They don’t pay me enough to lift heavy objects (bad back).
Other than that, I’m game for just about anything I can actually do reasonably well. They pay me pretty good coin to do stuff and I do it. “And other duties as assigned” is in my job description and I’m okay with that.
They don’t pay me enough to work for someone else. Honestly, I don’t know how I stood it so long.
Honestly, I’m super picky about what I’ll do and what I won’t do. If I wanted to be a janitor, based on my own list, I would have applied for that job. I wouldn’t have went to college if was my goal to do menial tasks.
In most of the jobs I’ve had, the person who always lends a hand tends to get shitted on. I can see the company’s logic. Why pay for x service when they’re doing it for free? Depending on where you work, doing tasks that aren’t a part of your job may not further your advancement.
When I worked in dermatology, sometimes I’d be clipping someone’s toenails to send for a fungal culture, and one would fly off into the air. I’ve had patients ask me to pick those clippings up and send them. I always told them that no, I don’t get paid enough to crawl around on the floor looking for toenail clippings, sorry! If you didn’t clip your damn nails to the quick just before your doctor’s visit to discuss toenail fungus, then you wouldn’t even have to ask!
Proofread college essays. Every year I have kids from the previous year who want me to proofread their college essays. I’m perfectly happy to sit down with any of these kids and go over their college essay together and talk to them until they can see their own errors/places that can be improved, but I’m not about to spend a big chunk of my own time going over an essay, carefully marking it up and then handing it back to a kid to spend five minutes fixing.
Supervise pep rallies. Technically I’m supposed to do this, but in ten years of teaching I’ve skipped every single one and no one’s ever noticed or said anything. I can’t stand that much noise in an enclosed space. I do plenty of other crap, so I think I get away with this.
Teach summer school. It would basically be time and a half for 8 weeks, but it’s just not worth it. I can’t believe anyone does it.
I get being flexible and willing – I think it’s a big part of being a good employee. I work for a small company and sometimes you have to be. For example, when we moved offices, everyone helped – every single employee from the president on down was moving stuff as their ability allowed. Getting “this isn’t my job” whining can be annoying.
At the same time, I am not a doormat. Some companies try to take advantage or ask people to do stuff a) has nothing to do with their assigned tasks and b) are unpleasant. Like cleaning toilets to you, some other people have things they don’t want to do – and it’s not really fair to hire them for a certain job, then just kinda expect them to do whatever. There is a time you have to put your foot down, otherwise you’re that guy who will eat shit with a smile on your face.
For example, I’m a pretty experienced support tech. I got hired and paid good money at my last job to do basically grunt work – resetting passwords, that sort of thing. I thought it was weird, and it wasn’t what they described, but I rolled with it – it wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I was willing to do it. I kept telling my boss that I could do more, and I’d volunteer for new projects or work on improvements, and she was happy with that so slowly I broadened out my responsibilities. Everyone was pretty much happy.
An exception, though, was that I had to work on-call. For no pay, except when I was actively working on something, including no compensation if I needed to travel to the office. During fully half of my free time. Indefinitely. As an hourly nonexempt employee, I took the wage I did because I wasn’t expecting to have to sacrifice my personal time without overtime pay. I was pretty rightfully mad when this wasn’t brought up during the interview, but I didn’t want to quit a job so soon, so I rolled with it.
Then they decided they were understaffed in the call center so support techs were taking over company switchboard. So now, in between projects, I was basically going to get interrupted by calls every minute or two. Have you ever tried to work on, for example, writing a long technical document when you are constantly being interrupted? Do you like having to deal with constant cold-calling sleazy salesmen and survey peddlers, data miners, and aggressive idiots who treat you like dirt – and do so all day, every day? It was a fucked up decision and I said so (not in so many words of course). Why were we paying, and aggravating the shit out of, a team of experienced techs in order to avoid paying an entry-level phone person? It made my job really stupid and unsatisfying. It made my day interminable. Just because they pay me doesn’t mean I’ll do anything, I figured out. I would have put up with it for awhile if it was a “hey, they’re really understaffed down there, we need to pitch in for awhile until we hire someone permanently”. That was not the case, it was now a permanent addition to our jobs. I didn’t want to have to tell a future employer that I was spending half my time being a receptionist. I took the job to expand my career possibilities, not get stuck in a dead-end, know-nothing job that someone with no experience could easily do.
Fortunately I got an unsolicited job offer so I was whisked away from all this in pretty short order. Unfortunately this wasn’t all of the problem – it was a pattern of disrespect for employees. My boss who hadn’t been clear about the job responsibilities was dishonest in general. I found her taking credit for my work – literally having me do a job, removing my name from everything, then sending it to her boss as her own work. She promised a promotion then flaked out. She undermined my application to another department (with promotion) to keep me for herself. She quite literally expected employees to just take whatever she dished out, and that sort of attitude from a manager is deeply disquieting. It truly was not my job to put up with that. 
I agree 100%. My mom talks about how when she started working in the late 80s, she was super careful not to fetch coffee or organize/hand out food: a man doing that was just being nice, but she felt a woman doing that shifted people’s perceptions away from “professional” and towards “secretary/clerk”. Also, managers who are too willing to do the work their subordinates are supposed to do are often managers that don’t know how to delegate properly, and end up not doing their own job because they are too busy doing some other person’s work.
I think this is it. If there’s a good reason why we should pitch in and do some cleaning, then yay for team spirit. (In a small group, it’s natural for everyone to help out with admin stuff if there’s not enough to hire dedicated people to do it.) If there isn’t, then the message I’m getting is “they don’t respect the work I do, and the company is in dire straits and trying to cut corners”.
And also, you might think that being paid a professional salary to do janitorial work is nice, but actually, I’d end up really hating myself in that situation because I’d feel I’m not really deserving it. And also, I enjoy doing something only I can do a lot more than doing something I’m kind of bad at and most people could do better.
Cover for my boss because he works about 30 hours a week (or less) and does nothing when he’s there.
Or my job in general. <sigh> But I do it anyway. I love my students. I get paid $19.32 an hour for 20 hours a week, but I have to work off clock without pay or I risk getting written up. Too much paperwork to do.
As it turns out I’ll take a lot of crap for a steady paycheck, but what I won’t do is chat politics with my conservative coworker, or listen to her yammer on about her grandchildren. Also I won’t attend any company functions that cost me money. Seriously, Holiday party next week, $40.00 per person to attend.
**Expand my job duties:
**
It took awhile but I learned to not volunteer for extra job duties. Thinking it’s a one time thing and will impress the boss. Instead it becomes yet another job you’re expected to do.
Example: I work in Human Resources and do all their pc support. That includes setting up and maintaing the server, web site, staff pcs and I also write any reports that are required. For example the retirement premiums for every employee are paid every payday. One of my reports takes that data and sends it to the vender for his files.
Human Relations - has been bugging my boss wanting me to help them with some Federal employment reports. The Feds are demanding we track and report every applicant, plus all sorts of other reports based on ethnicity and promotions. Some of that data isn’t even in our database. I’m resisting as much as possible. If I go down this road there ain’t no turning back. I’ll be doing double duty in two depts the rest of my career at this place.
I’m already a jack of all trades in my own dept. Normally hardware support would be a job all by itself. But, I wanted to get away from full time programming. So I took this job knowing my time would be split between the two areas. That’s much better than being stuck in a cubicle churning out COBOL five days a week.
I agree with this.
I think people who express the attitude of the OP should be fired. I’ve never tolerated it from an employee.
The not in my job description argument is always bullshit to me. If your boss tells you to clean, feel free to explain it’s not a good use of company resources for some other reasonable comment. Claiming you don’t get paid enough to clean when cleaning frequently pays minimum wage is garbage.
In retail I dealt with it all the time. My response was pull their job description up highlight the ‘other duties as assigned’ line and issue a write up.
Working for myself I’ll do stuff outside scope of the job no problem. I bill out at a 150 dollars an hour if they want me rake leaves wash their car no problem they just need to be willing to pay the rate.
Exactly. It’s one thing to all pull for the company when the situation demands – having some jerk refuse to help at all, when it’s clearly needed, is frustrating and destructive. I think we can all tell the difference between that and being used by someone with no sense of boundaries.
Honestly, though, in my current job, I actually can’t really think of anything that they don’t pay me enough to do. I help out as much as I can, and I get involved with making the company better because I like working there and I want the company to do well. I find my work rewarding. But, and here’s the key part, it’s a reciprocal relationship. I don’t sweat it if I miss my lunch or if I have to scramble to catch up because of sudden meetings or whatever, but at the same time nobody gives me a hard time if I need some flexibility for my personal life, and they don’t hassle me when I want to take vacation, and they don’t forbid me to do personal stuff at work when it’s slow. Too many companies expect the giving to all be by the employee, but won’t give anything extra in return. This is where I start to balk; don’t expect me to go above and beyond but then refuse to do anything but the bare minimum for me in return.
As an example. The previous company I [del]was bitching about[/del] mentioned upthread impinged greatly on my personal time. And really, while I was pretty shocked, I don’t like to be a complainer so I hadn’t even really said anything about that. I just moved on. Eventually, I made what I thought to be an absolutely trivial request: I wanted to leave ten minutes early one day later that week. Since I was hourly, I offered to come in ten minutes early. My manager turned me down flat. When I asked why, she blinked at me and said “Your scheduled hours are X and that’s when we expect you to work” in a voice like you’d use with a child.
I wanted to say, but didn’t, “well you sure as hell expect me to work outside of those hours, too, around the company’s convenience – but I can’t get ten lousy minutes so I can make an appointment? How the hell does that cost anybody anything?” and “I’d understand if I had performance or attendance problems, but you tell me I’m a star employee, I’ve never asked for any accommodations of any kind (six months in), I do tons of extra work and always volunteer to help with new projects… and you’re busting my ass over ten minutes that I’m trying to schedule with you in advance? Seriously??” What I actually said was a cowed “Oh”, walked back to my desk humiliated, filed back to my desk and moved my appointment to one of my few vacation days. It was a pointless, petty decision and – among other pointless, petty decisions to make life difficult for no explicable reason – it became a pretty significant factor in me leaving the company.
You can’t on the one hand want a dynamic team of helpful go-getters who are ready and willing to put in extra time and effort for the company in any way they can, and on the other hand make people punch a clock constantly and quibble with them over an extra two minutes they took at lunch one time last week. It just isn’t possible. Smart, talented people aren’t chumps. If you want loyalty like that, it’s a two-way street, not just a massive candy dish to be raided at leisure and never refilled.
Anyway, end of rant, but the idea that a good employee can’t ever expect boundaries – or, hand-in-hand with those boundaries, respect – just irritates the shit out of me. Being a doormat isn’t a good career strategy. Be a helper, a team player, someone who goes the extra mile, sure – but not a bootlick.
I get that in retail there’s a lot of miscellaneous tasks, and that’s fine. I get the feeling the OP is probably talking about the same kind of deal. But there is still a point where there should be a boundary. For example, Shagnasty, you say you’re happy to clean windows if asked. Fine, that’s your prerogative. But if your job was suddenly to clean windows full-time – instead of your regular job – you’d be pretty foolish not to object, even without a pay cut; it’s destructive to your career, I’d imagine, to suddenly be working in a custodial capacity.
Perhaps saying “they don’t pay me enough” isn’t the right phrase, but there really is a point where “that’s not my job”. Having ‘other duties as assigned’ means a cashier can expect to push a broom or to stock shelves, but not to come to your house to give your dog a bath or to put on a french maid’s costume and serve hors d’oeuvres.
For grubby work in the office. If it can’t be done by hired minimum wage employees, then a rotating shift should be setup among the staff.
Jane, this week you clean the breakroom. Bob, next week it’s your turn. etc. Plus, the big boss in the dept needs to take his turn too.
That way it’s not a burdon on any single employee that got hired as an accountant. Asking him/her to pitch in one week to keep the breakroom clean isn’t a big deal. If, everyone in the office has their turn too.
That’s how we do it. The breakroom and copyroom are areas we make an effort to keep tidy. Housekeeping comes in and does the brunt of the office cleaning once a week.
Re: menial work done by a salaried employee.
Do you clean the toilet? Do other employees with my job description clean the toilet? If no, then fuck you very much.
Did you hire me to clean toilets? No? Then fuck you very much.
Are you going to pay me more money to perform distasteful tasks that are outside of my job description? No? See the above for how much you can fuck yourself.
If I took a job as a janitor, warehouse worker, truck loader, or mechanic, I would have no problem at all performing menial tasks related to the job. I have worked those jobs before. But I’m not going to do that if you hired me to be an office worker. Emptying my own wastepaper basket, making sure my shit’s out of the fridge, cleaning up spills or other messes around the office? Not a problem.
Being assigned to run errands for other people (unless it was understood to be part of my job when I was hired), using personal money for business goods, using my vehicle for company business, providing technical or other support for children or spouses of other workers or even the boss? Fuck you right in the ass with a road-cone sized buttplug.
No way. I don’t even want to deal with reimbursement for using my personal vehicle. I had a couple of jobs where part of my duties were running errands. The reimbursement wasn’t worth the miles on the car, and unless gas was also reimbursed, I wasn’t breaking even, even including my hourly wage for the time I worked.
Ditto paying for something and being reimbursed. Fuck you. Use your own money. Take some out of the company account. Create a company card. I don’t care, but I’m not paying a fucking cent for anything up front. Unless you want to give me a share in the company, there’s no way I’m going to use personal money on that shit.
I was pushed over the edge into credit card debt when I moved to Japan because of moving costs and job-related expenses that were not disclosed before I came. It took me over 2 years to get everything finally paid off, when I had anticipated paying off those cards in less than 6 months given the debt I had before hand.
My friend works at a company with regular required business trips overseas. He has to spend personal money and submit expense reports before he gets paid back. They pay him back anywhere between 2 and 4 months after he submits the required paperwork.
The first time they didn’t pay me the $2,000–$3,000 I spent on a business trip within the same pay period, I would have told them that I wasn’t going on another trip any-fucking-where unless I got paid up front for planned expenses, and reimbursed for anything that I had to pay out-of-pocket. If they didn’t like it, they could go fuck themselves.
I would absolutely refuse to float thousands in debt while the company gets around to paying me. I literally couldn’t afford to have my friend’s job, even though I’ve got decent savings now. I don’t know why he puts up with it. He’s always in debt to the yen equivalent of a few to several thousand dollars due to reimbursement lag.
Given what I’ve had to deal with in the past, I would refuse on principle to pay for ANYTHING that the business should be paying for, even if it’s just a box of goddamn pencils. Fuck you. Dig the cash out of your pocket and I’ll give you the change when I get back. I’m not paying for a fucking thing.
It’s not petty, it’s something I’ve learned from personal hard experience. If you’re an employee, the money flows to you, never from you. If you’re paying to work at a job, something is seriously fucking wrong with the dynamic.
Regarding cleaning toilets, which is one of the things I said above that I wouldn’t do… When I was working as a waitress at 19, I did clean toilets. All of the waitstaff did, on a rotation. That was fine. That type of work was expected side work for that job.
I have an office job now. I wear nicer clothes to work. I should not be expected to clean toilets–it would be inappropriate to ask me to. If it was part of the job description when I got hired, that might be different, but it wasn’t
That said, I did say that I cleaned out the building’s refrigerator, which was full of rotted food and puddles of ooze, and that wasn’t in my job description, but it needed to be done so I did it.
I would even clean toilets…EXCEPT that while I was cleaning the toilets the work I already don’t have enough time to do wouldn’t be getting done, and there would be hell to pay for that.
I actually got fired once because I wasn’t where the boss decided I should be, because I was running an errand that the boss had earlier decided I should do. Apparently being in two places at once was my job description. Hope you enjoyed paying those higher UI premiums, asshole.