in "Nice Does Not Mean Good".

In other news: I continue to be amazed that people with no job and no money for the most basic of veterinary care think they can afford to get dogs. I try to be understanding about money issues, but god damn, if you can't afford desexing you can't afford the dog. Period.

Normally, I get paid $25 per hour of footage for transcribing videos. Since the company commissioning the guys I work with on this documentary are asking for a bunch of extra things after the project wrapped, the producer told me to bill $25 per hour of work to "update" the transcription of the finished documentary (to pass to the closed captioning team), because he wants to make sure they get stung with extra costs. It took me four hours. I made a hundred dollars for transcribing less than an hour of video, and half of it was just changing time stamps.

Hey at least you made your money.

I got briefly caught in yet another corporate crossfire earlier this week.

The company I worked for asked for the established document on how the site is run by the security guards to be reviewed, altered, and signed by the office. This was asked for at a fairly high level for our area. The big catch is the client has long had a standing security requirement that no documents with those kinds of details are to ever leave the building outside of special requests and conditions. I was basically told you will give them over and at the same time, because I informed my client contact like I am supposed to, told to deny them. Both parties were placed high enough that if they decided to be stubborn it would have gone badly as both could fire me on the spot for doing what the other wanted.

I really hate this horseshit as that kind of damned if I do and damned if I don't situation puts a shit load of stress on me. Obviously because no matter what I do I lose. Thankfully after a few phone calls at levels over my head by an appreciable degree my company backed down and said to not worry about it. This is just adding to the contention between the client and the company as they are still dragging their feet and making excessively stupid excuses for not supplying our location with a back up guard as demanded by the client.

If my company fucks this up and loses this account I will be amazingly pissed off. They would have wasted four years of my hard work and my life to be fucking idiots.

Slopey shoulders time: 'X says he wants this and to contact him if you have a problem with that.'

edited 18th Oct '16 7:52:57 AM by InverurieJones

Got tapped on the back bumper in the work truck by someone who I guess misjudged how close I was. It was the most gentle collision I've been a part of (the bumper was already so mangled before I started working here that I can't tell a difference), and I'm thrilled to have had it objectively not my fault for once.

Eesh. Glad to hear that worked out. I've been in a couple of dings and bumps but the most frightening one, in retrospect, was the time I got rear-ended by a fuel tanker. While I was a teensy little Prius-C.

Luckily it was low-speed and the only damage done was a neat hexagonal dent in my rear bumper. At the time I was too indignant to be scared, mostly because the bastard refused to pull over and there wasn't a whole lot I could do aside from "gesture furiously from beside him while knowing that he can't see me anyway". (And memorize his license plate before pulling off.)

Production company is handling distribution of other indie ventures' shorts, making the deals and delivering the content to distribution platforms. The platform people want full HD, specific codec. No big deal.

One of the shorts that was sold is in an unusual codec, at an unusual (SD) resolution, and interlaced. I alerted Producer to these issues, and he told me to do my best to fix it. So I installed the weird codec and transcoded it to full HD, per instructions.

Platform's tech complained about the poor quality, said "I think they just upscaled the image from SD and it looks very bad." Yup, that's why you don't just upscale. Now we have to go back to the filmmakers and ask them for a better master copy.

This is the same Producer who's told me to turn 72ppi photos into 300ppi deliverables. So I just roll my eyes and blow them up because that's all I can do.

edited 20th Oct '16 1:05:39 PM by TParadox

Auto parts customer came in today asking about a part that had been ordered in. He dealt entirely with me, expecting me to be able to seamlessly help him despite the order having been made by an actual sales person who did not associate the order in the system with the customer's company, and me being a driver with no actual training on the sales software.

I can do basic lookups for things, like finding a record of an ordered part if I had the part number or the customer. I did not have the part number, and as I said, the order hadn't been associated with the shop, so I found no record. I don't know enough about cars, so I didn't know what category to look up the part under in the digital catalog (turns out a "heater valve" and a "heater core" are not completely different things). The guy had to go out to his car and get the part number of the old part.

So now we have the number of the part, but no confirmation that it was ordered and is now in the store. I scan the order shelf multiple times looking for the box, but I don't see it. Just when I decide to go check if it was put away by mistake, the guy says "hey, it's right there", pointing to a box hidden under an overhanging pile of other parts.

Now he needs to pay for it because his shop doesn't have a credit account and it hasn't been billed yet. I know how to ring up items, but I'm inexperienced with taking payment. Thankfully, he has a card. I would've absolutely had to get help if he was paying cash because I don't have a drawer. But it takes me four tries to figure out how to get it to charge the entire amount to the card.

When he'd signed his receipt, he asked me my name. I bet it's so he can complain about how he was helped by someone who had no idea how to do their job. Try it. Since it's not actually my job, when my bosses hear about me eventually successfully making the transaction, the worst thing they can do to me is decide it should be my job and then I'll have to learn a lot more about cars than I want to.

I am so fucking sick of my idiot fucking coworker. Long story short, our longtime boss moved on to bigger things around the end of September, I applied for his job, someone else got it, and because the final pick wound up being from the morning shift, I basically became the boss because he's still got a lot of learning to do and the other guy who has been there for more than a year is very much a "lead by example" kind of person who doesn't really explain things and just expects to have you pick things up from watching him do them, whereas I explain things with a reasonable amount of depth. We got a new hourly worker back in July after another guy left, and while he was annoying and had a bit of a bumpy start, I figured that he just needed a little extra time (considering how long I took to become even an okay worker).

Boy, was I wrong. This guy is a fuckup and a complete loser who has only gotten worse without our old boss to keep him in line, as it's clear that he's doing the absolute bare minimum because he thinks that he can walk all over the new guy. Tardy with no call or calling out ten minutes before the start of the shift at least once a week? Check. Unable to satisfactorily perform at least one major function of the job (unloading trucks; he's slow as shit, knows about it, and doesn't even try to improve) and bad at everything else? Check. Fucking annoying as hell? Check. You're thirty-two years old, quit being an irresponsible stoner and working like you're in high school. We all want him gone (management included), the only problem is that HR doesn't like to get rid of people just for being wastes of space and requires something actionable (which chronic tardiness and late call-outs thankfully are).

I have some good news and bad news regarding my job since my last post about it. The good news is, the occasional compiling of reports is now something I do everyday rather than only occasionally. The person who usually does it is on detail to another part of the building for the next few months, and I'm filling in for her. So I'm finally doing something more engaging than opening incoming mail.

The bad news is that without her there, I'm now the only person in the department who knows how to compile those reports. While for most of the week, the daily report I have to compile is one that isn't quite as urgent, my weekly report for the previous week's work that I have to do on Monday mornings is important enough that my person I'm filling in for could never take a Monday off except for dire emergencies. So I had to do some rearranging of my vacation schedule for the last quarter of the year, including several weeks of use-or-lose time (earned vacation time up to a certain point will carry over to the next year, and anything beyond that is use-or-lose), to accommodate my new responsibilities, and move the Mondays off I'd put in for before I knew I'd be doing these reports to other days of the week instead.

And now, there's another Spanner in the Works: Philadelphia's Transport Workers' Union is on strike as of midnight last night. That means no buses are running anywhere in the city, nor are the Market-Frankford Line trains or the Broad Street Subway. Since I get to work by bus, then the Market-Frankford Line, and work downtown where parking would be a nightmare, this is going to be a problem. I took off today because of it, and I do have a lot of vacation time saved up that I could try to wait it out, as my manager is planning on doing. But I still have to be there on Mondays at least, so I have until then to find another way to get to work.

This is mainly funny since I wasn't actually involved:

One of my store's customers is the biggest auto workshop for the fleet of police cars occupied by the state, and as such, they make bulk orders of parts from time to time, which we have to special order from the factory, and are shipped directly to the store. We placed an order that was supposed to come in two weeks ago. We've long since refunded the customer the $50-odd shipping charge because of the delay. Today, the order arrived. Our corporate special order department always handles the payment, but for some reason, the shipper needed the driver to collect a $78 shipping fee. On an order that we (originally) charged the customer $50-something to ship, that was missing for two weeks.

Phone calls were made to Special Orders, to the factory, to district and regional managers, but ultimately, those pallets of parts had to be loaded back on the truck.

On an amusing note from my job, it appears that we just cut off a shipper because he hasn't paid his bill with us in months. The guy who runs the business is a complete dumbass (and also a former driver, funnily enough) who has been written up at least once in the past for habitually shipping items with grossly deficient packaging and rolled up in a box truck at the eleventh hour last night to drop off a bunch of shit that included a package that was shipping with a different branch of the company. Fucking moron didn't have his phone on him, either, so we couldn't call him to tell him that he needed to come back and get it. Oh well, it stopped being our problem the minute he left it there, he's the one who's going to be stuck with a pissed-off customer. I'm also waiting to see if the check bounces if he ever actually does pay his outstanding charges with us; given his track record, it probably will.

To get to and from work with the bus driver's strike still ongoing, I tried taking Regional Rail to work. While I live 9/10 of a mile from the nearest regional rail station, I work right across from the city's main train station. While I did have to deal with a late trains both to and from work, it wasn't quite as crowded as I feared it would be, at least on the car I was on. And while work let me out with plenty of time to get to the train home when the line to get on the platform was short, it became quite long by the time it arrived (about 20 minutes late) and they started letting people onto the platform to board. As for the price, the trains were honoring bus passes (which my job subsidizes me for), but they're only doing that until the strike is over.

Still, my fellow passengers were more well-behaved than I see on my usual route on the Market-Frankford line, with its packs of wild schoolkids and the occasional beggar. I even got groped once on there. I might even continue taking the regional rail even after the strike is over. As I mentioned, my job subsidizes its employees for public transportation costs, so switching from a bus pass to a train pass would just be a matter of filing the proper paperwork.

On top of that, the walk to the station? Good for your heart.

Every inch of me is sore today. Tiny house on a mountainside rock face wants fences, gates, walls etc etc and apparently we got the job because every other contractor quoted the price too high because they wanted to use dynamite, so in comes my boss who says we'll cut the price by using good old fashioned hammers, chisels, and iron rock bars. Even a single jackhammer was apparently "too cost prohibitive" :s

To be honest, I'd think jackhammers and dynamite a potential risk to the precarious house of "why the hell did anybody build there, anyway?". :/

For fuck's sake, I'd really like to go straight up Negan on the lazy bastards on the midnight dairy shift. Today they left 8 unbroken down pallets (full of product we needed) as well as they didn't do a damn thing to stock anything.

If I do Negan on em, it won't be barbed wire on my bat; it'll be C-wire.

The mass transit strike is now over. Starting tomorrow, I'll be back to my normal method of getting to and from work, at least for now.

So things have been happening at work. Lots of moving cubes around and rebuilding things. Lots of equipment going haywire. A new set of bathrooms finally being completed and all sorts of Yahoos who can't keep a schedule and showing up when they are not expected. The chaos continues this weekend with disaster recovery testing (data systems) , while at the same time cubes being torn down and built back up in the same space as the people doing said testing.

To top it off the cube rats are getting more obnoxiously petulant and whiny. One smuck left a laptop out and when it got snatched up concocted an amazingly asinine story. Somehow I have the super power to open locked drawers that I don't have keys for while simultaneously knowing exactly which drawer the item is in. Well shit I must be a super human security guard. Not the first time someone has drummed up this bs either.

Now because of these yahoos and their over indulgent and irresponsible supervisors adding to the drone of the whining simpering buffoons I have more work. By simple dint of them denying that perhaps their employees, who have been caught numerous times fucking up, couldn't possibly be messing up ever. Because of that now I have to do digital photo inspections. Which means my nightly checks now take longer to not only find the items, write the notes, and snap a series of pics documenting where and what I am finding and on whose desk I am finding them. The plus side is the guy I send this to plans to take picture evidence in hand and lean harder on them. I hope they choke on their complaints.

In more positive news I have regained several capabilities I previously had but lost do to changing equipment and programs. The person who handles the new stuff finally got a chance to give me back a good chunk of my capabilities with the systems. I also got some more solid dirt on the building expansion project that is planned for the near future.

So the plan is this. Once the company gets big enough in terms of number employees within the next two years they will build an extension/new building that will add space sufficient for up to a max of 200-300 employees. The project will take a full year and half. This presents an opportunity for me and the idiots that are running the office of the guard company I work for provide the morons can pay attention and stop pissing off the client. That is the obvious size of the project will require additional guards to manage and quite likely once the extension is ready for use an expanded guard team. Which leaves me top man of the totem pole provided the office doesn't get stupid in someway.

I have to figure out what's wrong with the scheduling system. I've been scheduled on two days where I said I wasn't available—this has happened four times already. Ugh.

Update: I told my scheduling manager about the conflicts last week, she said she'd see what she could do. And then, poof! She disappears due to some sort of convention or out of town business meeting or whatever.

I call today, and the schedule is unchanged, most likely due to holiday season multitasking. So I'm gonna have to call tomorrow morning and see if I can switch shifts with someone. If not, I can only work for two hours. Fucking fuck.

Everything else about the job is great, but I really want to bring up how unprofessional the scheduling is. For one thing, whenever I bring up "you/the computer scheduled me on times I specifically said I wasn't available RIGHT AT THE START OF THE JOB", I'm treated like the utmost inconvenience—even though it wasn't my fault. Not to mention I've informed them around a week ahead of time about their mistake four times.

I called in sick again rather than try and switch shifts. For one thing, I am still sick and I'd have to leave anyway. For another, I didn't feel like calling a dozen people to fix a simple scheduling problem.

It was the most unpleasant conversation I've ever had! The manager began a sentence which sounded suspiciously like "Can you still come in for a few hours instead of skipping the whole day" and then said, "Never mind, bye." All of my sincere regret about taking the easy way out, and losing money, vanished. It has never been so fucking difficult for me to sort out scheduling problems. And I have never personally seen so much unprofessionalism from not one but THREE of the four managers.

They are still a corporation and I am still expendable bottom-tier staff. They're just more "casual", "friendly", and "relaxed." I'm not going to quit, and I do have work friends, but I won't be sorry to leave the company as a whole in a year or two.

Lerad: Geeze that is kind of crappy. They doing anything about it? Hopefully you start feeling well enough to deal with the monkey business.

Speaking of monkey business. My company now has the most asinine policy for call to check in to date. We normally called in directly to a duty phone to check in at our site. Now we have to route through the companies call center who then just connects us to the duty phone to do the same thing. The kicker is the switch board has reliability issues and wait times when the lines are busy.

I really fucking hate corporate side of things sometimes.

edited 3rd Dec '16 8:26:27 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Ah well, I went to work yesterday and things seem to have been taken care of. Though I found myself still getting tired much more easily.

Other job news: In two weeks I will officially be a professional actor, with a certificate and headshots and growing experience. Sometimes it surprises me with how happy I am at this career change. Reminding myself that I'm an actor gets me to smile, no matter how tired or pissed off I am. It's awesome!