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Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2022 4:02:39 GMT
So, this is two stories in one as well as just saying what I've been up to since my hiatus.
When I left last March I was working in a convenience store. Not long after, word got out that our parent company was selling its stores in my state to another company. I wondered if I shouldn't use it as a chance to leave this line of work but a job is a job so I agreed to at least give them a try when the changeover became official that summer.
The new ownership didn't typically run its stores 24/7 like the old one but agreed to do so with its acquisition stores so I remained a night clerk. In some ways they did make my job easier. Too easy, in fact. Before, I always had enough to do to at least leave the store every day feeling accomplished, if tired. This was more like maybe one hour of real work a night and very few customers until the morning rush (unless it was Sunday). And night shift is draining anyway so it was leaving me perpetually exhausted for no good reason.
I wasn't the only one unhappy, either. They ended up treating its acquisition stores as an afterthought, with their own original stores getting top priority on supplies and whatnot. Our customers could tell what was happening and left in droves. It wasn't exactly helping our morale either. No joke, there was a mass exodus from one of the other stores in town after about a month.
I hit my own breaking point a few weeks later. One of my now-former regulars complained that he hadn't been getting the sale price he thought he was supposed to get. I explained that certain sales are only for members of that company's rewards club, which was true and is marked. He then accused me personally of trying to defraud him, insinuating that I was pocketing the difference somehow even though he always paid with a card.
He insulted me over some fucking energy drinks, basically. I almost quit that day but I cooled off somewhat by the end of shift. I didn't stay much longer, though. I needed to go back to being a daywalker anyway. Doing night shift for so long had messed me up and I'm still undoing damage almost six months later.
But yeah, they finally decided some time after I left that our store didn't need to be 24/7 after all. The old company REQUIRED somebody be there no matter what (even during bad weather, blackouts, or a remodel) since they didn't have a security system. They never needed one since it was 24/7. The new company installed one the first day and, honestly, should've made that change much sooner than they did.
One of my colleagues that stuck with them told me things did finally turn a corner at some point but I still feel better for having gotten out of there myself.
I've since started a new job that happens to be in the same physical location as one of my previous employers. Even though it's been through a total remodel since then, I still have that knowledge in my mind. Every so often it makes me think of things from my time with its former occupant, which made me realize something.
After a few years with them I had shown myself to be a real workhorse. I had been trained in every department we had. I was a former manager that had proven trustworthy enough to retain managerial privileges within our computer system, even without the title. I was also the unofficial assistant manager in our receiving/inventory department.
And yet I was only making $8-something an hour and working part-time, since there weren't any full-time positions outside of management.
At the time I didn't mind since it made me feel like I had job security (at least until the CEO declared bankruptcy) but in hindsight I was vastly underpaid. I even needed to take a second job at one point, which is how I started at the convenience store in the first place.
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Post by kokushishin on Jan 25, 2022 4:36:07 GMT
It's bad enough we are shorthanded due to Omicron. But the one person I was hoping would step up had their own Derpy moment. Well, in some ways it was worse, and they won't necessarily have Derpy's backers to make excuses.
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Post by Nth on Jan 25, 2022 5:01:18 GMT
Not really a horror story, but was in bed today getting some sleep for the night shift when I got a call at noon from our shop supervisor. I don't pick up the phone when it rings with an unknown number but he sent a text afterward asking me to call him back. So I did. He said our shop is having a bitch of a time with machine issues and supply issues. We have been for a couple months now. The winter has really slowed production down.
He said that they would be sending people home early tonight and figured he would give the people at the top of the go home list the opportunity to not even bother to come in if they didn't want to. I was pretty close to the top so I got first dibs to stay home. I figured what they heck, everything but the power bill is paid off for the month and this is my Friday, Saturday, Sunday working week as well so might as well take the extra day. Plus I am now under a month to vacation so I can start counting the days. So now I'm forcing myself to stay awake all night so I can sleep all day tomorrow for Tuesday night shift, which could be a long night if they're still having shop issues.
EDIT: Don’t feel so bad now. More than half the shop got the call to stay home yesterday. Only two machines ran and 8 people came in.
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Post by kokushishin on Feb 6, 2022 8:55:06 GMT
My former helper is one of the ones currently out. I'm worried due to their health issues, but also they may be coming back nowhere near 100% with at least one person gunning for their job now.
Another isn't as clear on why somebody else is having to fill in but it wouldn't surprise me at this point.
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Post by kokushishin on Feb 11, 2022 15:27:14 GMT
Pretty much what I expected. Under different circumstances, well, I guess even pondering that is pointless now.
Similarly somebody that was this close to being management (and probably should have gotten the nod) left for different reasons. Now supposedly they are back but at the bottom of the pile, hoping for tips etc.
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Post by kokushishin on Feb 15, 2022 8:50:28 GMT
One of the big shots has a more direct hand in the main area. Apparently it goes back to "we need to find a spot for Useless" a couple years back and they've slowly been pushing more and more. But all the regulars got shuffled and well, my mentor so far is stuck as the floater.
There's another related thing (mostly with split rate) but I think that's another area having some "oh, yeah, I guess we shouldn't have okayed that, oops!"
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Post by kokushishin on Apr 9, 2022 10:31:35 GMT
Heard the reasoning. It was very buzzword heavy but as usual, it comes down to "it's cheaper, duh."
Another change at the top was looking like a disaster. it still might but at least we know the pros and cons of the person who's filling in, and will probably direct stuff to the one person that actually gets shit done vs. who has the more impressive title.
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Post by kokushishin on May 7, 2022 3:30:32 GMT
Learned how to do a few more things but it was for stupid reasons. I actually expected someone else to put their two cents in but it seems like they wanted to see how I would handle it. Or maybe as someone else said, they just don't care anymore and would rather someone else deal with the hassles now.
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Post by Nth on May 13, 2022 17:19:20 GMT
First workplace fatality last night. Since I've been there we've had some missing fingers, bad burns and a couple amputations of hands and feet, but last night a guy in another shop somehow ended up caught inside one of the machines. Not sure how it happened yet, but the first responders CPR'd him for about an hour before they got a pulse back and then he was airlifted to the hospital, but we heard today he died. I actually didn't know the guy by name, but I'm sure we've probably walked passed each other off and on at some point.
Makes me appreciate the shop I work in, which is much safer compared to other shops in the plant. For the most part the worst we get is cumulative injuries in hands, wrists, knees, shoulders and back just from years of the same repetitious work every shift. Or cuts, since we use a lot of knives. I've cut my hands and fingers a hundred times over the years to the point where they are almost desensitized to it. We use hot knives, so the blades are heated and will often cauterize a cut pretty quickly and in the few times I have had a gusher I just wrapped it in paper towel and masking tape until it stopped bleeding.
Our machines actually have laser light curtains at every post that immediately stop that post when broken and each module has something like 50 emergency stop buttons all over it. So in order to seriously get hurt in my shop you'd actually have to work at it.
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Post by kokushishin on May 22, 2022 14:17:02 GMT
Kind of a repeat although this was more on my end. I'm hoping someone else is right in that it's mostly nothing, but with so many looking for any sort of "I didn't get a harumph from you"
That said, if another "what did they want? oh, nothing" was in fact "hey, double check this I don't know if it's just the system being dumb" then I'm gonna be really ticked at someone who seems to not follow their own advice about showing up ready to work, helping anywhere they can etc. etc.
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Post by kokushishin on May 27, 2022 3:35:47 GMT
And now we have dipped into somewhere between "this is too dumb to even respond to" and "Fuck you and your little friends. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a coward."
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Post by kokushishin on May 30, 2022 13:49:05 GMT
I'm usually joking when I say "karma" but this weekend seemed to rain shit on the do nothing squad.
And even if someone tries to press it, I have a whole stack of "RTFM" and "do you see this notice on the door?" Honestly if I could write their whole group up for "being a dumbass" I would.
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Post by Nth on Jun 25, 2022 1:27:40 GMT
What a shift last night. Couple hours in the plant an alarm goes off. It's just a call for the plant's emergency response team to go check something. Probably around 10:30pm I start smelling what smells like cat piss. I'm checking all around and the smell is getting stronger and stronger and I'm beginning to think I'm the only one noticing it until I see a forklift driver going by with his shirt pulled up over his nose. So I figure this smell is likely something to do with the alarm we just heard earlier.
I go back to work and suddenly notice all the forklifts are driving back to their parking areas and the guys are all shutting them down. It just so happened we needed a forklift so I got on the radio and called for one, but I got told everyone in our shop is supposed to go to the cafeteria. That's a sure sign something is going on. Plus that cat piss smell has now become significantly more chemical smelling.
So we all just abandon our machines as is and go to the cafeteria. We're told one of the rubber machines jammed and the rubber inside it caught on fire and set the machine on fire. So the plant is filling with this awful burning rubber stench that is starting to make people sick. Mostly just headaches and chest pains in my shop. We're told to wait in the cafeteria for an update. After an hour we get told the fire is out but they're now trying to use fans to air the plant out as its full of that burning rubber. The machine itself has to be dissembled, cleaned out and repaired. This machine is pretty critical to production in our shop and one of the emergency guys on the scene told us there's no way it's going to be running again tonight. So we have nothing to build with. We fully expect to be getting sent home.
To make a long story short, none of the on sight management staff had the balls to send the crew home because they were afraid they would get in trouble. For 8 hours of a 12 hour shift we did nothing. We sat around and looked at our phones and breathed in burning chemicals. The forklift crew outright mutinied and refused to drive into parts of the plant that were particularly hard hit with the fumes.
We fully expected someone to come along at every hour and let us know we could all leave. All night we kept hearing phone calls were being made and they were trying to get confirmation as to whether or not they could send people home. By 6am the day management started to show up for work and they saw us all sitting around and were asking why no one sent us home. You tell me, we sat and waited all night for someone to tell us we could leave.
At least the day shift crew was excited when they started showing up because chances are they were going to get their Friday off and sent home as they weren't expecting to have the machine up and running until tonight.
The management has become increasingly disorganized over the last few years to the point where even management people have quit. A lot of people punched out pretty bitter that safety as a number one priority is preached to us but in the last five years we've had a record setting number of burns, breaks, cuts and amputations as well as one fatality. So they let us sit in a plant breathing in chemicals all night with no production even being done. Within half an hour of leaving the plant my headache and aching lungs cleared up, but a lot of people joke about the tire cancer we get to look forward to if we make it to retirement.
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Post by kokushishin on Jul 15, 2022 14:15:25 GMT
I don't know whether to applaud this person for pouncing on an opportunity or just "if you don't want people to think you're a selfish dick stop acting like a selfish dick"
Probably losing my onetime helper too, although that might be for the better.
The third, I'm just tired of their shit.
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Post by Shadow Master on Jul 24, 2022 18:37:32 GMT
For a short while, my friend needed help doing parking attendant work at a funeral home. On busy nights, the funeral home didn't have many places to park and it was my job to redirect traffic
to a vacant lot next door.
During this time, the funeral home was handling a service for a huge Italian family. Everyone was there and the parking lot filled up rather quickly. It was also a miserably cold, winter night to boot.
But I digress.
The service went by without a hitch and a couple hours later, the family began to trickle out of the front exit. Habitually, I would hold a door open and wish the guests good night as they made their way to
the parking lot. For the most part, you might get a nod of acknowledgement or a simple "thank you" in response. On this particular night however, an older woman made eye contact with me and a short
exchange soon followed. Just as soon as I wished the older woman the usual, a look of shock crept across her face.
"What did you say?" the older woman asked in her thick accent.
"I wished you good night, ma'am" I replied.
"What did you say?" the older woman repeated. As if trying to make a point before adding:
"...HOPE TO SEE YOU AGAIN SOON?!"
......
Eh. When it comes to funerals, everyone becomes a comedian.
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