That’s what personal time is for.
Things like shopping can be done after hours. You can go to the post office on your lunch hour.
As others said, salaried employees can usually shift the time of their lunch hour to cover appointments or errands. If that causes the lunch hour to run long then we have to make up the time. My job is pretty flexible and an occasional need to leave isn’t a big deal. We earn Comp hours instead of overtime. Comp hours can be used with very little advanced scheduling. We don’t get personal days.
What I hate is jobs that require sick notes from a Doctor. You have a 24 hour bug and need one day off to get over it. How do you get a Doctor’s appointment “instantly”? Usually the ER is the only place. So you feel like crap and spend five hours shaking from a fever & sitting in the ER for a note. Then you take the next day off just to rest and recover from the horrible day you had in the ER.
Thankfully my job only requires a Doctors note if you miss more than 4 days work.
This is one of the few good things about owning the business. I tell my employees, “I’ll be back”. If I’m in a good mood I ask if anyone else needs any errands taken care of while I’m out.
As a teacher, I can’t shift my lunch hour around, or do flex time. The earliest doctor’s appointment is too late. So either a sick day or try to get in at 5 or so for the last appointment of the day. Routine physicals and dental appointments are scheduled for summer or school holidays. Post office and such is done during my half-hour lunch.
This thread reminds me of this study that really struck me as sad at the time.
(Warning: PDF) http://www.worklifelaw.org/pubs/onesickchild.pdf
For me, it’s easy. As long as I am getting stuff done and am reachable, I just run my errands or go to my appointments. Looking at next week, I am probably going to miss about four hours of work due to appointments for myself and my son.
I will probably work those extra four hours anyway (I am primarily dealing with a customer in another time zone and it just works better if I am here later) but even if I didn’t he just isn’t going to care.
You can get money orders from supermarkets and conveincene stores as well.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. The idea is that if you’ve got a job you shouldn’t need “welfare” anyhow. So if you’re employed and can’t make the appointments you get booted out of the system automatically. And if you’re employed that shouldn’t matter, right? Right?
(Don’t get me started on what is called “welfare” these days.)
The only time my mom gets to drive my dad’s new car is when it needs an oil change . . .
Dad’s dentist appointments are last thing at night, or first thing in the morning (and he takes a few hours of vacation time as needed to handle them–he’s salaried, so there’s some flexibility as long as work gets done).
He hasn’t been to the doctor in years–and would probably benefit from a routine physical.
He has used vacation time to accompany my mother to her doctor’s appointments when deemed appropriate by them both.
And other sorts of appointments, well, if Mom can do them for him, she does. That’s when having one member of the family not work full-time is really helpful.
I think the general answer is, if you are really strictly 9-5, your options are nights, lunch, weekends, internet, and non working or more flexible spouse. Or if really desperate, half day off.
In high school (class of 76) I would cut out of study hall if I had an errand I had to attend to. Teachers can’t do the same?
On the other end of things:
I work in the medical field, and our clinic building generally keeps 8ish-4ish M-F hours. Certain clinics do have longer hours on various days, but it’s very hit-or-miss. People will ask me about things like late hours, weekend hours, and there’s always the comment about how our hours are during their work hours. I sometimes think, “well sure, but that’s our work hours too.”
At one of our specialty eye clinics, for instance, you need to have not only the doctor staying late, but at least one desk staff person who is trained in insurance approvals. On clinic days, usually two people are at the desk to handle check-ins, check-outs, the phones, and insurance issues. You need to hope that everyone who has HMOs has an appropriate referral or they will be turned away anyway, as more likely than not, their primary care physician’s staff won’t be in at a late hour to get a referral faxed over. We need at least one tech to work up the patients, at least one photographer to do imaging, plus a second trained staff member (usually a photographer) available to monitor any patient who needs fluorescein angiography (due to the risk of allergic reaction). If a patient needs other testing (visual fields, ultrasound), that’s the job of another kind of tech.
So at minimum, you need to find one doctor, one desk person, and two different kinds of trained ocular techs to do the very bare minimum, and that means no fluorescein angiography, no visual fields/ultrasounds (add two more techs for those). For this kind of coverage in the general eye clinic, add a few more doctors, a few more desk staff, and a few more techs. All of those people need to be able to commit to staying late one day a week, so hopefully all of them don’t have kids or other responsibilities that they can’t make other plans to deal with. The photographers and testing techs work for other doctors as well, not just whoever decides they can stay late, so they won’t be working 10-6 or 11-7 or 12-8; they’ll be working 8 until whenever. If those people are hourly staff, they’re getting paid overtime. They’re also coming in early the next morning for their next shift, even if they don’t get out of the office until after their usual bedtime.
Then you need to hope that none of the patients come in with emergency conditions like retinal detachments that need to be fixed on the spot. Most of them can be lasered in the office, which means it’ll happen and everyone else waits.
Plus since our building is heavily “office hours”, that means that even if our clinic is open, nothing else necessarily is. I cannot emphasize enough how unnerving it can be to be in a mostly-closed-down building after hours when it’s supposed to be buzzing with people.
My own situation: I’m salaried so I have some flexibility, but right now we’re trying to hire a replacement for my previous coworker so I’m also the only person who does my particular job. This means some days I have zero flexibility, some days I’m good. I work in a medical center so I get most of my health care done at my workplace; my gynecologist moved to a private office so once a year I do come in early and leave early so I can see her. Banking - there’s a bank across the street from the train station downtown that’s open until 5, so I can get there. My vet is open on Saturdays and some evenings until 6.
awwww…such a poor,poor soul you are…
I feel so sorry thinking about what you might be required to do…
Reading your description of the HORRORS that would befall you if you worked past 4:00 in the afternoon is not just sad, it’s…well…pretty damned …infuriating*.
insurance clerks on duty!!! (ummm…my auto insurance clerks work till 6:00 p.m)
medical techicans on duty!!! (ummm…have you never set foot in a drug store?
photographers on duty!!! (after 4:00 !! it’s an outrage!!! or are occular techs more delicate than pharmacy techs?Do they turn into a pumpkin at 4 p.m–which is , ya know, still the day shift..)
and “hope no patients come in with an emergency” after 4:00 p.m !!! Gee whizz, what a tragedy----that a doctor might actually work from 4:00 till 4:15 to, you know, save a human life, or at least save somebody from going blind and ruining the quality of life for an entire family.
And , seriously----you may find it “unnerving” to be in a modern, well-kept office building just because it is not buzzing with people. I find it even more unnerving to think that the eye doctor --who I damn well expect to have very,very, steady hands while she works on me–is as afraid of bogeymen in the closet, like a 5 year old who doesnt want to be alone at night.
now back to the OP:
I chose my dentist because she takes appointments at 6:00 p.m. And she has plenty of customers at those hours…customers who keep coming back and keep on paying her. She seems to make a pretty good profit, and everybody is happy.
*(oops,I just realized that this isn’t the Pit. Language softened.)
It sounds as if you think “weekend hours/ late hours” are “on top of a normal 9-5, 5 day week” instead of “moving the opening hours to different positions”.
If everybody who’s necessary in the shift does one long thursday evening, where everybody comes in at 11 am and stays till 7 pm, you have the same number of hours (and you can still do all the telephone calls etc.), but you are available to your patients for two hours longer.
Similar with weekends: offer Sat. morning, but close earlier on Friday and rotate the Saturdays.
I don’t see why the employees would dislike this, because a Thursday morning off or Friday early afternoon off gives them more flexibility, too.
They expect us not to leave the kids by themselves. The nerve! I’m junior high, too, so they’re 12 -13 years old, and we don’t really have study halls. If they’re with me, I’m teaching.
Thanks for the vitriol over my attempt to explain the problems that would result at our particular, single location.
Security: We’re located in a not-so-nice neighborhood, as are quite a few major hospitals here. My own office has had several thefts over the years when we’re not in the office and are down the hall taking care of patients. A pissed and/or crazy patient shot at a doctor on another floor - during the middle of the day - a few years back. The streets around here are pretty safe during the day but sexual assaults and robberies have happened at night. Having more people around is comforting. I’m semi-regularly in my office by 6 am - because I’m salaried and thus work as much as it takes, plus currently I am literally doing two jobs until we get a coworker to replace the one who left 3 months ago - and it fucking unnerves me when I’m the only one around and I hear one person in the hall or see someone who doesn’t look like an employee at that hour.
Late night emergencies: As a patient, which is worse - that your doctor tells you that you’re going to be seen an hour late because a patient came in with an emergency if you have a 1 pm appointment, or a 7 pm appointment? One Friday afternoon, we had 4 patients with retinal detachments as emergency add-ons. I was apologizing for the wait to one patient and explaining the sheer number of emergency detachment repairs to be done. Turns out he had a retinal detachment too. (That was a long day.) And yes, our doctors stay as long as it takes - and so does everyone else, including all the other patients on the schedule - when emergencies happen. I resent the implication otherwise.
Everything else stops after “business hours” or gets very slow too, as it’s a huge clinic building that more or less keeps the same hours. Valet parking is only available until a certain time (we have a lot of elderly patients), there are fewer options for food after 3 pm (diabetic patients, kids), the outpatient pharmacy and phlebotomy lab close by around 5 or 6, etc.
I suspect your dentist works in a small private office where it’s easier to make such arrangements. Our staff does not. As such, people who want off-hours appointments should preferentially look for private offices, or doctors who explicitly advertise special hours. I personally appreciate it when businesses do this but have absolutely no control over the office hours where I work.
constanze: At our location, much of the staff would be working the regular 9-5 plus off-hours due to the number of doctors on staff and that they serve multiple specialties in the same department. If a glaucoma specialist decides they’re going to see people late, that means nothing to the general ophthalmologists, etc. Organizing a large number of doctors to agree to alternate hours in this fashion would be difficult at our particular location, in my opinion.
Could also be something like 10-6 Tuesday through Saturday. Now the employees still get a full two-days-in-a-row weekend off every weekend, only their weekend is Sunday and Monday. Restaurants do this sometimes. That gives employees one full day a week for their appointments and errands… Seems like a win-win for everyone. Count me in among the mystified as to why this is such a terrible idea to expect a business to shift in order to accommodate its customers.
I have a couple of options available to me, luckily.
I can flex my schedule, so I come in earlier/later another day to make up the time - I’ve usually put in extra time somewhere anyway, so it’s usually not even an issue of working with my schedule (I’m an exempt employee, so I do not get comp time for that). The person I report to trusts me to work the time for which I am paid without having to account for every second. I do the same with the people who report to me.
Or, I can schedule vacation or sick time as appropriate. Which I do depends upon the length of the appointments and things I need to deal with.
That’s why I said “the whole shift” - all the people that work from 9-5 so far move 2 hours down on Thursday.
How is that difficult for the doctors etc. to agree on?