Two days ago I got an email informing me that I was selected to participate in a Quality of Worklife Survey meeting. OK, fine, no biggie… Except it runs until 3:30. My work day ends at 2:30. It’ll be a pain but I hate the quality of worklife here so much, I’d like to have my say. And I figure if I stay an hour late today, I’ll leave an hour early on Friday, so that works.
This morning, we all got an email saying there’s a mandatory 30-minute meeting tomorrow afternoon with some admiral. Starting at 3:00. Held in an unairconditioned hangar during the hottest part of a Florida afternoon. No parking at the hangar - we have to be bussed in. Busses start running at 2.
Since it’s mandatory for all hands (except for contractors) then all work stops. All computers go idle. All machine tools are turned off. Plating line stops. Sheet metal work stops. Engine work stops. F-14s sit alone in their hangar, as do P-3s and S-3s. We’re all to head to the hangar on assorted busses. Oh, did I mention there are over 4000 employees at this depot? Granted some work nights, but easily over 2000 are on days.
This 30-minute meeting will wind up taking at least 90 minutes per person, and closer to 2 hours. All charged to training. It’s not like we need training to do our jobs. We don’t need to worry about improving our processes or learning how to use the high tech systems that are all over the place. No, better to spend 2 hours per employee in the heat of a hangar listening to an admiral. And no need to give us more than a day’s notice. It’s not like we have lives outside of work.
What really hacks me off is that we have a wonderful closed-circuit TV system in place. Former commanding officers used this system to do their All Hands announcements. A 30-minute address only stole 30 minutes from a work day. What a concept!
No, I won’t be attending. I have things to do after work. If I have enough advance notice, I can change my plans. But one day doesn’t cut it.
And they wonder why it’s so hard to get soldiers to reup.
Sounds like a huge waste of taxpayer’s money to me. If you weren’t in the military it would be illegal. I saw supposed “Christian” managers at a retro diner where I was cheffing call a mandatory attendance meeting one morning. Even though you had to attend there was no pay or time-off compensation for doing so.
The kicker? It was on a SUNDAY! So what if employess wanted to go to their regular services that morning? Real “Christians” they were. They ran the place into the ground in a few months. I saw one waitress out back on her smoke break huffing nitrous from a whipped cream charger in the presence of an assistant manager.
So, FCM, was there a change of command? It’s the only reason I could imagine the top brass wanting to idle a couple of thousand grunts. If this admiral is already seated and doing this sort of crap, a review is in order.
When I worked third shift, our department had monthly department meetings that were always held at 2:45 pm. First shift ended and second shift started at 3. So it was real nice for those people. 1st shift stayed a little late, and 2nd shift came in a little early. Third shift was required to have one representative at the meeting. For me, this meant getting out of bed and driving 40 minutes to work for what might be a half-hour meeting, then driving 40 minutes back home and trying to go back to sleep. NOT FUN. Especially when the day-shifters always had to make their little “humorous” remarks about my being up and about. Hardy har har.
Once they tried an experiment of having the meeting at 10:30 pm, between second and third shifts. You never heard such whining from the day shift people. Wah, wah, we had to stay up so late. Yeah, well, I know that most of you are out in the bars this late on any other night. Cry me a river. Why don’t we have the next meeting at 3 am? That’s real convenient for ME, and then YOU can find out what it’s like to get up in the middle or YOUR sleep to come to a damn meeting.
As if that weren’t bad enough, after the boss gave his spiel about how the company was being so accommodating to us night-shift cogs and isn’t that great, the first item on the agenda was to schedule the next meeting. One guy said that since he had to drive ALL THE WAY IN from a town TEN WHOLE MINUTES AWAY, he thought the next meeting should be at 2:45 pm, because that worked really well for him. OK, sounds great! That was the last night meeting we ever had. Never did get to find out how a meeting at 7 am would have gone over; that would have been fine with me too.
Despite all this getting crapped on, I actually preferred working third shift at that company, because it allowed me to avoid the maximum number of assholes.
I’m not in the military. I work for the Dept of the Navy as a civilian. Most of the employees here are civilians - we might have 30 military attached. I’m surprised the Unions aren’t raising a stink!
When we have a change of command, it’s only mandatory for the military folks. I’ve not attended one yet (not since I left my uniform-wearing days behind) No one knows what the admiral wants to say - or if they do know, they’re not telling.
When I was a GS, all of us civilians were supposed to attend retirements, changes of command, quarters, etc. Beats working, I guess.
The only wastes of time that burned me were the Navy-wide safety stand-downs (or stand-arounds, as we used to call them). I worked for a training command - no big scary machines or anything like that so filling the time wasn’t easy. It’s hard to come by training films about how not to get a paper cut.
Everyone in the private sector is getting quite a chuckle about this, I’m sure.
Last week I was in Seattle on business, to return on Thursday. A meeting was called in Salt Lake City for Friday. There are no direct flights from Seattle to SLC on United, so I flew to Denver on Thursday eve, turned around and flew halfway back, getting to my hotel around 1AM. I flew back Friday night and got home about 9PM. This was nothing out of the ordinary.
Lamar - I’ve done my share of traveling at stupid hours and on holidays - our old travel office felt it was their duty to have us put in a full day at our desks, then spend half the night getting to where we had to go. Thankfully, the powers that be let us make our own arrangements now, and I rarely travel anyway. But I know whereof you speak.
So I’m home after my Quality of Worklife meeting thing. They made sure it lasted right up until 3:30, ensuring I’d get caught in the worst traffic (and, incidentally, the worst of the thunderstorm) Cynic that I am, I know that nothing we said in the meeting will amount to anything. The powers that be don’t want the truth - they want affirmation that they’re doing Good Things. Whatever. I transfer next June. It’s hard for me to care.
FCM, without raising too much of a ruckus, you may wish to check on the labor laws in your area. In California it is a violation of the labor code to have an off-hours mandatory attendence meeting that is unpaid. (Not that it stopped those cretins at the diner.) It sounds like they really made your day.
Zenster - they intend to change all of our working hours for one day so that we’re on the clock for this stupid fiasco. However, I scheduled my daughter’s dental appointment so that I wouldn’t have to take time off - and I’m not rescheduling for this meeting. Word I got this afternoon is that this admiral likes to see a sea of bodies when he speaks. Apparently last time half the seats allotted were empty.
It just happens that I know this admiral. We were in the same squadron 20 years ago. He’s gone from being a partying pilot to a power-mad ego in khakis.
Back when I was serving at Camp Humphries, in South Korea(1976) we had a change of command ceremony. The incoming guy, Col. Black, was a jerk of the lowest order. It had been suggested that the actual ceremony wait for a day or two, while he was shown around. Nope, he said the day he arrived was the day he took command. Held at the motor pool, since it was the only paved place we had big enough for everyone, we waite, waited, and waited some more for his helicopter to arrive. This was in the summer. July. On blacktop. About half a dozen guys had fainted by the time the jerk arrived. I was standing behind one of the guys who passed out, I took the opportunity to help drag him away so I could get under shade too. No altruism from this soldier girl.
Col. Black chewed his officers out in meetings when there were enlisted present. He put a 24-hr guard on the stupid painted concrete statue of a tiger that had been vandalized. He never realized why the “surprise” inspections he made to northerly outposts never found anything amiss. It was because after coming into our radio area and openly calling on one of "his"helicopters, the unit to be vistited was called before he got there. When he asked about our communications work, and we gave him dates and time, he’d say "Don’t give it to me in Zulu time(GMT ), give it to me in REAL time, by which he meant local Korean time. We’d have to stop and convert, because we always worked Zulu time, so our reports to units elsewhere could be more easily collated.
He finally got his comeuppance after he left us. You see, a general paid us a visit, to check on female soldiers, and their perceptions of the quality of their workplace. Col. Black did not approve of us women being in the Army in the first place, so he made a feeble excuse and did not recieve Gen. Clark on arrival, as protocol would demand. Gen. Clark heard about the excuse. General Mary Clark, as it turned out. Huh. He went from us to being a deputy commander of some obscure unit at Ft Hood in Texas.
Wow, I feel like I just lanced a boil. Bosses can be egotistical, can’t they?
I raised a little stink when our department finally got around to having regular meetings - I’m a part-timer, and my hours end at 3:00 pm. They wanted to have the meetings at 5:00 pm. Nuh-uh. Have 'em without me, then. I get paid peanuts in exchange for flexible hours.
Oh, regarding the regular meetings? As suspected, they’re accomplishing a whole lot of nothing. The accounting department has a meeting where we air our grievances and figure out better ways of doing things, then management ignores our suggestions and tells us they had no idea we had any grievances. Typical.
I can’t stand it when employers try and get any time out of me for free. I’ve always made it a point to be as unavailable as possible outside of work and to let the people I work with know it. As the sole qualified Unix Admin at my at job (an ISP) I was unofficially on call all the time - if a server went down and the actual on call tech couldn’t get it working based on my written documentation (which was actually quite good) they were going to try like hell to reach me at home and on my cell phone no matter what. I set their initial expectations for my unpaid after hours availability* very very low, early in my employment. When worked called when I was off duty I’d never answer the phone, I’d wait for them to leave voice mail and based on how important the problem was call them back up to an hour later. The only times I’d answer work calls off duty was if I was drunk or out of town for the weekend Since I was never officially on the on-call schedule there was nothing they could do if I wasn’t fit to come in when called.
At my current job (just started two weeks ago, after seven months of unemployment!) I’ve already began asserting myself and my right to a life outside of the office. I come in at 9ish and leave at 6ish and I always take my hour for lunch, unlike most of my fellow IT goobs here. Fortunately no one can accuse me of being unproffessional or not dedicated since I tend to get more work done than any of my co-workers already. I am pleased to discover that despite seven months of unemployment I wasn’t so grateful to be working again that I would no longer defend my personal time with the all the politeness of a mamma grizzly defending her cub
Not that any of the above really helps you any, I just wanted to join in on the bandwagon of defending personal time from scavenging employers.
*getting called in after hours was 2 hours of instant overtime but there was no additional compensation for being on call after hours, neither for my unoffical status or for the official on call tech, so it was unpaid availability IMO.
Well, interesting change this morning. The meeting is no longer to be clocked as training - rather it’s authorized as overtime for those whose work hours it exceeds - as a job assignment. I’m thinking the Unions got involved with this.
If the good admiral wanted to create hate and discontent, he’s sure done a bang-up job of it.
When I was in college, I worked at a restaurant. The restaurant was sold, and the manager told us we were required to attend an all-hands unpaid meeting with the New Owner. We all showed up except for New Owner. We waited two whole hours for him before we could leave! The meeting was rescheduled. I called the LA State Department of Labor and told them about it. They told me that if attendance was required, it was to be paid and that tipped employees (who normally get half min wage) had to receive min wage. I spread the word and everyone arrived early. The minute the meeting time arrived, we all clocked in. The manager asked me what we thought we were doing. I told him and I said if he had any questions he could call the State Dept. of Labor and gave him the number. New Owner did not show up; meeting was rescheduled. New Owner managed to show up on time for the next meeting. It was a short meeting.
Well, the mandatory meeting was yesterday afternoon. According to my 3 of my coworkers, they couldn’t hear anything that was said, save a random word here and there. A bunch of people left after 30 minutes even tho his egoship was still speaking. It’s dead quiet in the office this morning - I’m starting to wonder if his last proclamation was for a day off today - half the office is empty…
There were at least five chartered busses outside our building yesterday. The distance from this building and the main depot building to the site of the meeting might have been a half a mile, yet every bus was full, from what I hear. All that wasted money spent on busses and bottled water and pay for work not being done… our tax dollars at work, folks.
Forgive my ignorance, FCM, but what exactly do you do? I know you mentioned Department of the Navy, but does it involve putting together/maintaining Navy planes? Because your job sounds kind of interesting.
And I guess I wouldn’t worry too much about that Admiral of yours. I don’t know how comfortable I’d be around a former partying pilot that became a partying Admiral…say this Admiral wasn’t inovlved in Tailhook, was he?
Incubus, I’m an aerospace structural engineer. For the last 3 years, I’ve been involved primarily in the overhaul of landing gear for the P-3 - calculating rework limits, developing repair procedures, and determining when the gear is beyond repair. I used to have an interesting job years ago when we were doing actual design work - back when we did modifications and upgrades to the aircraft. Now it’s no fun - it’s just a job.
And the admiral wasn’t involved in Tailhook. Had he been anywhere near the convention that year, he wouldn’t be an admiral today. And really, I don’t much worry about him, although there are rumors that he’s may be promoted to a much more powerful job where he can mess with many more people. THAT disturbs me.
Waverly - 6-2:30 M-F… I don’t do overtime because a) it’s not required of me and b) because of the way the pay regulations are written, I actually make almost $4/hour less than my base rate on overtime. Working for the gov’t is such a joy…
I make zilch on extra-hours, but I’m hording lots o’ job satisfaction under my mattress. I save up about 20 hours worth of pride in jobs well done in an average week.
Imagine how irritable I’d be if I didn’t enjoy my job.
Since I was never officially on the on-call schedule there was nothing they could do if I wasn’t fit to come in when called.
