To Whom It May Concern

Just When You Thought It WAS Bad...

I guess my previous post about my job was a little premature and misleading, and for that I apologize. What I had painted as a picture of a bad job, has now become a HORRIBLE job.

Bear with me, this is going to be one big post.

I suppose I will have to put thru the cast of characters in this particular docudrama:

Art - warehouse manager
Jason - assistant manager
Chas - maintenance/warehouse worker/delivery driver
Bill - returns specialist/warehouse worker/delivery driver
Lenny - daytime north route driver
ME - perishables/warehouse worker/delivery driver
Mack - moldings/mirrors/warehouse worker/delivery driver

I got this job, as anyone who reads my blog knows, back in April of last year. My intentions were to remain 3 months till something else came up. Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

Things went smoothly enough throughout all last year, we had things pretty much going well for our crew. Lenny was problematic but then he is around 65 years old so he tends to fuck things up. But he had the daytime north run so he was gone from 9 in the morning till about 3 in the afternoon, and when he would get back, he would just get sent home right away, no reason for him to stay. This suited him perfectly.

As I said before, one of the workers quit about a month ago, Bill, so I had to take over his returns duties, which is okay but it's a rather half assed set up for stock transfers from one part of the company to another so it takes awhile to get used to. Well, they hire no one to replace him. That was where we left off the last time, on As This Shitty Job Turns. Then about 2 weeks ago, Jason puts in his two weeks... to move over to a competitor and get a management job. BOOM, they sent him home that day, basically fired, but understandable because he IS going to be going to a competitor.

So, of course, they have to hire someone to replace him, RIGHT???

Uhm, WRONG! The idiot general manager comes down and lets Art know that, because of these 'hard times' we have to make due with what we have. Well ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLRIGHT!!! *sarcasm should be noted here*

Art is in a wheelchair, because of a surgery he had to repair his foot, so he can't help at all, not for some time either. And Chas, well, Chas is a lazy slob. I can get along with him in most instances, but Chas has been there longer than me or Mack, so therefore, he believes, even though they are not filling the assistant manager slot, that it's 'his' position in absentia, so to speak. And when Art needs to go home early, or heads off for lunch, Chas takes it upon himself to not do a god damn thing, but sit on his ass and answer the phone, which Art does, because Art IS IN A WHEELCHAIR!!! HE CAN'T HELP!!!

Add to this that Chas is perpetually getting hurt, twice it was his back, now it's his hand, so I would say over the last year, about half the time I've been there he's been on 'light duty' due to injury. And even when he is healthy he is the master of 'switching off' jobs on myself and Mack. Let's say a ticket comes up to pull a part, and nothing else needs to be done. Well, rather than pull that part, Chas would call myself or Mack in and try to pawn that ticket off on us. I usually didn't care I would just take the ticket and head to get the part.

NOW... this changes if there is another ticket that comes up all the sudden. Let's say this ticket has 5 parts that need to be pulled, he will come out and say "oh, I'll get that ticket you have, you take this one" and hands you the harder ticket. When someone does that even a few times, you start to get pissed. Well, Chas does it all day long every day. To put this into perspective, Jason ALWAYS pulled tickets, he never traded out for easier tickets, and he worked his ass off even if Art was gone to lunch or gone for the day, something Chas never does now, even though he isn't even the assistant manager and technically holds no more power than Mack or I other than seniority.

Well, our general manager (different from warehouse manager, general manager is a moron who can't run a facility if his life depended on it), he comes down about 4 days after Jason was let go to let us know that the north run was being cancelled during the day and that Lenny would now be working full time during the day. Talk about a kick to the stomach... for both Lenny and us. Lenny was good driving that north route because he is getting too old to be handling parts in the warehouse, and makes a lot of mistakes for the time he was in the warehouse.

So WOW, now we have Lenny all day long fucking up probably about 20 times a day. If he's not pulling the wrong part he is leaving his returns on the truck or routing tickets on the wrong route for the night drivers and generally making more work for everyone. Art is now seriously thinking about getting rid of Lenny, but the problem is: will anyone new be hired or not??? Right now we are totally swamped beyond belief and if we lose someone else from our crew without someone being hired, it will really suck. If we can keep Lenny in a truck and on deliveries, away from the warehouse, it's pretty much okay, although he fucks up deliveries pretty good too, at times.

So here we are, Art useless in terms of pulling parts or helping load trucks, Chas using every excuse to remain on light duty yet trying to worm his way into being assistant manager while still being a lazy bastard, even if it's an assistant manager position in his own mind rather than reality. Lenny screwing up about as much as he helps out, and Mack and I trying somehow to keep things afloat as the only two non injured fully capable employees in that warehouse. As you can guess there is a perpetual sinking feeling going on.

Because we are a skeleton crew, we now have mandatory overtime to put up parts into stock when they come in, because we can't afford to do it during the day, we just don't have the manpower. Sure, this is great overtime, but wow, not when you are so tired that you just want to fall over at the end of every day. Plus, they mess up your check half the time anyway, mysteriously always in their favor (you always lose money). This last time I lost out on 144 dollars from two night runs I took. They made it up, but had I not been looking closely I might have missed it and never known it.

It can't get worse, right? There just isn't any way???

Again, wrong. We are told last Friday that one of our sister warehouses is being closed, and that all the stock from that warehouse is coming here. Nice, because I'm the returns specialist I have to handle in processing of all incoming stock, which basically meant I was unloading 90 to 100 pieces off the truck every morning all week, and it will continue into next week. Add onto that the main office decides they are going to send out stock transfers to us at the same time, and we end up moving another 60 parts after I put away the other 90 or so. I worked it out in my head last night that I had walked more than 4 miles inside the warehouse yesterday, talk about crazy.

So, it's what, March 10th on Wednesday? Welllll, we get a lovely email from the main office:

"As it approaches spring we would like to do what we can to help with the budget crunch. All furnances need to be turned off. Thank you."

WTF?? First off, what is a furnance? Is that Nancy with a beard or something? Secondly, this is March in Nebraska, and it gets DAMN cold in March around these areas. We turned out furnaces down, but needless to say we did NOT turn them all the way off.

So, anyways, I'm doing all of what Bill's job was, with returns. I'm doing 75% of what Jason's job was (the other 25% was the laid back part of ass. manager job, and of course Chas feels that is his job.) I am doing the stock transfers and all sorts of crap, there seems to be no end in site. As I'm in there with Art each day, we make jokes about how awful it is, referring to one another by numbers instead of names:

"Employee 2704, are you swearing about the company??? Report to the anal probe room IMMEDIATELY!!!"

Anything to make the day go by quicker. Now I really need to kick it into high gear and get a job elsewhere, and that's exactly what I plan to do.