Last day
Posted by blueraindrop on January 6, 2012
And so today is my last day with the current job.
I have very mixed feelings about this.
On one hand, I’m ok with it. I knew it was seasonal with no guarantees to begin with.
And, honestly, the job is probably a bit beyond my level physically at times, particularly when dealing with the home chemical section on truck unload. Ever try to pick up a box loaded with 8 large bottles of laundry soap? Repeatedly? Sometimes carrying them back to the pallet stepping over other stuff and around other pallets? There were several mornings that I found myself feeling light headed and/or like I was going to vomit… and just had to tough it out.
That works for a while… but eventually it’s going to catch up.
And, with family circumstances around here changing, it’s likely that at some point this spring, I will lose my morning babysitter. 6am start time does not work well with childcare… let alone when 4am rolled around again.
Plus, the days drop down to 3 a week from here, and the hours drop from being 6-8 per day to being closer to 4-5. 15 hours a week, at $8 an hour, does not go very far. Further than the job program stipend… but still a rough go at making ends meet as an only job.
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But then there is always the other hand.
First, the obvious, job and paycheck is better than no paycheck, pretty much regardless of the job or pay rate. 8 time 15 is still much higher than 0.
But, honestly?
The bigger thing that bugs me is actually that the decisions on keeping people seem to have been in no way influenced by staffing needs or common sense.
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They kept a total of 3 people from our department.
Truck unload is a mandatory part of the job… especially for seasonal… with no exceptions. Including the guy who had a 10 pound lifting restriction from his doctor and was basically told the job involved lifting and ended up even being stuck on worse areas than he had been before the restriction.
But… there were actually two exceptions to this among the seasonal workers. One of whom was a lady in her 60’s, which I’d agree was a valid physical limitation…. the other of which was a girl younger than me and in better physical shape than me who declared after her first day on truck that she just couldn’t handle it…. and because she got along well with the manager who plays favorites heavy, they got the exception. (this was the manager mentioned in a previous post who seems to pretty much hate me)
And so, if you are picking people to keep, especially when you are going to be low staffed with the losses, you’d want to keep the people who could handle the job well, right? Nope. Both of these were in the 3 who were kept.
The other interesting issue was that of schedules. We were pretty much told first day that the end time listed on our schedules meant nothing… that they couldn’t legally keep us past the time listed for that day, but that we were expected to work until all of the freight had been finished.
Usually, this meant at least 6 hour days, with the regular option of 8 if you wanted it… and especially early on, offers to go to other stores on the days that ours didn’t have trucks to help them with getting their trucks done in decent time.
All of us just accepted this… with 2 exceptions. One was the lady in her 60’s from above, who said she wasn’t able to work that many hours… and the other was a guy who kept using his “other job” as the excuse he could never stay beyond the time listed, even when our main manager at times pretty much begged him, offered to buy him lunch, etc. The real eye rolls starting when we found out that his “other job” that was so critical was that he sells candles from a catalog… nothing that would be tied to his leaving at 8am being a critical matter.
And yup… this guy was the other person kept. Even though a lot of times he wasn’t even there long enough for the first department he worked in for the day to be completed yet.
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It’s sort of weird… because the people who are permanent employees are actually more worked up about these decisions than the seasonal people being let go.
Because it’s them that will have to pick up the slack of being two people short on truck unload, and of having two people leave early every day.
In addition to just the regular level of work that gets added anyway when the seasonal people are lost, instead of their new teammates being people who will add the most to the team, they seem to have almost intentionally picked the people who will add to the team’s usefulness the least. All of the rest of us worked our tails off… and among the let-go are several guys in good shape that could easily have been twice as useful as the women who don’t work the unload. We worked crazy hours and did everything they asked of us whether it was our job or not, and they seemed to reward the ones who did the least and had the least commitment.
There’s theories going around as to why they would make the decisions that they did… none of which involve helping the team. Many seem to think they picked these people assuming they will quit from the low commitment, thus making the payroll look better.
Others blame diversity… the ones who were kept all have reasons that they look good on the statistics, where those of us who were let go are mostly white and all under 40.
The one I believe is the theory that it was just a matter of the manager who plays favorites. They all three were ones that she liked. Many of the rest of us were on her apparent hate list. While the decisions were made by both of the managers plus the HR person, our other manager is sweet and outgoing, and I don’t think would have been willing to cause a major rift by going against the other…. and the HR lady was luck to even know our names let alone anything about our work performance beyond just attendance numbers.
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In any case… when it comes down to it, even if they had kept more and done the decisions by staffing usefulness, I’m thinking that the strong guys would have been the most useful choices to keep, so it would have had the same result in my case.
So I suppose it shouldn’t matter to me much anyway, but it still just sort of rubs me the wrong way.
Partially about fairness to those who gave their best and gave their all to what they were supposed to do.
And partially still because of feeling hurt about the one manager who plays favorites… assigning favor or rejection that appeared to have no basis on the person’s actual performance.
And because when it comes down to it, I know I gave it the best I was able. I wasn’t the strongest person there, but I did the best I could under the circumstances…. and I held my own at least as well as many of the permanent employees.
I may not have been the best candidate, but I’m confident that I wasn’t at the bottom either, and I’m proud of myself on sticking out the rough spots, getting things done quickly and correctly, becoming flexible enough to work in almost any department, and being useful to both the team and to customers.
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And so I’m sort of ok with the fact that I’m not entirely ok with it, if that makes any sense.
Because the reasons I’m not ok are over things that I’m glad that I’m not ok with.
I think I’d be more worried if it didn’t bother me when things seem unfair, or if my work ethic had been low enough to have not felt some hurt when faced with unjustified judgement.
May not be the most pleasant feeling, but I suppose I’m actually glad that I’m feeling that way.
