I had been doing my little version of a touchdown dance for the last week coming into this week after I read the e-mail telling us at work yes, you are "essential" but in order to try and stay healthy and to follow the rules of the city to "stay at home", we are to do whatever work to stay current and then we can go home. Everyone that has ever had a job knows we work one of two ways, if we "have to" be at a job for a given amount of work, we will stretch that work to last us most of the time, so it looks like we are busy to anyone looking in from the outside. The other way to do it is if there is no "timed" component tied to the work and the important part is to get the work done, most of us can find tricks and shortcuts to get done much faster, that is just facts.
I will start with the sentence that I love where I work and I wouldn't do anything to hurt our bottom line and most days in the last 24 years that I have been an employee if I need to stay a little longer I do, no problem. But suddenly, we are in a new world, no one really knows how so many people are contracting corona so easily. There are new reports that it might even be air born, that it stays alive on surfaces, like doors and countertops, and the only thing we can be sure of is that being home is the safest thing for us, right now. That was what the message was last week, so hell yeah, time to work at optimal speed, no slowing down to go make coffee, no sitting down to get my mind eased into working with a few music videos to get me in the mood, shit. I was planning my day since 5:00pm, looking at our online list of work, and planning in my head how to run them the fastest. we technically have two identical tools in the room which we are qualified to run our work on. We usually stick to the one that is ours, the other one belongs to the other company that shares the lab space with us. But if I only have two jobs and I can split them between the two jobs and be done in 4 hours versus 8, wouldn't you do the same?
The funny thing was that after being all giddy at the new set up all last weekend, I come in this week to a new and improved memo, that because I am an hourly and not exempt I "need to work the 12 hours" to get paid. This set me off the rails and if I wasn't so level headed I would have thrown computers across the room, I have never gotten more pissed. The company has made a career of modifying the rules to make people happy, such as allowing exempts to get paid OT, the only reason I refused to become an exempt in the first place. I called my direct supervisor, the most level headed of my "bosses" and he quickly apologized and said he knew as he wrote that part of the memo that it wasn't right, but the rest of the people in the room were overreacting and actually trying to help me. "Help me?" I asked with foam coming out of my mouth, "by making me stay here by force, to be the first one in the company to get sick? and then what? when I die, who is going to give a shit?" He was trying his best to apologize and insist that wasn't the intention, that they just wanted to make sure I didn't lose money in the whole deal. I explained that in this time, who gives a shit whether I am here or not, as long as the work gets done? I would not abandon the work as long as I am healthy, I know that affects our bottom line, but once it gets done, I should be treated just as fairly as the rest of the people and be allowed to go home. In this new environment, none of us knows how much longer we will be around, we should be allowed the free time we have to be with our loved ones. Shit, if you contract it, and die, that's it, no more contact with the people you love, just a cold medical bed and buried alone, for fear of infecting family, it is a horrible way to go.
He agreed with me, so I let my anger go. We both agreed I would just fill my timecard as if I was there the full twelve hours and leave it alone. I am sure someone above will not like it and still insist I have to be there, but maybe if I suggest to them I'll have a coffee with them at their house after any of my 12 hour shifts, they will come around. Yeah, some of the people insisting I be there 12 hours, were also the first to isolate themselves and decide it is best for them to work from home, I mean that sounds fair, right? If all that doesn't seem that bad to y'all, there was also a sentence in the memo that said "Mando needs to have work for the full twelve hours, so if the workload is light, just leave it for him."
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