Yup - That’s the ways things are down here. Mama knows EVERYTHING.
You forgot peons. Where I work, we’re peons. Most of the people they hire have the mental capacity of a blunt shovel - which means they are stupid enough to not realize that the job is godawful boring, or the fact that it only pays $8.25/hour.
I am a peon. I do not fit the peon mold. Acutally, as I’m not a toothless hick, I hate Nascar and football, and my tastes in alcohol run slightly higher than Bud Light (preferably consumed while sitting on the porch at 8AM), I don’t fit many molds up here. But, I need to work third shift and the pickings are slim.
I wanna be a lackey. 
I was a lackey once. It was cool.
What about us dogsbodys?!
With all due respect, that schedule sounds utterly horrendous to me. You work 7 twelve-hour days in a row? And only a day and a half off in between, before the cycle starts again (at the opposite time of day that your body is used to)? And the boss calls you a “lackey” to boot? No thank you. Even the five days off in a row wouldn’t make up for that crap to me. 
I’d say that he hated it enough to quit, even with the holidays coming up. Perhaps he found a new job. Yes, he should have called, but I have trouble coming up with all this respect for employers who, if they so desire, would drop your ass at the drop of a hat with no notice whatsoever.
Was that the time when employers did not follow the policy of laying off the oldest and most highly paid workers, because they valued the workers’ experience?
How should a worker who has watched grandparents get laid off from jobs too young to retire but too old to get better jobs than Walmart greeters, mothers hang on to miserable jobs they hated just for health insurance, and fathers scramble from one ‘contracting’ [read: ‘temp’] job to another, develop ANY belief that hard work brings reward, much less any sense of company loyalty?
In the aggregate, we reap what we sow.
Who shot who in the what now?
The view is pretty much the same on the other side of the glass ceiling however. Talking to older folks about the way companies treat their employees these days have them doing that lean-in-closer-and-squint thing that means they think you’re lying or they’re taking pity on you.
That is an unbelievably awful and unhealthy schedule. I can see how that kind of circadian-rhythm disruption can really aggravate the sort of depression that would cause one to just flake out. My fiance does shift work, and when he changes shifts it takes him a week at least to adjust.
I had a coworker once who just didn’t show up one day. My boss (who was a huge jerk) apparently wrote her a nasty email about how she was fired for job abandonment and how unprofessional she was, etc. Talked it up around the shop about how much of an irresponsible asshole she was, yadda yadda. She had been a good worker with no history of problems and had worked for us for a couple of years. Eventually a worried coworker managed to track down someone who knew her. Apparently the boss never bothered to try her emergency contact, only her cell phone. She’d been in ICU after being gravely injured in a car accident. It ended up causing her all sorts of problems because the termination canceled her health insurance, and getting everything fixed was a bitch.
Pisses me off when people flake like this because it makes employers automatically assume malice even in the case of genuine problem.
Standards and values have changed but that is in lock-step with one side responding to the other. I have been in the professional workforce for 11 years and I know for a fact that me, and people in similar positions, are treated like commodity items. My boss loves me and my bosses boss loves me but that doesn’t mean much when you work for an international mega-corp and your entire division can be wiped out with a few swipes on the org chart. Don’t get me wrong, I actually think playing fast and loose with new circumstances are good economically but it can be a rough ride.
On the other side, employees have to treat employers like commodities themselves and have no irrational expectations of what they won’t do when they feel like it. My entire department got laid off from a company you have all heard of 8 months after I started (I call that poor planning on their part). Six weeks later, I had a job at the headquarters of a company you have definitely all heard of and a policy of no layoffs was explicitly mentioned several times in all the interviews and that reassured me because I was a little gun-shy.
Two days after my one year anniversary (in which I had a great review and big raise), twelve of us were laid off. I later found out that their policy of no layoffs meant no “big” layoffs so that they could stay out of the news and they ran them constantly. You know all of those dear coworkers that had to leave the company to take care of family circumstances? Well…it wasn’t quite like that.
Never, ever have pure allegiance to an employer. You can forge relationships with individual coworkers but that is about it. That coworker may be the one that leaves and drags you to a better employer when the shit hits the fan and it is time to bail. I see it all the time.
You mean like my husband? Who in 15 months of employment asked for a grand total of 2 days off–and that’s when his father committed suicide? Who never showed up late? Who gladly stayed and worked whatever OT was asked of him? Who is a diligent and thorough stickler for detail and regularly had error-free reports?
People like him, who never once got a raise in 15 months (they kept putting him off and in hindsight it’s clear why) and had about 2 hours notice before the entire office was laid off and sent home since the branch was closing?
Yeah, cry me a fucking river. I agree with j666. Employers reap what they sow. He certainly didn’t get any rewards for his standards and values. He found a new job and he starts on Monday–just two weeks after he was laid off, thank God. And he’ll bring the same quality of work to his new job because that’s just who he is–at a previous job, he dragged his exhausted and shaking body to work after spending all night puking his guts out because hey, he wasn’t dead, right? They had to force him to go home.
If you were a real dogsbody, your name would be Baldrick.
I must conclude that you’re lying. No real dogsbody would be named “glee”. That’s a minion or henchman name if I’ve ever seen one.
Yup.
About 15 years ago one of my bosses asked me “Where is your loyalty to the company?”
I asked where the company’s loyalty to me was.
His response: “Good point.” He never brought it up again.
Hmm, I dunno. That sounds extremely rough. Sweatshop like even. Your employees liking this may have something to do with having no other choice, and having an income. I mean, it’s one thing to work 12 hour nights, and also one thing to work 7 hour days. But you’re flip flopping these people like crazy. No way can they really be happy with this just to get a paultry five days off at the end. Are we talking a call centre here? Seriously, why flip flop these people? And how can it be productive to the business? Genuinely curious…
I work 12 hour shifts, but certainly not 7 in a row. I work a 3 day week the first week, and a 4 day week the second week. That means I rotate between 3 day weekends and 4 day weekends. I work nights as well. But certainly no shifting back and forth from dayshift to nightshift.
I have no earthly idea why anyone would “like” working the schedule the OP described. It sounds like pure hell. I would say that the employee quit because he got fed up with the absurd hours.
Me too, same exact shift. Dallas huh, I wonder which three letter company you work for? 
The company that only goes by two letters.
Ok, just making sure you’re not the guy I talk to on the all-night bridge call down there. :eek:
/done with hijack
Not even the older employees at my company would really fault you for lack of loyalty these days if you quit. We just had a guy quit who had been with the company over 20 years. He was an engineer, but they had basically hired someone else to do his job. So, when the company reorganized, he put in for one of the production supervisor positions. Supposedly, everyone in the company could apply for these positions. Well, HR apparently thought he had applied for the position by mistake and that he really wanted this other position supervising engineers…but they didn’t move his application to the other pile or call him to clarify–they instead threw it away!
He was angry, so he went out, found another job, and quit. He gave one week’s notice, which anyone who knows what had happened to him thinks was very generous indeed. (I think he would have given two weeks’ notice, but his new company actually needs him and wants him to start Monday.)
No, there are co-workers of mine who remember what it was like when the company took care of you and you took care of the company but those days are gone baby gone.
You can monologue in front of minions. They expect it. I think lackeys would just sneer at you behind your back, and dogsbodies would just be confused, or think you weird.
Maybe the Lackey/minion/dogsbody question needs its own spin-off thread.
Lackeys are white collar, minions are blue color, and dogsbodys are interns. Simple! Your lackey plots against you, your minions just foul up your plans, and the dogsbody goes and fetches stuff. And accidentally leaves things unlocked.
I’m a Disposable Employee. I’m cool with that because I’m getting what I want out of my employers, and I’m aware that I’m a Disposable Employee and all that it entails.