Sorry, but here's another "cat vet" story.
So like a Navy man circling the Bay of Baghdad I'm working nine days in a row, including weekends with "mandatory overtime," and then they've added one hour to everyone's schedule for next week. We must be getting phone calls out the wazoo, right?!
Sunday before last, 7/2, I go in for my mandatory overtime. Sunday it's an off-the-phones project they've got for us. You may recall I had left the previous Friday evening to see lots of people standing around because the computers had crashed. That Sunday we work maybe an hour-and-a-half, and then the computer runs out of work. You hit "get new work event" and it assigns one to you, but now it was saying "no records found." In an hour-and-a-half! A girl who had been there Friday and Saturday, too, said they had gone two hours at a time without the computer producing a new job for anyone to do! And here are over 100 people on a weekend getting time-and-a-half to do nothing! A team manager had brought enough hot dogs for everyone and we wound up just sitting around having a cookout! "Isn't this the best day at work ever?," my work buddy Grossman said, chewing on his. Yes, it was.
So this past Saturday, 7/7, I'm supposed to be on the phones. It was extraordinarily, unusually slow all last week, but on Saturday I took all of three phone calls in an hour before they put me on the offline project again. And again, in no time at all the computer ran out of work! So I'm sitting there doing mandatory overtime on a Saturday deleting old e-mails and reading company press releases all day!
Sunday 7/8 I'm back for the offline project. Within 51 minutes the computer is saying, "No work records found," with seven hours in the day to go. I wound up chatting with another co-worker for a prolonged period of time about if we're really going to be on the curb soon. As we're having this chat another girl comes up and says she wants to show us something on the computer.
If you selected our call center's name from this dropdown menu, then "unassigned" from another dropdown...there was LOADS of work in that computer! You would then put "assign" and highlight your employee ID and the job would be assigned to you. You clicked "get new work event" and there was what you had just assigned to yourself. So if I'm understanding this right, it looks like the bosses have no fucking idea how to assign jobs in the computer and therefore have loads of people standing around with their hands in their pockets getting time-and-a-half. Then they start sending out e-mails to go home early if you want. And there's work in there!
The gal I was chatting with told the other girl, "You just showed me what NOT to do! They don't tell me about it, I don't know!" The other girl said, "Just do like one an hour," and gave us a wink.
So I went back to my desk with this new knowledge. This other trashy girl who usually sits on the other side of the call center was there, and she's filling everyone in on the conversations she's had with her mom...about dick sucking. "She says, 'I start gagging on it! Don't you start gagging?' and I'm like, 'Mom, we is not having this conversation!'" Eager to go into my own universe, I started assigning myself work.
Truthfully, perhaps the girl who said, "They don't tell me about it, I don't know!" had the right outlook. It wasn't like anyone was going to give me a cookie for doing the right thing, but I figured there was some kind of dignity in being the one non-fucked-up cog in the machine.
If you do a substantial amount more work then your co-workers, then it will show up and make somebody ( the boss, the creepy girl next to you ) look worse. That's not going to help much.
As much as I hate to admit it, this is a problem with many unions today. They will actively tell employees to cut thier output if it makes the others look bad..I like to think of myself as relatively progressive, but even I see the flaw there.
Your intentions are good, but I dont see any positive payoff for your hard work, other then some self esteem...
If there is no chance of advancement, and possibility of downsizing is plausible, do as much as the person next to you.
dont make waves:-)
I liken it to a relationship: if your pretty convinced that the 'love is gone' and there's no chance of 'saving' the relationship, why work hard to keep it? You might as well reap whatever benfits remain, but why bother working hard to save a doomed affair?
It appears that your not very happy at Fitzsimmons, that when you do work hard, or try to do the right thing, your not acknowledged or rewarded..So if the computers are down, and people around you are having a cookout instead of working~ go have a hotdog.
Dont take my advice personally, I have been in your position before. If they aren't going to respect you, why show them any respect? Unless it's a 'self esteem' issue, I would just go with the flow.
(Although it's unlikely that would ever happen.)
However this also gives me ammo if they ever want to microanalyze everytime I go take a whiz or put my calls on pause to catch my breath. "If you think I'm so fucking slack why don't you go check to see who was the one person here knocking out work while everyone else sat around with their thumb up their ass?"
I did something similar to this when they called me in about my calls being too long. I had six or seven pages of notes I had saved where I had to fix silly little fuck-ups from other people that took up to 20 or 30 minutes per call. "You want to know why my calls are going over time? Look how many mistakes I have to fix from your other employees!" That felt good.
On hot dog day I had a hot dog. This last Sunday there were no hot dogs, though, just touching stories of a mother and daughter bonding together around dick sucking. I'd rather be occupied.
I'm sure my mother knows I'm not a virgin, but in our house it's always been 'Dont Ask Dont Tell' :-)