My same chronicly late cow-orker also dissappears around 5:30 am, not to be seen again until just before we are to punch out. I wonder if it’s any coincidence that he lives in the apartments ajacent to our workplace.
I know he’s going home for hours, on the clock. I have complained. But the boss is to worried we won’t be able to find a replacement for him in time for my scheduled vacation next month. So I am stuck with his worthless, lazy, self-absorbed, spoiled-rotten-only-child-that-never-grew-up, stinky, bitchy, rude, open-mouth-burp-in-close-proximity-to-my-face, puts-his-fucking-feet-up-on-the-desk-next-to-me-while-I-am-trying-to-work-or-eat fucking worthless ass.
I have a coworker who’s very chummy with the boss, and she “has an arrangement” with him that means she can show up whenever she wants.
Seriously.
She’ll be like two hours late, routinely, and everybody just has to compensate.
And the funny thing is, the boss was going off the other day about how he “needs to start controlling this problem with all the chronic lateness,” but all the people he listed off as problems were male.
The only thing better than having really late coworkers is having a pervy boss who lets it slide. (I mean sure, I’m a girl, so I’m off the radar as well, but it irritates me intensely out of principle.)
Query: What would happen if you simply left? Would the inmates unlock the doors of the asylum and run amok?
BTW: If you have that much comp time saved up-USE IT! There may be a “Corporate Restructuring” in the near future which will hose you of all you’ve earned.
I ruined a marriage by making myself a corporate ho. Never again.
Exactly how much are you getting paid to post to the SDMB? At my outfit, you’d be fired much quicker than Mr. Tardy Tardyson.
YMMV, but bitching about work conditions on an internet message board WHILE ON THE CLOCK doesn’t fit my company’s guidelines of acceptable use, or appropriate use.
FTR, I’m late occasionally but still constantly amazed at the cow-orkers that spend ALL their time generating non-biz related email, re-programming their cell phones (beep-beep…beep…beepbeepbeep…beep-beep, ad nauseum for HOURS) or explaining to another cow-orker why they’ll “never go another blind date again as long as they live” right in front of my desk while I’m trying to concentrate on an important project. We should be issued tranquilizer guns or something.
stockton - I’m a 911/police/fire/ambulance dispatcher. Which means if the phone ain’t ringing, and no one in the county is getting shot or stabbed or set on fire or having a heart attack or beating a spouse or sliding off the road, or (in the case of the officers) running traffic stops and random license plates, then I’m just sitting here. It’s a rural area and I work graveyard, which means whole nights will go by when not a damn thing happens, but we still have to be here because you never know when all of the above will happen at once. FYI, I’m getting paid the same to post to SDMB as I would if I were knitting, or reading, or playing computer solitaire while waiting for the phone to ring. I can’t make people have emergencies. Not without breaking a few minor laws, anyway.
Good answer. I’m in the same business, right down to working the overnight shift. You can only study so much, and anything that helps keep you alert is a good thing.
It is possible to have a job where one deals with customers, and at slow times there are no customers to deal with. But somebody still has to be physically there in case one calls. Customer service can be like that. Sometimes we have a few minutes between work tasks.
We solved any late arrival issues by creating an employee agreement that states if you turn up two hours late one day you come two hours early the next day allowing the person that covered your ass to get a bit of a break.
This also works the other way. If we want to get away early one day, we work a few hours of the other persons shift a few days before. I have on occasions worked 7, 16 hour shifts in a row (i swap shifts with my boss) and then had the next two weeks off…while still getting paid for it. My boss then works a full 7 days etc.
If “habitually late” know’s that the consequence of turning up two hours late for an eight hour shift is having to work ten hours the next day, most people make the effort to be on time.
A flexible roster like this can usually avoid lateness issues in permanent shift work. Management might not want to know about it though.
We call it efficiency…I have a set work routine, i cramb most of this work into two three hour blocks. Then all i have to do is answer to my evil computer overlords when something fucks up and answer the phone when john Q calls.
I also have my bass and acoustic guitar at work and a 600 watt amp. My boss is stoked because i do more work than anyone else, am always in a good mood and am slowly teaching him how to play “sweet home alabama”. He is sixty
Lurking is my right, my work respects that…AS LONG AS THE JOB GETS DONE, and done well.
My own late-for-the-shift horror story: In college, I worked at the campus radio station as a DJ. My normal shift was 3-6 p.m. One Friday afternoon, I got a call about 5:30 from the station manager, saying the 6-9 p.m. DJ had a problem, and wouldn’t be able to come in. He asked if I’d mind staying for the next shift. I enjoyed the job, and I had no particular plans for that Friday night, so I said “Sure.”
About 8:30 p.m., when the next DJ was supposed to show up for the 9-12 (closing) shift, I started getting antsy. No DJ was walking through the door. At 8:45 p.m., I called the station manager. No answer. Left a message.
Nine p.m. No DJ. No answer from the station manager. I keep playing records, and call the station manager at every break, leaving increasingly frantic messages.
At 10:30, I’d had enough. I called the station manager and left a message saying I was shutting down for the night. Miraculously, this prompts a return call, just as I started playing the national anthem. “You can’t shut down now! We have to broadcast until midnight!”
I reminded him I’d been in the booth since three p.m., that I’d done him a favor by staying for an extra shift, but that staying for a third shift wasn’t in the bargain. He told me he’d have me fired if I shut down. I said, “Hang on a minute,” and put him on hold. Then I potted up my mike and said, “Thank you for listening. This concludes our broadcast day.” I’m not the confrontational sort, but man, that felt good.
He stormed into the office the next day (so I was told; I wasn’t there) and demanded a meeting with the faculty advisor for the station. Two days later, he was fired as station manager, and I continued as a DJ. Turned out he’d given the other two DJs the day off and didn’t tell anyone. Apparently he hoped I’d just take the bullet for the station. Jerk.
My boss now is a stickler for punctuality. I have a 35-minute commute to work when traffic is good, and our school won’t allow us to drop off children before 7:20. So, if I’m lucky, most mornings I get here around 7:55. However, a single fender-bender can cause me to get here at 8 or a bit after. Most days, I take a shorter lunch (around 45 minutes) to help compensate for this. Nevertheless, I occasionally get a brief reprimand from my boss because I was here at 8:02 as opposed to 8 a.m. I’ve tried explaining the dynamics of the situation, and pointed out my willingness to make up the missed time, to no avail. Frustrating.
The company I work for is so incredibly anal about attendance, it’s ridiculous. I got written up once for logging into my phone at 7:01am a couple of times in one particular month.
There have been occasions where I showed up at 7am to see an ambulance parked outside our building. I told one of my supervisors, “When people feel they must show up at work in that condition, it’s time to ease up on the attendance policy.”
My current supervisor set a record for herself recently… she missed two days in a row while suffering from bronchial pneumonia.
Allright. I can feel the daggers in my back even as I contemplate posting…
I am one of those people who is 10-15 minutes late for every damn thing if it happens in the morning. Have me be somewhere at night, and I’m there on time with no problem.
I’m a contracts administrator in a construction business, and we’re medium sized. We don’t have shifts, and the front desk is to be here at 7:00 AM. I do not have to be here until 8.
I have two bosses. One doesn’t care that I run that late in the morning for a gang of reasons…I get my work done efficiently, I get along with everyone, and I CONSISTENTLY put in waaaay more hours here working late than I have ever taken by being tardy in the morning. I don’t complain about it…that’s the nature of being the hub in a company. There’s always something that rears it’s ugly head late in the day. On top of that, my husband works for the company and has to work late all the time and he doesn’t make a stink about that either. It’s an unspoken rule that we don’t put in for overtime.
The other boss, (who might I add spends less time here than anyone else in the company, and when he is here, spends his day working out his next golf tournament and travel plans) has a pet peeve about people that work for him being late. Doesn’t matter what extenuating circumstances there are. You had better not be five minutes late, I don’t care if you do two hours of overtime a night! He thinks I’m the cat’s meow otherwise, but has threatened to fire me. Sometimes I’m amused by the whole thing, but occasionally, I’m ready for a fight…he means to tell me that he’d gladly throw away everything else that I am to the company just because I’m not here five minutes early every morning? I find that asinine. It’s a control freak attitude to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Evaluate the big picture, I say. If someone gives you everything they got otherwise, Feh.
I’d also like to add that my 10-15 minutes inconveniences noone. Nobody is ever waiting on me to do something important at that time in the morning, because it’s already been done!
That doesn’t sound like a “work ethic baboon” to me; sounds more like a “victim baboon” - why should the supervisor do anything about the situation; it is working for him and others.
Take your time off- all of it. The world goes on.
As far as that idiot talking about internet use on the clock; I really appreciate people like that. They get to be supervisors and managers and the next thing you know, a union is voted in.
Okay, I’ve come up with a plan. We hire a bunch of ninjas - stay with me, here - and we arm them with the addresses of all our chronically late co-workers (and Faruiza :D). The ninjas, under cover of darkness, will then break into every house on the list, set all the clocks a half hour ahead, and then rap the occupants sharply over the head with their nunchakus before melting into the shadows.
Any volunteers to compile the Master List? I would, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to have any time off anytime in the near future. I like my job very much, and I’m good at it; I just get pissed off when I can’t get out of here on time in the mornings, because I do have child-care related things I have to do. The way I see it, I don’t work for the supervisors and I don’t waste my time trying to impress them; I work for the public, and for the officers, EMTs, and firefighters who are out there actually doing stuff. That being the case, I have a tendency to feel guilty on the rare occasions I take a day off and I’m not deathly ill.
But I’m thinking December 17th looks like a good day to take some comp time. That is the day RotK comes out, right?
I remember one Valentine’s Day … sigh … lucky I didn’t have a date or I would have been really pissed off.
It was a Sunday and I was working at a coffee shop. There are two people on at all times, and the other person who was supposed to open with me called in sick (or something; I don’t remember but I believed this person as s/he was quite reliable.) Just before the store opened I managed to scrounge someone from another store to come and cover.
His shift ended at four, and the person who was supposed to come and take over for him also called in sick (or something). Again I scrounged and the only person I could find was a friend who had stopped working for the company several months before but who agreed out of the kindness of her heart to take the shift, so that this guy who wasn’t from our store could go home after a full shift. She came in and I was delighted until the person who was supposed to relieve me at 5 (who was a snotty, lying brat) called just after her shift was supposed to start, and told me her dad was in the hospital so she couldn’t come in.
The manager was off visiting family and unreachable by phone.
I had used up my goodwill with other store employees by then, I knew that there was no one to take over the shift, and I couldn’t leave my kindly friend-who-was-no-longer-an-official-employee to close the store so I stayed on, cursing the whole time, working a 14-hour shift on Valentine’s Day, entirely without my consent.
Yes, I would have been sacked instantly if I had closed the store early and gone home, and I wasn’t prepared to lose the job.
I never believed Brat’s story but how can you say “Your dad had better be fucking unconscious” to someone? I was so angry.
I really earned my minimum wage that day, let me tell you.
My tutoring job has me working with quite a few overacheivers whose academic performance doesn’t mean squat in the workplace. Sometimes I wonder how I was hired, because all of my co-workers were/are phenominal students in HS, with a GPA twice that of mine with all sorts of awards hanging from their academic coattails. And then there is me, a C student in high school that didn’t do anything extracurricular.
For quite a while, I had also assumed that good student=good employee, but that isn’t always true. A lot of them were so used to excelling at everything they did that they developed this arrogant sense of self-entitlement at work. The shifts at my job are very short, only 3-4 hours each. The tutoring center’s hours are also pretty short- especially on Sunday. Generally they only need 2 sets of shifts for each half of the day. But because they are always doing everything they can to cut down on payroll expenses, they tend to have the minimum number of people scheduled, and often schedule days where 3 people (of an average daily staff of 5) are off at the same time, to be replaced by 2 or 3 people. There was one day I came in where me and 2 other people were scheduled to take over for the 3 people that were off. I knew the center would be busy that day, so I came in early to see if they needed any extra help. Well, one co-worker decided that since I was in early that gave her the right to just take off 30 minutes early, without telling the only supervisor there that day what she was doing. Had she had stayed, my extra body coming in early would have made things a little more manageable during the busiest time of the day. But since she took off, we were short-handed again. And the other 2 people that were supposed to come in? 30 minutes late! arrggg! :mad:
I told my boss that I don’t mind coming in early to help out when things are busy, but that is no excuse for another coworker to just leave without telling anybody. I’ve been getting irritated about this lately becaues I’m the only one of the 12 coaches there who is willing to come in early/stay late for the sake of helping the other people/supervisors that are there. But becauese my co-workers see that I do this without complaint, they have been taking advantage of this by coming in late/leaving early on days when I will be working.
I won’t be surprised if one of them winds up getting caught leaving early because they had just assumed I would show up and cover their ass
One of the other managers at work is habitually late-anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours. He’ll be the opening manager (scheduled for 7:30), and show up like an hour and a half late, pulling in around 9sh. He’s claimed everything from flat tire to traffic to his brother took the wrong keys. Usually it’s traffic though-I don’t think he’s caught on that if you hit the same traffic every day, you should leave earlier to accomadate it. He’s also the first to try to leave early. This wouldnt be a big deal if we’re slow, except that we’re all paid salary, and dn’t punch a clock. He’s getting off with hours of less work than the rest of us, for the same pay.
He actually bitched when it hit his performance review…he seriously thought it’s been going unnoticed, even though we all bitch about it to him all the time…
