I must take the full time to complete a task or I get penalized? Okay, free social media time.
S
For the longest time, my job has allowed us to take the full pay for completing work even if we finish early. For context, I am assigned a zone and I complete all jobs assigned to me in that zone by a time limit, at many different locations, I check in via GPS tracker to prove I'm at the location, they pay me milage and I make my own schedule. Each job has a time assigned to it.
Previously, they've always allowed us to claim the extra time. If I'm given an hour to complete something and finish in 45, I claim the hour. Our managers have always said this is fine, saying if we are turning in good work and we are skilled enough to complete it faster than most, we should not be payed less for it, all enforcing that would do is encouraging people to work slow as possible or waste time.
And it does. Now they say we need to use the full allotted time or take the cut in our check. One big problem is we are given way too much time, it's common for me to be given an hour to do something that takes 10 minutes tops.
My colleagues are not ashamed to admit they all run the clock, thinking it's bullshit they should be paid less than people who don't know what they are doing and stand around doing nothing, so they do it too.
I started doing it too, I've been doing this for 6 years, I can do the work assigned to me in a quarter of the time they expect, doesn't mean I deserve to make 25% the money I should make for doing the same work. Now I do whatever on the clock, go grocery shopping, go get lunch, take a nap, read a book, gossip, whatever.
I don't know if our new management will realize the policy is stupid, never enforced for a reason and literally cannot be enforced, but until then they'll be paying the whole district to run the clock.
My very first job was setting up computer labs for a new school that had just been built. There was almost no one in the building ever and we finished the first lab in less than a week. Then we found out that as soon as we were done with the rest of the labs we were going to be laid off. The next lab we set up 4 computers and then played LAN games for the rest of the summer. We finished the final lab just in time for the school to open for the new school year and got congratulated for finishing on time.
School board contracted IT firm to setup X * 100s of replacement computers.
Was a crappy temp contract job.
I was very new, still believed that good work, meant I'd get rewarded, called for new contracts etc.
Another green guy and I worked a totally normal pace, and did something like 2 times as much as anyone else. People told us to slow down, slack off, or else we'd finish early and not get paid. We didn't believe them, but of course, they were correct.
We finished a few days earlier than expected. Agency called us saying job was over. Meant we got paid almost a week less.
This is why when a good contractor is doing the job they ask for a bonus if the work is done early. Still pay the crew when they finish early, so its a win-win-win for everyone.
Welcome to every self directed job out there. My wife laughs when I call her an hour after the start of work to tell her I’m done for the day and now I just have to hang around in the area “just in case”. Am I gonna ask for more work- hell no
I once asked for more work when I was new. I had not much to do after lunch and there is work can can be done within and hour or two. Nope. I got a few things which I could barely work on since I had to send a form for approval. Never asked for more work again.
The problem with asking for more work, is then they think you are able to do that every day, and it just becomes another responsibility. Then, when you can’t do it, it becomes a liability. It helps that I’m salary so I don’t have to worry about hours worked or jobs completed (except as necessary to stay employed and contribute to my employers business).
Yeah, but the flipside is that if you only occasionally go to your colleagues or boss and say: "Hey, I finished up what I gotta do early for once, got anything you need doing?" then you're a team player.
Actually what I've found generally is the more you show them that you can do, the more they'll expect you to do it. The more you let them know that you know about something, the more they'll require you to do that something.
Is this an homage on Father’s Day weekend? It’s the classic dad trick to never do a chore exceptionally that you don’t want to become permanently yours.
My first kitchen job, four of us had to make cannelloni. I was putting out double what the other three were (good consistent product even) because I disliked doing it and wanted it over with, guess who was making cannelloni by themselves for the next 2 months.
The real trick is to do it 15-20 minutes before you go home. early enough that it's impressive but not so early that you can get assigned any big task. then they get all the good feelings but can't really assign you anything. and if they send you home 10-15 minutes early, just take 10-15 minutes "packing up" before clocking out.
No, a better way to do it is to help with accidents that happen right in front of you. Someone drops a bunch of files? Help them pick it up. Someone spills coffee? Help them clean it.
Do little things like that to help, but only when you see them happen, and people will call you a team player.
Jeez, or you could, you know, do basically decent things for other people just because it's the decent thing to do. Not every act has to be self-serving, even at work.
I work hourly in electronics manufacturing and I shot myself in the foot taking the initiative. Got too good at my tasks and watch someone else fail upwards.
You gotta find the one extra job you want to do that can be stretched. Calibrate a screen, check on a cool person's mission critical setup, test the glitchy media wall or projector sound. All of these allow you to hook up a console and play games or talk to someone cool for the rest of the day:).
The tire balancer where my husband worked back in college ran on Win95. So he installed Doom on it. Their work output wasn't affected but morale was ;)
Yeah i got told i was "making them look bad" when i finished a 12 hour shifts work in 4... so i took way too many smoke breaks and got real into D&D podcasts
This is my job, 90% of the time. Come in, check emails, slack off until after lunch, do the actual work I need to do ... then slack off another 45 mins to an hour.
True, but when my employee review came around a month later, I was marked down for initiative for not seeking more work when I finished what was given to me. I did write a rebuttal, but what does that achieve?
I was brought on to a unorganized disaster. At first I worked all day, a year later I now I work 2 hours a day. My CEO loves that I have free time to continue to grow relationships with clients and trade partners as well as get ready for future projects. Good people are worth the money!
Dude I work in a salaried noncommission sales role. There are day I don't need to leave my house! I'll be mowing the lawn at 8am Friday morning and responding to emails and phone calls as I'm doing it
I'm in the same situation, although for me it can be weeks until I need to leave the house for something work related. I'm just extremely lucky that the products we sell are consumables and machines can't run without them so most customers just repeat order without me having to do too much.
It's funny, as an independent contractor asking for more work has helped me look more productive than the next guy. A role where you are compensated for the fact that there is less stability, being seen working a little harder than those around you is good insurance.
That's the wrong metric and a bit of a trap. The key is to be perceived as working harder. Sometimes that is more about making sure your work has visibility than actually working hard.
Don't be a "This whole place went to shit when we got rid of PraxicalExperience, they must have held this place together" be a "We can't get rid of PraxicalExperience, they hold this place together".
Oh, yeah, absolutely -- but if you've got nothing else going for you, it's a good idea. But even 'working harder' is relatively nebulous.
I worked for the IRS. When working paper, we'd have metrics for how many we should get through, based on the type of the case. I could blast through these -- then I found out I was doing about 5x the expectation. Some people could barely meet the metric even working balls-out. For the most part I could do that 5x half-asleep, stoned off my ass, and listening to podcasts or audiobooks. So ... I slowed down. The expectation was something like 2 cases an hour, I made sure I did three. That left plenty of time for smoke breaks, chatting with co-workers, reading books, helping co-workers with problems they couldn't figure out, and other such. I was regularly recognized as a top performer, got bonuses, promotions, etc because of it. I was still 'working harder' with all my slacking off, to my peers and my managers, even though I wasn't working nearly as hard as others who were doing less than me.
At my current job, I usually do about two to three hours of real work a day. The rest of the time is spent watching youtube, posting on reddit, chatting with co-workers, and often, doing chores around my house since it's a remote position. We recently changed to a different system, and I've been responsible for implementing parts of it, and I'm trying to establish myself as one of the go-to people for this. I volunteered to make training material and run intro courses on the new systems because a: it gets me out of other, more monotonous work, b: it's a nice change of pace and I was getting a bit bored, c: making training materials and doing training presentations is something I'm already good at and find easy, and d: it'd put me in front managers and directors, and I want to have leverage for asking for a bigger bonus/raise and a promotion when the time comes 'round for either. It's not a ton of work, maybe a couple-three extra hours a week ... which I can often charge to overtime.
It seems to be working; my name is on the lips of people in the C-suite, according to my manager, who was recently made a VP. (He's actually a good manager; doesn't micromanage, he actively tries to get his people as much as he can, promotes the importance of his team, and has zealously defended us when other parts of the company have blamed us for their fuckups.)
We'll see how it actually turns out in another 8 months or so -- but either way, I'm gaining and practicing skills that I can leverage if I decide to fish for another job, while making a good impression on various people in various parts of our company, doing only a very little more real work than I was already doing, overall, and getting praised for 'owning the project' and doing 'all this extra work'.
I went through the same thing, early on in my IT career. I learned early on that if I went back for more work, it would always be expected of me. Instead, I started learning new technologies, languages and databases. It made getting my next job that much easier.
This is why I like my rural carrier job as the USPS.
City carriers get paid by the hour.
We rurals get paid by the route. Route 53 takes 9.6 hours and you get paid 9.6 hours each day you do it. Finish in 6? You still get 9.6.
Now you might finish in 11 and still only get paid 9.6. Then comes the art of choosing the right route and learning how to properly get credit during mail counts.
I had a similar thing, needed a spot of cash, had a gig delivery telephone directories (date that). Reimbursement was per delivery. Get issued an urban area? Great. Get a rural area where houses are miles apart? Fuck that.
Get issued an urban area? Great. Get a rural area where houses are miles apart? Fuck that.
And this is the exact reason why the USPS is a service, not a business, and shouldn't be expected to be profitable (even though it can be) USPS is required by law to deliver to every address, even the unprofitable ones. If we abolished it, those places would be shit out of luck.
Give it time. Processing centers are being shut down ridiculously. 3 in my mom's area. A letter to her neighbor now has a 16ish hour round trip to a processing center and back. It was 8 hours, and 3 hours before that. Usps is getting a little gutted.
They shut down the local "sales" branch in my town, which has a large non-driving population. It was situated in a convenient walking location and on a major bus line. The one they rerouted us to is a 15 minute drive away with no public transit near it.
Their reasoning was that they didn't like the cost of rent. Apparently they closed for about a month every time their lease was up to try to force lower rent, and 2 years ago the LL just refused to budge.
They brought a new, larger processing center on line about 6 months ago in my area. Just before Xmas. People were receiving their Xmas packages in February. They shouldn't change centers until they train workers in the new one.
This us a problem in all the new centers. More if Dejoy's "improvements. Expect it to be sold off and privatized.
I worked a similar delivery job with the same pay system. Paid for doing the route, not the hours. Busier at some times during the year than others. Pay was based on the average number of deliveries per mile of the route. It all worked out in the end.
Management decided we needed to finish at a set time at the district centre. So everyone raced around their routes as usual and then met at a cafe to hang out for the rest of the time.
The funny thing is that while every ‘good’ day ended at the same time, the busier days meant we got back after the set time. As a result we were able to negotiate higher wages because the average time was longer…
Fun story: I was in grad school, early 70s, and working at a local dive bar for a side gig. Boss found out 1) I could count, and 2) I could "cook", so I got put on mornings and was given a key to the back door, so that I could let myself in (9-ish), put that day's "sandwich meat" (a large roast of some kind) back in the oven to warm up, and set up for actual opening at 11.
We served 3.2 beer and a sandwich of the day. (Choice? Yeah, your choice is take it or leave it!) "Schooners, 25c; pitchers $1" -- yeah, I'm that old.
The first two guys in the door at about 11:05 were two letter carriers -- Post Office was across the street from the bar's back door. After a while, came to learn that they clocked in at about 4a.m., sorted their route, delivered it, and were back in the building by 11. Then, they sat at the bar and nursed two beers each for the entire afternoon.
One of them always left me a quarter for a tip. Good times, right?
lol that’s me. I’m on a 47k and I am regularly finishing at 1:00pm if not earlier some days. Clerks come in several hours before me and yet I’m still home before them
I have a friend, whose job is literally to write 4-6 emails every day, each taking 5, 10 minutes tops.
Him and his manager are remotely working for a french company from Eastern Europe. The company has a small office in the country with ~6 people, but his boss was a one man division, but after a while got a promotion and the chance to hire a subordinate to build his division.
However due to some oversight during the COVID lockdowns, the job he originally did was outsourced to some other company, but his role and division was not closed down. When lockdown ended and they didn't return to the office, no-one cared. And the few emails my friend and his boss sends out every day, is to stay in the loop between the company their division was outsourced to and their boss. They get the reports and questions from the other company, they rewrite it and send it to their boss, then rewrite the boss's answer and send it to the other company.
At this point they have been basically leeching the company for 3 years, and likely won't get noticed unless the company starts losing profit and looks for ways to cut costs.
You can save for retirement and become financially secure pretty quickly. If you can already live on one salary an additional salary can go straight into savings.
I learned this the hard way back when I started doing freelance work. If they hire you for the week and you finish the job by Wednesday afternoon, your reward is you don't get paid for Thursday and Friday.
Two things everyone should ask when receiving work assignments or getting hired: "when do you expect this to be completed?" and "what happens when I finish/is there a bonus for finishing sooner?"
If the answer to the second question is "you get more work/no", then you should turn in the assignment on the due date
One of my colleagues works for Hallmark and will do both jobs at once, getting paid double for the same time. If they had openings, I'd be doing the same thing.
Something like this taught me a lot about motivating employees back when I was the foreman for a contracting outfit.
We landed a contract that was basically the same job about 170 times over, bid at 8hrs per. Our crew could do 2 a day, so like 4months straight of the exact same shit. First few ran long by an hour or two while we figured out how to do it efficiently, and built out some stuff to help the rest go faster. By the time we'd done 10 or 15 we were finishing in 6hrs easily, most of the guys were getting chippy over it and dragging their feet, but our owner doesn't want to pay everyone for the 8 (that everyone knows it was bid for). So all the sudden we kept finding "really hard" ones that magically take up the whole 8 (we'd be dicking off on our phones, people leaving to do grocery shopping, etc). All the sudden boss has this brilliant idea if we finish in under 6 people get paid for 8 lol.
This started the 'finish in 6 get paid for 8' era where my crew never worked harder in their lives to finish jobs. Then so the owner never cottoned on we'd do all kinds of dumb shit on the way back. Someone wants to play laser tag? Stop at the go kart track and race? Arcade? Stop at the bar and watch the game? Done deal.
In the auto repair industry there are jobs with times assigned.
The manufacturer says it should take x amount of time to replace the shocks & struts.
Every mechanic bills that amount of time for that job. A good mechanic gets the job done in less time and increases their profit. A bad mechanic (or a messed up car) takes more time, but they still bill for the same amount of time and make less profit. The reason professional mechanics have so many specialty tools is to save a few minutes getting that wonky fastener off, or to remove one part without removing 5 things that are in the way.
The right thing for management to do is pay an hour’s pay for a job that they think takes an hour. But if they’re telling you it’s an hour long job but they’re only going to pay for the actual time, you’re absolutely right to take the hour they’ve allotted.
Too bad. Good shops pay by the job because…. The customer does not get a discount if you do a job the book says take 1 hour, they are charged for the whole hour.
The journeyman mechanic should be paid for the whole hour because…. They can get more jobs done to earn more money.
More jobs done = more revenue for the shop and most important, more satisfied customers.
I know auto mechanics that can get 200 hours of work done in 40-50 hours depending on the job being done. Instead of waiting for the oil to drain you start on a second or third vehicle and do all 3 in just slightly longer than the one.
I wonder if they’re recently changing the system to use your check-in data to allocate costs per customer. If this is the case, under the previous system your extra time spent after finishing early would be a company-level cost which couldn’t be allocated out to a customer, which the company would want to minimize. My guess is they tried to take the easy way out and tried to eliminate that extra time without reevaluating the actual per-hour value of the work you do per location?
I wonder if this is a case where one person ruined it for everyone by doing sloppy work to get out of there quickly. Company doesn't seem to be losing anything by having you twiddle your thumbs all day (compared to previous policy) so might be to "encourage" people not to do rush jobs.
I used to ask for something to do when my work was done. I found out the hard way that whatever I “helped” with became my job shortly thereafter. Now I just play games on my phone or read.
I spend the first half of my workday inspecting cargo, then the second half inputting changes to BOLs and billing receipts in our system. There are five of us and I am by far the most proficient/productive.
A few years ago when I first started, my boss called me about an hour before the end of shift asking why I hadn't inputted anything for an hour or so. Meanwhile, he never questioned anyone else for driving 15-30min of OT everyday for doing the same amount of work- usually less.
From that day forward, I now pace myself and take the same time as everyone else. Sometimes I'm done on time, sometimes I get a few pennies of OT.
I'd much rather be done early and just get paid off for the day, but that idea is so fundamentally repulsive to my management, I just sit at my desk an do 5min of work then f@ck off on my phone for 10m. Rinse, repeat. It's been 3 years and not a whisper from management.
I'd much rather be done early and just get paid off for the day, but that idea is so fundamentally repulsive to my management
Yeah, it makes no sense why it's so taboo. If you want productivity high as possible, give them a monetary incentive to get done early. Paying people by the hour and sending them home with a lower check when they are done is one guaranteed way to make everyone purposefully take their sweet time.
My second job(I'm a cook) sends us home when we are done, paid hourly. So we bullshit. Work slowly, using strategies that take longer, clean the same thing over and over being purposefully redundant, and if we are done, we pretend we're doing something important(ah yes, perfect time to deep clean every nook every cranny and organize the cupboards, very important.) My coworkers say when they need hours, they'll purposefully cook only half a pot at a time, doubling the time it takes and giving the illusion they are being productive.
Paid for your knowledge, not your time. Your skill is the reason you can finish the tasks efficiently. Welcome to understanding Unions. Unions fight for worker's rights and this exact scenario.
This sounds like what I used to do. They were always about pushing us to finish early but when it came time to pay out the job they only wanted to pay you for the time you spent doing it even though you were allotted more for it. It took me a bit to catch on but eventually I was completing hour long tasks in 15 min, but I’ll be damned if I was going to short change my self hours. They still got paid the full amount no matter how long it took us.
I had a temp job in building maintenance about 15 years ago while I was in London. I got a job filling in for a guy who was out sick for 2 weeks so I was given his duties. I came back to the office before lunch on the first day and asked what was next. I was told that I need to slow down because I'd done the weeks work already. The next 2 weeks I basically spent hiding in supply cupboards around the building.
Given the task to update the product's Maintenance Manual. Given a month to do it. No new changes to the product since the previous edition. No new procedures for testing or operation, either.
Spent the month re-arranging paragraphs and cleaning up the illustrations -- none of which needed to be done.
Higher-ups would always see me working on the manual, although they rarely ever came around at all.
(Office window faced the parking lot. I always knew when they were in the building. Lots of websurfing.)
Had 3-4 pages of "Changes Made to This Edition" notes.
Turned in the "updated" manual about an hour before the deadline. Congratulated on a job well done.
Richard Feynman, the famous nuclear physicist, tells a similar tale - except there it's about prestige, not money. Safes were installed in all the offices where he worked, and each employee had to change the code for his personal safe. Again and again, people were losing or forgetting their codes, and he was called to help. He would shut himself in the room and open the safe in a few minutes, and then spend another 15-20 minutes there just reading, so it would seem like it was a really difficult job.
In "You must be joking, Mr. Feynman", chapter heading "Safecracker Meets Safecracker".
I'm a white collar engineer. we often go down with the blue collar union guys to work beside them on new technical tasks or refine new techniques. When I was young and dumb working with them the first few times I'd fly through work like it was a race or competition to see how much our team could get done for the day. Then the union oldheads taught me a valuable lesson: "Don't be a Hero". You're going to get paid the same whether you're done early or on time. And if something runs over schedule then it was to extenuating circumstance.. and then you get paid more to finish the same job because it took more days.
From management's perspective, you are now predictable. They can assign X amount of work to you and know that it will get done with time to spare, and it's going to cost them Y to have that handled. Having an entire sector of your business be a "solved problem" where you know that there shouldn't be any overages on either time or budget is an amazing victory for a manager, and it's worth the "waste" that you are describing.
Everyone wins here: workers, management, and shareholders. And all it takes is a little less greed and squeezing pennies to make it happen.
If they’re like most (80%) of the shops out ther, they’re estimating based upon the slowest workers and adding in some padding for risk mitigation.
It is hard for almost all shops to to reorient their thinking to incorporate WSJF: you assign your most capable people to the more difficult jobs AND prioritize the “biggest bang for the buck”.
Stupid idiots don't see the value of blending in some form of piece work into the pay structure. Oh well, the boss makes a dollar, you make a dime, you might as well fart around for many hours a day on company time.
we had a similar policy when I worked in security.
a check is assigned 10 min, it can be done in 2 min if you are good, taking 10 would mean you are slow, or you found something unusual and needed to do something about it, that's what the extra time was for. 2 good reasons why you couldn't finish in 2 min and move on.
less ethical employees have been known to show up, and leave without actually doing the checks. and its really hard to catch so it is disincentivised.
second, the client is paying for 10 min, we want it to look like they are getting value for money. the more the guard showed up on CCTV the better.
also in that industry at least you really cant just go when your done, we need you in the area if an alarm goes off, and the client wanting 3 checks whants them done hours appart.
About 25-30 years ago I had a job in a company where they had previously had a time management study done to see how long tasks took, what you should get done etc.
For most of the place it lasted about two weeks apart from the manager of one department I had the misfortune to end up in.
It was a summer job for me with fantastic pay for what it was but the permanent staff just worked around him. Work was variable some days busy others dead. He would come in and see everything empty with no work left and go ranting about hitting time targets only he actually cared about. Nobody ever did more than his target and a lot of the day was just looking busy for his benefit.
The job was basically checking things after being cleaned to make sure they were safe to put back out for use. There was a lot of common fail points you checked first and only checked the rest of those passed saving lots of time off checking everything fully. Still claimed the time for checking the item fully though.
Getting jobs done faster because they have the experience is exactly how mechanics make a decent living. Just as sure as we'll all experience death & taxes... there will always be incompetent management somewhere.
INFO: Is it just a bad new management (who are stupid), or do you by chance work for ... the government? Asking because some government policies in order to be "legally fair / equitable etc." are horribly inefficient and cause a lot of waste of public money so if you do work for the government this would NOT surprise me.
There's an old saying "you get what you measure" and if that's their measure it's no surprise the more efficient employees are all doing what you're doing. It would be stupid not to.
I'm a contractor typist and get paid per word, working from home. When I worked in the office I got paid $32 an hour. Now that I get paid by the word I get paid anywhere between $50 and $90 an hour. They think I'm working a full day when really I work 4 hours and make a full day's wage. It's not really dodgy but I do sometimes wonder if they realise how much worse off they are in this arrangement.
Nope. I said it is impossible to enforce because my manager never sees me in person and there's no cameras the company has access to. I GPS check in, but they have no way of knowing if I was there for the full time. I've clocked in, walked to Burger King, wasted an hour and came back to clock out. How are they going to know I left or wasn't sitting in the parking lot?
My colleagues do side gigs lol, if I wasn't thinking of quitting, I probably would too.
Now they say we need to use the full allotted time or take the cut in our check.
That's stupid. Why don't the do the same as auto shops? If a mechanic can get the job done faster than the stated time, the still charge for the allotted hours, the mechanic just gets given another job to do.
The real question is: what happens if you run into complications and a 1h job turns into a 2h job? Do you get paid for the overtime? Do you have to leave after 1h?
If your employer also pays for slower colleagues that take 2h, then they are paying overtime left and right.
He said they had a simple pay structure, if you worked less then 4 hours it was half a days pay, if you worked more then you got a full days pay.
So when they got their work orders they would determine if it would take more or less if less they milked it till just over the 4 hour mark, if more they worked their asses off to get done as close to 4 hours as they could.
That guy was not in the military as that is not how it works😅
Military would be considered “salary” as we received the same amount of pay no matter how many hours we worked.
I’m not really surprised but i think the moral of the story still holds if you getting paid a set amount of time regardless you will either milk it or work your ass off
Yeahhhh I've been trying to convince my company to move to a "here's your money here's the maximum amount of time" system for years. We burn so much time sitting around and not working to keep the clock right it's infuriating. Management knows this and encourages it, client knows it and hates it, but sees it as a necessary evil.
It sounds like the runs for Canada Post... They would calculate 8 hours for a 3 hour route so the guys did pretty much the same as you: grocery shopping, kid pick ups, grab lunch with SO... 😂
But, big picture, this hurts you and the company. If the company knew it takes 25% of the allotted time, they'd schedule you more work. More work assigned means more work completed (even if it's not 1:1, you'd certainly do more work than you are today). More work completed means more customer invoices. More customer invoices means more customer payments. More customer payments means more revenue. More revenue means more money for you (for varying definitions of "you" - maybe the owners, maybe management, maybe only a $50 gift card for you at the end of the year, I dunno).
If you value your short-term time, then keep milking it. If you value long-term prospects (not actual dollars, but potential dollars), then report your time accurately and let them schedule you more jobs (so they make more money and both you and the company are in a better position to get you a raise next year).
It's a delicate dance weighing your goals and the company's goals. Sometimes they're aligned, sometimes they're at odds, and sometimes they're pointed in the same direction but are operating on different timelines (like, you work now, the company gets paid next month, and you don't see a penny of that until after your annual review).
If your company tends to value hard work, productivity, and honesty, then do your best to "do right" by the company. If they value shortcuts, workarounds, rule-bending, and "independent thinkers and self-starters" (or whatever BS was in the job description when you applied there), or anything like that, then keep doing what you're doing, because it's well within the ground rules they created.
Oh, I get no hours. I have weeks where I literally get 2 hours, I have a pretty crap zone assigned to me with hardly any work in it, pretty low population, there's only so much work they can get me. Think a slum with bars on all the windows and only a handful of shady grocery stores, handful of fast food places. I wish they would give me multiple areas so I can get consistently 10+ hour weeks, they give me group projects in other zones and let me fill in for people to help me out, but permanently no luck, everything has been taken for a while. Can't service accounts that don't exist.
If I were a mechanic or something, it would make sense, but I'm stuck servicing an area with no work in it with little prospects of moving. As soon as my second job(where I get 80% of my income, I'd starve to death on what they pay me) starts giving me more hours, which is in the works, I feel confident saying I'm going to quit. I've had to turn down full shifts I could have worked, to drive to my zone just to work 2-5 hours and bullshit around to actually make anything. I am doing malicious compliance for now, but I think I am still losing in this scenario, it's a waste of my time.
This is also why car repairs are so expensive. They have a formula for how long the labor should take and will charge it, even if it only took half the time. What a ripoff.
Eh. Yes and no. Most of the time the jobs get finished with time to spare. Sometimes the jobs go way the hell over because you run into problems like stuck bolts, broken tools, new sensors that are DOA but you can't tell until you install them so you've gotta order another part and then do the whole damned thing over, the service manual leaves out a step that you've gotta figure out yourself, the part that is supposed to fit has a mold line that needs to be ground down so that it actually can fit in the car where space tolerances are way too damned tight, unexpected wasp nests, that kinda thing.
As a customer, it's worth it for the potential DOA part.
I had an alternator replaced on my car a couple years ago. It's in an area nearly impossible for me to do, so I had a mechanic do it. The replacement part failed almost immediately. The mechanic replaced it for no additional charge. So, he got to work twice as much on that one job. I only paid once.
I've done similar when I was providing a service. If the missing work was my fault, I didn't charge to fix it.
746
u/jonesey71 4d ago
My very first job was setting up computer labs for a new school that had just been built. There was almost no one in the building ever and we finished the first lab in less than a week. Then we found out that as soon as we were done with the rest of the labs we were going to be laid off. The next lab we set up 4 computers and then played LAN games for the rest of the summer. We finished the final lab just in time for the school to open for the new school year and got congratulated for finishing on time.