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What are you doing right now??

HansGruber said:
Youch.

Just went through a couple months of that…down one person on a different shift, company not filling it in the contractually required time…

Lots of overtime & double time, but it gets old after a while.

At least the other two people in my classification and I grieved the contract violation, and won…we might get all of our hours covering that shift after the deadline back in vacation hours…which, for me, will be a couple of weeks’ worth.

Good luck. Those long hauls can suck.
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Glad you'll get some vacation out of it. :)

I can't really grieve. None of it is mandatory. I could do five 8s a week and be done with it if I wanted. I'm what we refer to in the business as an overtime whore. And I'm far from the worst. One old operator I know gave them back all 5 weeks of his vacation the last few years because he'd rather come in and work 12 hour days for the OT. This year they are making him take it. Then there's a guy on a hydro excavator who has worked over 70 days in a row as of this writing.
Before this morning I was planning on cutting weekends back to every other one. Then I heard some news about the company training contractors to do these meters and changing the timeline for having them all installed from April of next year to August of this year. Which if true means the Sundays ( double time) will be gone by August. Supposedly the guy who designed "Workload planning" which is a new and terribly inefficient department ( and who is also a complete knee pad wearing, suck up and an idiot to boot, who got hired in with me and went company as soon as he could with the help of his uncle, a retired boss- I have many ridiculous stories about this tool.) was told that if these meters weren't done by Jan 1 2025 he should start looking for a new job.

Then there is the meeting I had last week with the heads of WLP ( including Shane the idiot), the head of the south district and the head of all of C&M ( Construction and Maintenance). Long story short, a project I did when I first came south out of north city was the impetus for this WLP. I told Shane the tool he could take the credit, I just wanted some changes made to the way the pigtails were scheduled and performed. Well he took my plan, ruined it, then called it WLP. So in this meeting I laid out my plan again, only this time to all the bosses. The meeting ( this was a zoom meeting incidentally) ended with me suggesting a pilot program that only included myself and my laborer. I was told by WLP that they would keep it in mind for the future, but that for now things would stay the same ( I could go into detail but I doubt you would find it very interesting, suffice it to say it is ridiculously inefficient, wastes massive amounts of fuel and man hours, confuses and irritates customers and insures these jobs will not be done in a uniform way, meaning one house may be done right, my way, and the house next door may be done, weeks or even months later, by some idiots that don't give a crap about doing a good job or inconveniencing customers), because I was putting up the highest meter numbers in the entire company and they want me focusing on that ( which they are F'ing that all up too). I expressed disbelief that a broken down old man like myself should be outworking everyone else, all these young guys, consistently. Which really is a testament to their main problem. And that is that they routinely hire useless, lazy pieces of crap, they routinely promote them to management, then they recruit their useless lazy piece of crap buddies into management positions and none of them has a clue how to retain and motivate competent employees.


Anyway, 5 minutes after that zoom meeting ended I got a call from the head of the south district who informed me that he and the head of all of C&M both liked my presentation very much, were impressed with my stats and that WLP is going to be bypassed for me and I will get my pilot program. Which I lovingly call Bob's bad ass pigtail pilot program. :)

The really stupid thing about it is that the only advantage this gives me is that I get to do my job, my way and not have anyone scheduling work for me or second guessing my decisions. It doesn't come with any more money and I have already made it clear I was not interested in a management position as they can not or will not meet my salary requirements or my autonomy clause. It does mean I have effectively managed to have the 2 top guys in my department providing cover for me and my immediate supervisors can't do anything about it. Also I won't be bouncing all over town like a pinball and will get to start in a neighborhood and go house to house finishing my work in a systematic and customer friendly way. The same way I single handedly cleared the neighborhood that runs from Clayton road to highway 40, over 400 pigtail jobs in about a year and a half. Without missing a single house or pissing off a single customer.
 
Contemplating the next music selection, a switch to scotch and whether to light a fire
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