It wasn't enough that my manager gave me a firm talking to, I had already gotten the message, but yesterday, our Director of Operations pulled me in and gave me another talking to, and I guess made the necessary adjustments. I really wasn't expecting this to get so big, and honestly, I haven't been the only one taking advantage of the whole rule of "get the work done and go home to protect yourself from Covid-19." Shit, when the pandemic started 3-4 people were given permission to just work from home for months, don't bother coming in, keep yourself alive. I was on the other end of that spectrum, because I was an hourly, so from upper management's mouth "leave the work for Mando (save yourselves, my little addition here), he has to be here twelve hours, all you exempt people go home and be with your families in this time of so much unknown." Of course, that email pissed me off and I went in there about ready to quit, but my manager said to ignore that and do as the others "get the work done and go home, don't worry about the time constraint." It was then put in motion to make me an exempt, so that I wouldn't be breaking the law, although that sentiment is complete bullshit. Why do we keep calling it our company and saying we are independent and capable of forging our way, but then insisting on using antiquated rules and techniques to keep operating? Our lab spun off from the giant that was Spansion, and we are supposedly an independent lab consisting of about 18 employees now. About 9-10 of us actually touch product and produce data, which means we make the money, yet we are still being treated like we belong to a company with 1000 employees, and we revert to rules that don't have to apply to us.
The problem, in a nutshell, I figured out how to produce the same amount of work in half the time by using both analysis tools in the lab at the same time (we share the lab space with another companyand they also have an analysis tool like ours), so in 5 hours I could produce the same amount of work that it would have taken me 10-12 hours. This worked out great for all, I thought. All the work has been getting done, I was then free to get in get the work done and go home and enjoy my time with my family. I never once left just because I felt like it and ignored work that was due the next day, my conscience wouldn't allow that.
This proved to be too efficient, the higher ups found out I have been doing this, they did announce sometime in August we were to go back to working our full shifts, and now want to close Pandora's box and expect us to all go back to the way things were. This is a small microcosm of what has happened with letting people work from home, they have found a better way to get the same work done and they don't want to go back to the way things were.
My director now wants me to be back in there for the full shift, which I argued that I won't be working in the same way of running both tools and prepping samples manually for a full 10-hour shift, that pace is too much to do continually. Her fantasy is that I would now have an extra 5-6 extra hours a day to do more work. I have to say no. I literally leave work in a sweat because I don't sit down. I don't turn on the computer to look at videos or anything that wastes time, I even read my email at home, so when I walked in the door, I hit the ground running. I was even turning down coffee time with my coworker because it is so easy to sit and loose an hour in our delightful conversations, he is one of the few guys who doesn't seem to get tired of my shit, and we can argue a point to death, it's fun.
For proof that I am not being hyperbolic, I just have to mention the one guy who did die at work a few years ago. He literally ran around like a chicken without his head on. He was a great guy, he would show up at 6:00am, and hit the ground running, no coffee, straight to the work, I could barely make him sit down to bullshit, he was always being driven by the managers. Well, he had a heart attack and collapsed on the ground one early morning between me leaving and the other coworkers showing up, back then I was doing an honest 12-hour shift, I left when I was supposed to, but he collapsed out in some hallway by the bathrooms and was found later.
My point is you can have it one way or the other, not a mix of both. I could continue to work as I have, and I take the hit when more work than usual comes in and I stay late, if I have to, knowing that I'll make the time back on another day of the week when things go back to normal. I can also go back to dinosaur days and just be an honest employee and put in my ten-hour shift, but I am only going to run one tool and what gets done, gets done. There is a reason we work in a group, I guess we can rely on the group to get the work done. I don't see there being an extra 5 hours of work coming from me, who is going to support my family when I collapse in a heap from a heart attack because I was trying to keep up with a rate no one else even thinks about doing?
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