When I was laid off on 2003 we were given sixty days notice and told to not come in for those sixty days. We would be paid as usual and receive benefits as usual for those sixty days. After that our lay off benefits would start–one week per year of employment, paid out weekly. Doing the math it looks like I was on payroll for fifteen weeks after I was given notice.
This company was a major U.S. based telecom equipment maker who’s corporate logo was the basis for a Dilbert strip.
Last Thursday I spent 45 minutes listening to a group of “managers” with an average salary in the ~160K range debate what we should do if, during the Thursday Root Cause Analysis part of the Operations Meeting, there were no RCA-worthy outages the week before.
Should we:
discuss an old RCA ticket?
take a week to think about it? (the person who suggested this is my boss)
ignore the fact that there are no RCA tickets and just get on with the regular operations meeting?
There were other suggestions, but they hurt to much to recall. I suggested #3 roughly 60 seconds after I reported that there were no outages requiring a root cause analysis last week.
So the managers discussed it for nearly an hour, and in the end, voted on it.
I came in here to find out if a “bitch about work” is something like a less pleasant, female version of a “man about town.” Imagine my disappointment.
But since I’m here, I might as well join the kvetchathon. I don’t have much to complain about regarding my job - I’m lucky to have one, and about the worst thing I can say about the work itself is that it’s not really related to my career (I’m a copy editor who volunteered last summer to take on some web site updates in an attempt to help out the overwhelmed web team and make myself as useful as possible, who is now pretty much doing nothing but website updates).
I do have one complaint, though. I’m a contract worker hired through a staffing agency. Long-term contract jobs are normally thought of as sort of extended job interviews, and if you work out well, eventually the company will bring you on board full-time. This hasn’t happened to me, even though they like me and the quality of my work, and it’s been more than a year (on a job that was supposed to last a month or two). Damn, people, I know you’d have to pay the staffing firm a bounty to bring me in, but you’re paying them nearly twice what they’re paying me – you could save money in the long run, and I’d kind of like to get sick pay and vacation and maybe even health insurance.