I’m running into a somewhat amusing ‘Murphy’s Law’ situation at work.
I work as a bus driver. One neat thing about my job is that I always have the option of working on my day off for extra money (similarly I can work on my vacation days for 2x the money). There are two general types of schedules at my work. “Regular run” where you get to do the same thing 5 days a week, and ‘Extra Board’ where every day you do something different and random, depending on who is sick/on vacation/etc that day. When its slow the Extra Board people get put on ‘Point’ basically like being on-call where they sit around in the driver’s room for an 8-hour shift in case they are needed.
When I finished training I really loathed the idea of Extra Board. I really wanted to be able to hash out a weekly schedule and know exactly what I was doing every day. I was elated to find that I had enough seniority to do the same thing every day. However, there were downsides as well. At first I didn’t want to work my days off not because of the work but because I was on probation and the last thing I wanted to do is screw up/be late on a day I’d normally be off. But this quarter I am a little more confident and decided to work every other Saturday.
Last quarter a lot of people who did this basically got paid overtime to sit in the driver’s room and play ping-pong, watch tv, etc essentially easy money. I wanted to get on it but now so many people have put in to work their days off (writing in working their days off on weekends for 3 months ahead of time) that they will get priority. Not only that, but ‘Extra Board’ folks always get first dibs on working days off to compensate for the fact that they have a less-then-ideal schedule during their workweek.
So in short when extra work was available I was too chicken to take it, and when I fianlly was brave enough to want the overtime everybody and their mother was jumping in on it and now its sheer luck if they need enough people on a Saturday to finally get to my name on the list :smack: