I got an official-type “reprimand” today, because “I’ve been late coming back from lunch 6 times in the past month” including yesterday. It is, of course, not possible for me to access all my stats for the past month (heaven forbid they let employees look at their stats), but yesterday’s was still accessible. I was twenty one seconds over my alloted 30-minute lunch time. TWENTY ONE SECONDS. Do they take into account that I only had 28 minutes and 47 seconds of “coffee break” time rather than 30? Even with that 21 second overage, they were still getting almost a whole extra minute of work out of me.
True, at least one of the “lates” was about 2 minutes, but I had compensated by coming back 2 minutes early from my afternoon break, as we had been told we could do back when they implemented the current tracking system. We explicitly asked about that, due to the way that the freaking system had been explained, and were told, yes, if you have to run to the restroom during your online time, or if you were late back from break for some reason, you could cut your later break short to make up that time and keep yourself under the one hour alloted break/lunch time. You said as long as the total time was under one hour, everything would be peachy (paraphrase, not exact quote).
I just wonder, in the stats list, was R also reprimanded for being late back from lunch on Monday? She stole a whole five seconds of time from the company. Better get on her ass, too.
Are you paid down to the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, minute, half-minute, quarter minute or second, and do they round it? If they round it to the nearest minute or higher (very likely), then you have a beef with your time Nazis. Will they pay you 21 seconds of overtime when that might happen or will they round it down to the nearest minute and not pay you any overtime? (Likely)
Wow. That’s pretty fucked up. I don’t mean to insult you and I know you said you couldn’t access all the previous times, but were any of them over 5 minutes? I mean, if a person is five minutes late every day, that’s something to bitch about, but most companies won’t say anything about an occasional five minutes or less.
Of course, it’s been a few years since I’ve actually had to clock in and out for my job too.
If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of job do you work at where your exact time of arrival and departure are tracked to the second with enough accuracy to be reliable, and where they would actually care about 21 seconds? When does that 21 seconds begin? When you get up from your chair, or when you head out the door? As Yeticus asked, do they track each second you might not have quite finished up at the end of the day and pay you for that?
Get out; get a new job; but if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason:
Look, you have to not give them a reason to fire you. Once they have decided to fire you, there is usually not much you can do to prevent it, but if an issue is lateness, and you really don’t want to be fired – be early. Stay late. Give them an extra 15 or 30 minutes of your time, unpaid, every day, so they have absolutely no leg to stand on if they’re starting to gather information on your lateness.
Of course this is hard to do when you hate the company, which I’d hate, if it was the sort of company that noticed when you were 21 minutes late. Which is why my first words to you were Get Out. But if you don’t want to get out yet, it’s evident you can’t afford to be even 21 seconds late, ever. My sympathies to you.
You have go to be working in some kind of call center right? I had to put up with shit like this waorking in a call center. In any case I second the calls for geting the fuck out now!!!
I get crap like this and I work at a grocery store. 1 minute over the fifteen minute break and you do not get paid for the break. You cannot punch in early from your 30 minute lunch break; only on time or late. If you get .10 of an hour overtime your name gets highlighted on a list printed daily.
It’s a fun job. :mad: Great work environment. :mad:
I’m a call center supervisor responsible for (among a lot of other things) keeping track of our employee’s in-and-out times.
The way I do it is round down. You’re supposed to be logged in at 7:00? Well most mornings, I want to see you in by 7:00:00 (we might get a call right at the bell). But if you come in at 7:00:21 or 7:00:45 or 7:00:59, I let it slide, as long as I don’t come to believe you’re doing it on purpose, every day.
If you log in at 7:01:00, I gotta mark you late. My reports get checked, too, you know. And it doesn’t matter if you shave a minute off your lunch. I mean, the point is, we might get a call at 7:00 and I need you to be able to answer it. At lunch, I’ve already scheduled you out, so staying an extra minute isn’t helping.
If you’ve been late five times, but four of them were less than a minute – hell, you might be a star performer here. :rolleyes:
Really? Wow, I want to work for you. Every call center I’ve ever worked in except one, if my shift started on the hour, I was expected to be there 5-10 minutes early so that I could have all of my computer programs loaded up and be logged into the phone system. At that one call center it was formalized that the shift started at five minutes before the hour but we were given a 35 minute lunch to compensate. Every other one I was expected to work that 5-10 minutes a day for free, along with the 5-10 minutes at the end of the shift to log off the phones and computer.
I’m still working at my first “real job” which is in politics. I tell everyone I’m completely ruined now and it appears as if I’m right. I’ve got to spend a lot of off-hours time going to events and doing other activities outside of the office and compensate by taking some time off here and there. All I have to do is email my boss and let him know I’ll be in late or I’m taking off early. And it doesn’t have to be an “I’m sick” excuse either. I can actually be honest. And you know what? The loose rules haven’t turned our staff into a bunch of slackers. We work hard, because we know how good we’ve got it. Why would we want to screw it up?
To me, it’s a matter of respect for your employees. Employees are people, not goddamn machines. You’ve got to treat them as such. If you want them to give their all, they’ve got to have at least some respect for you. How the hell could you respect someone who thinks of you as nothing more than another cog in the machine? If you expect employees to conform to the kinds of ridiculous standards such as the OP, then that’s all they’re going to give you. You can forget about them ever going the extra mile.
Gah! Companies like the ones mentioned in this thread make my blood absolutely boil. :mad:
I don’t think I could ever punch a clock at this point. My current gig ends in November and I’m really starting to get scared about future employment. I’ve gotten really used to the type of working enviornment I’ve come to enjoy. Unless I find another gig in this industry, I fear for my future.
Timeliness matters at my job, and I show up early as much as I can. It’s hard sometimes, though; hauling my butt out of bed at not yet seven in the morning is no fun.
But I stay late, I work through lunches, and assuming I’m not contagious I come to work sick as a dog becasue of how well they treat us. I’ve been late coming back from lunch before, but I’m ALWAYS late getting off work (just gotta finish this name change, just gotta log this complaint).
I have to clock in and out, but it’s all electronic and computerized and we’re paid for every second we’re there. The overtime of 10 seconds would not get dropped from my schedule…nor would it really be paid attention to. It’s ten seconds. Heck, an hour of overtime accrued over a two week period wouldn’t be more than a shrug and “Maybe you should pull your last batch of tickets earlier than usual.”
I feel for you, though. My first college job had us noting down the exact minute (seconds were unnecessary, but only just, I think) we left for our coffee breaks, came back from our coffee breaks, got up for the bathroom :eek: , took our lunches, smoked our cigarettes…and at the end of the week it would all be totted up and multiplied by $5.65 and there was your paycheck printing. Getting an immediate paycheck was NICE, admittedly.
Our time cards were yellow index cards that the lawyer who owned us must have bought in bulk. Name at top left, day at top right. It always had to be on our desk. If we were away from our desk and the yellow card didn’t have the time we’d left, we were in trouble.
Most companies have been pretty good with timekeeping.It depends on what you’re like too.If you’re a punctual employee who always turns up early or on time and you have a good excuse(the bus broke down,the kitchen flooded,there’s a huge hole appeared in the road) then you could appear 45 mins or an hour late and it would be overlooked as an exceptional circumstance.If you were always late and staggered in just 5 minutes late announcing I couldn’t be bothered then you’d probably get shot…
I got dragged up for leaving at 3.55.I was told that I should stay until 4,‘as you are paid till 4’.I pointed out I was paid from 8,but had begun work at 7.50…each day.And was given 1 hr’s lunch unpaid,but usually took 50-55 mins.So I had worked more unpaid for them than the bit I was cutting now.And left.Nothing more was said…
Besides,what can I do in four minutes?All my jobs are complete,the computer is closed down.As soon as I begin to start anything,it will be time to stop it.I may as well watch the clock…
Well, I should have been more clear. You need to be logged into the phone system, ready to take a call at 7:00. Usually this means allowing time, as you say, to boot up your computer which might take 5 minutes. So you could be here at 6:50 and still be ‘late’ if you haven’t logged in by 7:01. You get paid from the time you walk in the door, but it’s a mark against you if you’re not logged in on time.
Wow, what different work worlds people live in. In my first job as an IT analyst, I refused to have set hours. Some days I came in a 6:00 am, other days I came in at 10:00 am. It just depended on what I needed to do that day. It was virtually impossible to be late under that system unless I was scheduled to be part of a meeting or something in the morning. Nobody ever said anything about my 2+ hour lunches on nice summer days either. I did my job well and always put in well over 40 hours week and everything always got done. I can understand where there are some jobs where scheduling is critical but I could never be in that environment again.
That’s still better than anyplace I’ve worked. The last job I had I was initially instructed that the time was paid and logged the time, only to be told eventually that I couldn’t. My argument in favor of logging the time was that I was expected to be there so I should get paid for the time. My bitch of a boss said that logging in to the phone and computer wasn’t “working;” it was “getting ready for work.”
This, my friends, is why I won’t work a time-card type job ever again. Unless timing is essential to the job, I just simply don’t understand how anyone could get bent out of shape for a minute or two late…even if it happens every single day! I’m always on time, but that’s because me and Mr. Kalhoun ride together and I have to start early in order for him to make it on time to Anal Retentive World. They’re so hung up on time that they give Mr. K a thousand or more dollars bonus every year if he’s NEVER late. So he’s NEVER late. He’d run his own mother over to make it to work on time!
I’m an on-time person by nature, but goddamnit, if I’m a minute…or FIVE minutes…late, as long as I’m not screwing anything up, get the FUCK over it!
