1/21/22 Spanking 2.0?

     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?  

1/20/22 Should People Be Having Kids?

     I was listening to the radio this morning and a guy came on talking about people shouldn't be having kids, because the planet already has too many people.  He was trying to get a second date with a girl he had met, so he calls the radio show after she doesn't respond to him directly and they do a "1st date follow-up".  The girl did not want to do a second date because she said he went off on his own talking about not wanting kids and the planet and on and on.  Everyone can do what they want, I'm not here to say who is right, but even when she came back on and they talked a bit, he was still super aggressive trying to get her to see his side.  She was not having it.

    I can see his side and even agreed back before I had kids of my own.  Boy is currently kind of talking like that too.  I am glad I was wrong, and that Wife got pregnant (I still don't know how that happened, 😀 ), and now we have our two boys, who have been everything for us these last 20 plus years.  I can't imagine deciding to go the other route, it leads to an easy life, when you are young and want the freedom to do as you please, but who will be there to celebrate with you as you get older?  Boy likes to tease us (I think) that they will just get pets and they will be alright.  Great plan, get some cats then when you die, they'll have no problems eating you.

    I think we exist to procreate, if you don't then you aren't leaving anything on the planet after you are done.  The notion that the planet is getting too full just means that you have to raise competitive kids who will strive to get ahead and thus be able to provide for themselves.  What is the harm in raising 1-2 kids, when there are people out there still cranking out 10 kids or more and living in poverty and mayhem?  I think that is a harm to the environment, not to mention when some of these wild-ass kids grow up and don't respect the people or environment around them.  I'm all for people having kids, if they are going to raise them properly.  Assholes spitting out kids because they don't understand birth control should be sterilized, unloved kids are a burden on society, as ugly as that sounds.

    As for the guy on the radio, I think he just has to find the right person.  I am pretty sure it wasn't the lady he went out with, but there have to be some females who might be open to that idea.  Maybe he needs someone like Wife to just get herself preggers on him, then he might come around, who knows.

1/19/22 Another Disappointing Trip To Maxwell Ford?

     I love a good Ford vehicle, but I cannot believe what they are doing with the prices nowadays.  There seems to be no shame, and I guess they don't need to show any when people are still obviously buying into whatever they are doing and getting away with.  I like to walk the lot every time I go in for an oil change and it was time again for our Escape, which we bought a year and a half ago for $11,000.  This car has been great, other than buying new tires for it, all we have had to do is change the oil.  We bought it with 73,000, and it is about to go over 100,000 here in a month or so.

    I decided to go today because I know there is a strong cold front coming tonight and I don't want to feel like I have to be doing this in the cold or on the weekend.  Since I like to walk around, today was perfect.  The weather outside right now (11:00am), is probably 68, so I took my time.  It still turned into a shit show.  First of all, the section of the lot that used to hold a couple hundred trucks in the past is now just parking for the employees.  They only have a handful of choices for each model.  I really only saw one used F-250.  They had maybe 20 new F-150 trucks, but the nice Platinum was $73,000, might as well get an F-250 at that point.

    I then walked over to the two new Broncos they had outside, I assume they were for sale, although they have been making a stink that one won't be able to buy one for a year unless we ordered them when they were announced.  These two could be ones that were canceled on by other customers.  Either way, the price looked good on the 4-door model with a soft top, at $48,000, but then they have the balls to add $30,000 from the dealership.  Maybe I have the prices flipped, but they are both over $70,000 (just checked online).  At least put a big V-8 engine we can brag about for that money.  I refuse to get a new car for more than $50,000 with a dinky 4-cylinder engine.

    I then kept walking in disgust and didn't really see any used F-250 trucks.  They had a good-looking Ranger, not that I want a small vehicle, but they are nice to get around town and park anywhere.  It was used, with 6,000 miles, it had a sticker saying, "No Warranty", but they were still wanting $43,000.  This is a small truck, no leather, no sunroof, WTF!

    At this point, I just went back inside and drank the shitty coffee.  At least they are throwing a little pastry offering with the coffee as we wait.  Maybe I should just learn to sit in the waiting room and stop looking.  At this point, I am just going to keep driving my Excursion for the rest of my life.

1/18/22 Do I Have The Balls To Start Over?

     I really felt insulted with the crap they came up with this week to get after us.  I would understand if we had gotten lazy and we were letting our customers down, but I swear, at least the chemistry group, we are right near 100% completion rate on any work requests for the stuff I work on.  Sure, there are sometimes weird experiments and that is handled by our manager or the more experienced people, and with having to discuss the work with the customer, those type of jobs may occasionally fall through the cracks.  The stuff I work on is always completed, and there are 24hr jobs, ones that need to be done by the next day coming in at least 3 out of the 4 days I am there, they are very common.

    I know that a lot of the reason I haven't tried looking for another job is because I am comfortable most of the time, but maybe this is a sign that I should shop myself around.  I just hate the idea of starting over and having to meet new people and proving to a new group that I am useful.  Boy has been encouraging me, as well as Wife to apply to Tesla, or Samsung.  Both of these companies especially are investing big time in the area, Tesla is building a new plant in Del Valle, and Samsung is also putting in a new $17billion dollar fab in Taylor.  Just looking at the cost of housing in the area, and the median house selling for $500,000, salaries have to be climbing to keep up, yet here we are with no raises in over 10 years.  We got a lump sum of money about three years ago, and we were told that would be a more regular thing, but it only happened once.

    I don't think management did us any favors by also telling me (not sure if they told this to the others), you can be replaced if you don't like it.  I was also told "If you want to continue working your current time, you can become a part time worker."  I don't think they could have said it any clearer that I am not really a valued employee, if anyone can come in and replace me.  Never mind the years of loyalty I have given them, and it was their stupid idea to let us be so fluid on our schedules.

    Like Boy has told me, in today's environment, where people can productively work from home, can conduct business through the computer, and so many other ways, we stumbled on a method that was working for us, I wasn't even minding not getting raises, if they were going to keep looking the other way on our time.  Wife says the first step is to write up a new resume, that might be enough for me to get the ball rolling.

1/17/22 Spanking At Work?

     Well, I guess fun time's over.  I got the proverbial spanking at work for leaving early hundred too many times.  I still call bullshit on the whole thing.  Back in 2020, when things were at their worst with Covid-19, we were told that in order to reduce exposure, we had permission to come in do as much work as was required to keep things going and just worry about what was going to be due the next day, maybe prep the upcoming stuff so it would get done in time.  The important part was to keep up with customer demands, still meet our deadlines on getting the data required to our customers and still feel safer because we didn't just have to sit onsite to meet our time demands.  I was even converted from an hourly, which I had been since I started there in November of 1995 to an exempt.  Since it had been years since I had made any extra money from over time, it seemed the smart thing to do.  By doing this, it allowed me to come and go as I pleased, provided the work was done.

    I thought we had become very efficient at working in this manner, I even got in the habit of running both analysis tools, which essentially doubles my work output and allowed me to do double the work in half the time.  Prior to this, we could only use the other company's tool if ours was down.  Since we were qualified and allowed to run our product on that tool, it just seemed like silly human rules to not use the tool, the other company only works 8-5pm, so the tool is empty and not used in the evenings, which is why I've been the only one to get into this habit.  You could say on any given day, I was only at work for 5-6 hours, but in that time, I was not taking coffee breaks, I stopped watching shows on Netflix, all I was doing was focusing on getting whatever work done, and then leaving.  Trust me, I may be only there 5 hours, but nobody else's lab coat has sweat stains, I hardly sit down, and really enjoyed working at that rate, with the understanding that my reward would be a short shift most days.

    For whatever reason, the dinosaurs in charge have decided we should all be back to full time on site, I guess we can ignore Covid now, it has lost its star status as the disease of the week.  We were told this sometime around August to go back to normal, but none of us really wanted to, and why should we, the work was all getting done, and we were as happy as idiots who haven't seen a raise in over ten years can be, given the circumstances.  We were all given a sheet which showed the door data, funny enough, they had said they would not be looking at this data when I brought it up before.  This shows how long we are in the building because we have to scan in and out.  My time was pretty much what I thought it would be, I have been onsite 49.1% of the time I am supposed to be there.  I don't think it was quite right, I only showed 8 hours of vacation in the months between August and December.  I know I was off for a week in November for Thanksgiving and the last two weeks of the year for the Christmas holidays.

    There is no fucking way that I will go back to ten hours a day and work at the rate I was working before, I'll stay the full shift, if I must, but I will only run one tool, like everybody else.  I also asked about bringing my hours down some more.  I can't go back to working the true night shift anymore, it has left my internal clock messed up.  I am writing this right now at 1:00am, I really should be asleep, I have to get up in the morning to take Baby A to school.  I am going to try to work something like noon to 10:00pm, or maybe if I put my lunch on the end of the shift, get out at 9:00pm.

1/16/22 Dealing With Covid Boy?

     Baby A came down with Covid-19 last week.  We tested him on Thursday after he woke up looking like he had the flu.  I would have left it alone and believed it was just the flu, maybe the cool Flurona, but after hearing six other wrestlers also were positive pretty much told me he had caught it.  I hate to say the name, but Victory Medical is my new favorite place to go for our medical needs, specifically the one in Bee Caves.  This location is so clean and quiet, I just feel relaxed being here, as compared to going to other places which always add a waiting component to the visit.

    Anyways, by the time I took him, he was full into his sickness, but as bad as he looked, it was over pretty quick.  His biggest ailment was muscle soreness, he was moving like my dad, just missing the ooh ooh ooh every time he sat.  Since he had overdone it in the weight room, he had thought it was this Tuesday and Wednesday, when he started going downhill.  I was pretty sure I was going to get it again; we were at the wrestling meet with them, and he spends all his time at home with us, when he is awake.  I thought it was funny when I called to work and they asked me "well, have you been close to him?"  My response was "we are currently touching elbows in the car (the Ford Escape is rather small), so yeah we have been close, but he will be quarantined in his room when we get home."  I can't say he was quarantined all that badly, like I was a year ago.  We let him come down and sit with us on his end of the sofa and watch a movie while we ate.  This has been our routine for lunch and dinner all weekend.

    He woke up Saturday happy that he could squat almost normally, and he said his chest was not feeling as congested.  It is now Sunday and Wife and I still feel fine, I can't think he is still as contagious as he might have been on Wednesday or Thursday last week.  He was pretty much back to normal today, but I think he is enjoying the "having to stay home and not doing anything."

    Boy was trying to be in a panic, as little as he has been here.  When he came and saw Baby A sitting in the living room, he started with his passive aggressive shit about he is supposed to be locked up, Wife surprisingly told him "Shut up!", something she never does.  He kind of got the hint, and that might have been part of the reason he went to go sleep at his girlfriend's house.

    I thought it was interesting that when we got home from the doctor and Baby A found out he was sick with Covid, Boy got home early from work because he went to go get his third vaccine shot, or his booster.  They were both sick for about the same amount of time, Boy woke up Friday with sore muscles and a sore arm where he got the shot.  Both were up and moving about fine by Friday night.  I am not saying the booster is a bad idea, but it does seem like the latest Covid is mild and it might spread faster, but with less devastating results.  In all, nine or ten of the wrestlers tested positive, but they are all feeling better by now, as Mijo heard through their group text.

1/15/22 Boy Is Moving On Up?

     Boy told us last night that he has signed a lease and will be moving out sometime in late February.  Although I am happy for him, if this is what he wishes to do, it is in total contrast to what we had talked about just a couple weeks ago.  During the Christmas break, we had a pretty good discussion of how he should work on saving money this year (for a house), after getting a nice bonus at the end of the year and thinking that would happen again at the end of this year.  He assured us he wasn't in a rush, which sounded good, if it were up to us, I'd like him to aggressively start paying down his school loans, but then again, he is now 27 and probably really wanting to start his own life.

    It is of course exciting to venture out, and we will support him on this (not financially, but still), but there is a yin and a yang to everything.  For the immediate freedom he will experience moving out and playing house with the girlfriend (I would prefer they get married first), there will also be a penalty of him losing his ability somewhat to save money for a down payment.  It is unfortunate, but houses in Austin are very expensive, the median price for a home in late 2021 is $498,000 and even saving up the down payment is rough when realtors expect 5% to 20% down.

    The apartment sounds good, it is in North Austin, he said about 15 minutes from his work.  It has 2 bedrooms, and a total of 1300 sq ft.  That is actually a big apartment, that sounds about the size of our first house.  The complex is gated, and they supposedly have 24hr security walking the premises, which makes me feel better.  The cost will be a pretty penny, at $1700 a month plus utilities but the unit even has washer/dryer connections.  With the 2 bedrooms, they'll have room to take some of his 3D printers and hopefully all the kitchen utensils which have taken over our kitchen.

    My only change if I could have anything to do with this whole thing, is I would have preferred he stayed down in south Austin, but I guess I should be happy he is still going to be in the same city.  I doubt we will see him during the week, we are sometimes too busy to see each other during the week right now and we live in the same house.

    I felt a big loss when he moved out a few years ago when he lived in San Marcos for two years while going to school, I don't deny that.  I didn't feel he was ready to leave us, he was still very immature.  I feel different now, he is 27, he has shown us to be very responsible and acts like a grown up most of the time.  He has had three different jobs now, each for a good amount of time, and what we hear is that he is appreciated and respected wherever he works, so at this point, I have to assume he will be alright.  We will certainly gain a bunch more room in the house.  We will keep his room as a guest room, but much much much cleaner.  I will gain the usage of the room next to his and probably move the weights in there.  This will then allow us to convert the room downstairs into another guest room for when my parents come and visit.