Categories: uncategorized
Date: 09 August 2007 16:33:31
I spent almost three years as a "permanent temp", an employee of a temp service, farmed out to an oilfield exploration and finishing company.
My position was "switchboard operator" but involved 1,001 other duties, such as:
ordering office supplies;
handling both the company's and individuals' sensitive personal and proprietary information;
screening people who wanted to enter the complex through my barred-and-alarmed tight-security front door;
dispensing safety equipment;
fielding calls and doing administrative assistant type follow-up on both business and personal phone calls for a couple hundred employees,
and just about anything else you might think of.
The company designated my position as a not-very-important, entry-level job, thus not needing anyone with any major skills or experience or discretion... So you know how the pay was.
No opportunity for advancement (despite the "entry-level" designation), so last February I accepted a better offer (pending of course anything my temp. supervisor or the jobsite boss could do to "sweeten the pot" and convince me to stay... which they could not do).
New employer allowed me to give 2 weeks' notice, which in some areas has become a courtly old-fashioned rarity... but that's what I wanted, and they needed me, so they gave me that time.
First day working for the new employer was 1st of March.
Found when I came in that the staff had had a blowup and a change -- the lady whose position I was to learn so she could advance, had been summarily sacked. Apparently a manager at the sister shop in another town had some horrible 'Net usage on the job, and said lady had some dealings with him on the 'Net.
Wow. So there I was, walking in, all these strikes against me because I wasn't the fired lady, who had been the bosom buddy of the lady who'd trained her... And now, this left-behind disgruntled lady was supposed to think back two positions to when she used to do what I was coming in to take over... and train me.
She didn't show a lot of interest in actually showing me how to do stuff then letting go of it and letting me do it. She' get a question from me about some tricky aspect of a project, then she'd whisk it away from me and rapidly do it herself -- often just tweaking the one or two things I'd asked about -- then she'd send it off with her name on it!!
Starting date of March 1st, remember -- then came the very end of March, and Mama, in another state, entered her rapid decline at the end of a seven-year fight with lung cancer.
The company, at headquarters/personnel and at the local shop level, showered me with bereavement benefits and paid sick leave and flexibility, whatever I might need to get my mother moved and settled to deal with her final illness.
(They are not bad people, even the intense bossy little lady who tried to keep hold of her job, her lost friend's job, and my job too.)
I handled Mama's passing, and even with all the travel and disruption in my life, I only missed a couple days of work.
Things progress. Early June, I am called into a meeting to address some things location manager wants me to adjust -- ratios that show us near the bottom on speed of delivery supposedly are low because of me.
My only part in the equation is that I need to get my hands on some paperwork and type it in by noon.
The people who handle it before me would often not even get it to me by noon.
And the work I was not doing... I needed to do that.
Well, I was doing it. The management allowed the lady training me to take it from me -- supposedly for a quick check -- but in effect turning it into her work, since she would send it off when done.
The only times I ever did it with no interference I had to quickly and secretly finish it off and send it in while she was busy doing things that were supposed to be her job.
Fast-forward to the last few days of July.
A big national company in a related field buys our set of locations from the ones who owned it when I was hired. A better fit, actually, and literally stating that they had no desire for sweeping rapid change coming in.
Within 19 days I was sacked. I was carefully told that it wasn't for any negative reason -- no problems with my performance -- but that I, or more specifically my position, did not fit in "with the vision the new owners have for the Gulf Coast".
Offered an extra week's pay, reminded I had several hours of extra pay coming from vacation time, offered help to decide which way to handle continuation of my health insurance etc., so it's not exactly a nightmare scenario.
But still. What an irritation.
And to think the president of the new company had come to meet us and explain the "we want to move slowly, no radical changes" philosophy in person. There he stood, not two days before, and shook my hand himself, he and his dogpack, looking me in the eye and knowing they were lying the whole time.
I tell ya, if I drop by for a visit in a couple of weeks --
As former employees often do there, even the lady that was supposedly such an unprofessional horror and security and image risk due to her Internet usage --
And she/they wander around looking for whomever they've come to speak with! Into dangerous shop areas and everything! I tell you, that slack attitude on the part of management was a shocker and difficult for me to get used to, after 3 years running the front line of security in a lockdown facility on the previous job! --
Anyway, if I wander in there for a visit in two or three weeks, and see that they have obviously not eliminated my position, but have replaced me with someone 20 years younger and 20 pounds lighter and 20 shades blonde-er -- they will have a lawsuit on their hands.
I don't need to scramble for a job today today today, because my husband works, and Mama left me a little nest-egg... But I need to save that against future need. I do want to find something.
I could kick myself -- not for leaving the temp job at the oilfield company, that I had to do. I needed to "move up".
But I could kick myself for not chasing after the offers I had, while employed since then by this now-bought-out company.
Seems you always get interesting offers when already employed and are not in a position where it seems a good time to move.