Quote:
Originally Posted by pgrundy
Ice Cream Kid, awesome post about today's workplace. I am convinced that eight years in call centers made my illness worse--yet ironically, I needed the health insurance to treat the illness.
The part-time retail job I have now is just as you describe. They make us take training and sign waivers saying we understand that taking our breaks is our responsibility and if we don't the company can be sued, and then they have no way to cover our breaks so we don't get them half the time. The managers are constantly applying insane performance goals and threatening to fire us if we don't meet them, and they have all these metrics now, just like seemingly every job on the planet, to keep you on task every single second. The first call center I worked in even timed our bathroom breaks. We were allowed an average of 3 minutes or less per day and we'd have contests to see which team could get the lowest average. It's nuts, but if you don't adjust, they say you are nuts, and if you do adjust, that's not so great either.  |
I believe you. I started my new job a little over 3 months ago and I haven't taken a lunch break yet. I haven't done the job I was hired to do, either. The boss laughingly said after I was hired: "
here's what we are going to have you do" and then proceeded to give me all the tasks that (I can tell) no one else wants to do. The day someone told me my going to the restroom would be timed is the day I would urinate in my pants and sit there the rest of the day, soaking wet, doing the job (I wasn't hired to do.) And I still say that the problems I see on the job
are fixable. But management has to get its head out of the sand and be willing to admit they've lost track of the reality of the situation. As you said: "It's nuts, but if you don't adjust, they say you are nuts, and if you do adjust, that's not so great either."
I don't ever want to adjust to lying, cheating, and mistreating people.