Sunday, February 25, 2007

 

Rules

When writing, a blog or anything else, you always have to remember who your audience is. For the longest time, even today, my main audience on The Globex Corporation Newsletter has been myself.

I used to get really frustrated, things I was good at brought me no notice. Worse, at a time when I was unemployed, they brought me no money but used an incredible amount of my time. I played a lot of music and would get frustrated that I was never going to pay the bills that way, worse, it often cost me money in the long run.

Any artistic pursuit has to be for the benefit of the "artist." You have to do it because you love to do it. I liked making music, I liked writing sort of twisted, out of the ordinary songs about my somewhat twisted and out of the ordinary love life. It was great that other people got a kick out of my music. It was monumentally more important that I got a kick out of it. That's the way it always has to be.

I started this blog about two years ago. It was very freeing. It was safe because I knew nobody was reading it. I could kvetch (oooh, Yiddish!) at long lengt about any topic I thought deserved it. Things changed after a while. Some people started reading on a regular basis. That's great, I like having an audience, but the truth of the matter is that I write this for me.

The other truth of the matter is that since other people are reading this, I have to be careful, somewhat restrained in the topics I cover. There are few rules on this blog. I was reminded of the first hard and fast rule a few minutes ago when I checked my email. I made the rule, but outside influences made me consider and implement that rule. In a way, I feel like I'm violating that rule by even typing this. It's my rule, so I guess I can bend it a little bit.

More of a guideline than a rule is writing about work. I've instituted the policy of referring to my employer as [Nameless Company] (special thanks to Sarcastra for the reference). The fact of the matter is that blogging about your employer can be detrimental to your employment.

This started as an idea for an email. To a particular person. That would probably get me in trouble. And maybe this will too, but here goes.

At the first of the year, my shift was changed. I had the option to do or not to do this. I chose to. My choice. That is not the complaint. While my old shift was from 3:30pm to 11:30pm 5 days a week, the new schedule was from 1:30pm to 11:30pm 4 days a week. This is great, 3 day weekends every weekend, you gotta love it.

The problem was that the day shift is ludicrously over-staffed and that three of us who were working this new shift had little opportunity to do much work during that first two hours of the shift. It's not that we didn't want to work, but there was little equipment for us to do work on during those hours.

The day shift supervisor got a bug up her ass and decided that something had to be done. So on Friday my supervisor asked for solutions. The three of us are changing our shift to work from 3pm to 1am four days a week.

The problem, as I see it, was that our department was over-staffed from 1:30pm to 3:30pm four days a week. This other supervisor didn't like that and wanted a change. Solution? None of her people change, someone else's shift had to change.

If the day shift had two many people during those hours, why not send 3 or their people home two hours early? Have three of their people come in two hours earlier to make it work. I suppose 6am is too early to have someone come into work. And there probably wouldn't be anything for them to do.

Having someone stay until 1am, on the other hand, is totally reasaonable. There's plenty going on between 11pm at 1am, enough to justify a change in MY schedule. This is the day shift supervisor's idea of compromise. Do things her way and nobody gets hurt.

Let me say, for the record (such as it is), that I'm not upset by the schedule change. It's fine. It wouldn't be my first choice of the hours I would be at work, but I can live with it. What bothers me is that there was a problem and three people from swing shift were expected to change their schedules, to change their lives, to rectify the situation.

I guess I don't understand compromise. I thought it was give and take. In my life, I've always been the one who gives. I've always been the one who's taken from. I'm the one who compromises.

That would be fine if I ever got anything for that attitude, but I've found that if you bend for someone else more than once that they come to expect it of you. From now on [Nameless Company] will see me as that person who they can do anything to. If I refuse or resist at some future point, I will be the bad guy. I will be labelled as a "discipline problem." I'd like to think that it will be different this time, but past experience tells me otherwise.

BOJ

Comments:
Geez... sounds like >nameless company< works the same way as their competitor in the "personnel relations" game.

Here, our entire department had to give up a 4x10 schedule because a new site manager "didn't like it". I can see in a 24x7 department where it can be difficult for scheduling to work with shifts of 4x10's, but not only are we not a 24x7 department, we now have reduced support hours all 5 week days because our "swing shift" people now works 12p-9p instead of 12p-11p.

Not to mention, that one person has obligations with a child that require 2 trips during the week to a medical facility 100 miles away, which now without that extra weekday off he's had to have his wife handle (which screws up her job).

And.. that site manager was only here 4 months before being "promoted" elsewhere... and our newest site manager doesn't want to address this issue at this time.

I miss the old days in Oakdale... a VP AND the company owner were always just a phone call away, and willing to work with their people... this corporate conglomerate environment sucks ass.

~Quinn
 
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