J is for Job Pt II

[the_siobhan]

I woke up yesterday morning from a dream where the new senior manager was sitting on my bed and yelling at me to get up and go to work. Not a good start to the day. I blame the fact that I was opening the centre for the second time in a row and I was already really really tired and seriously worried about sleeping through the alarm clock.

One of the regular day people is taking a week's holiday soon and I'll have to get up that early every day to sub. I expect my brains to be running out my ears by the end of it. I am so not a morning person. (Diurnal people insist on telling me that I'll get used to it. Bollocks. I worked a day job at the pharm for 9 years and never got used to it.)

The thing is overall I still really like my job. It's challenging enough to keep me interested and I know that given half the chance there are a lot of things I could do to improve the way we do things. There is also ton of stuff that I would love to learn more about and anything that keeps my brain engaged is a big win for me.

The trouble is I never have the time to do those things, and that part is starting to really frustrate me.

We have been short-staffed for two months now. There are only five of us so when one of our team got another job that had a huge impact on our work load, which was pretty much already at full capacity. The guy who was hired to replaced her backed out after only four weeks and during that time he was still in training so having him there was sucking up a lot of the available time of the people training them.

Add to that the fact person four just does not seem to be capable of doing the full job. He would be maybe 75% of a full-time person if he didn't make so many mistakes. As it is the rest of us spend a lot of time fixing things so he probably counts as about 50% of a full-time person.

And we're swamped. I'm digging through piles of work from the moment I get there to the second I leave. Mr 50% is the only one who really takes all his breaks, the rest of us take maybe half of ours and some days we don't take any all. (I tend not to on Saturdays because Axel isn't there to drag me out of my chair and force me to take a walk.)

Requests that should take an hour take days because I just Do Not Get To Them. Things I am supposed to update daily are getting done weekly. People who have time-sensitive requests are starting to send second and third follow-up emails - and I can can completely understand why but it doesn't help reduce the workload any to have to go through twice as many messages in our Inbox. And forget my personal email. If you sent it to me directly, I didn't see it.

Our manager quit last week. When he was here he was letting the three of us work as much overtime as he wanted. In a meeting he told somebody it was so we could work on extra projects and I didn't really get the chance to pull him aside afterward and tell him that all those extra hours were barely enough to keep us caught up on our routine stuff. Now the new boss wants to cap the overtime, but I'm just too tired to care. Fuck it. If it doesn't get done, it doesn't get done. They can bloody well get that empty job filled.

It probably adds to my disillusionment that the last thing my manager did before he left was make Mr 50% permanent. So I'll be picking up the slack for him for the rest of my tenure there.

Oh well. The extra money was making a nice dent in my debts, but maybe if I just work my regular 40 hours a week I'll actually have energy left over for things like cleaning my house once in a while.

Comments

[nicklausse.livejournal.com]

Expecting more work from fewer people appears to be the norm these days. Not awesome when everyone was being squeezed like a dry orange to begin with. I hope things improve for you sooooon.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

From now on whenever somebody asks me to take on more work I'm going to ask which of my current responsibilities I'm going to be giving up.

[nicklausse.livejournal.com]

Can you take it to your manager? Or is your manager part of the problem? I had that issue in spades at the Oakland Museum. Finally in our regular department meeting we asked for written requests to my super for any work that wasn't explicitly in my job description (which we handed to everyone.) It was a tactful yet firm solution. I agree, a free-for-all on your talents can make work you love become total drudgery. It's so not fair that the less talented are benignly tolerated while you take on the rest.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

My manager is part of the problem in that he quit last week and there is no knowing when he'll be replaced. My senior manager quit last month and his replacement doesn't actually start until some time next month. (This is the guy I was having dreams about.)

The director is the next one up, but he's got his hands full. Besides the two suits in my team there are two more managers he has to replace, one of whom is going on maternity some time soon and the other who is already off work with a high-risk pregnancy.

You'd think in a recession we'd be able to replace people faster.

[nicklausse.livejournal.com]

Ugh, so is this a case of lose your manager then make you take on both jobs for half the money of the manager? Been there done that too. Gah, I feel ya.

[the_axel]

No. We are replacing everybody but because of the recession the bank adds in extra bureaucracy to the permission to repost a senior level job, both to ensure the job is actually needed [1] & to save some by leaving it empty for an extra month.

If anything Sio's old manager is likely to be replaced by two people at the same level.

[1] 'Cos in good times, the padding rolls.

[dali-muse.livejournal.com]

Yuck.

At least at the store I'm currently employed at, the manager recognizes who is competant and who is not and arranges the schedule and work load accordingly. Unfortunately, this is the end of our fiscal season and we have to run with only 335 hours instead of 450 hours. This means whoever isn't selling $200 per hour for managers and $250 per hour for part time help gets their hours cut. The next few weeks I am currently scheduled at 34.5 hours, but if the store makes money then more hours can be added.

I'm only half unpacked from Convergence.

[ravensee.livejournal.com]

I hope all this and your basement flooding goes away soon so you can have time to focus on what you love about work, home and life.<3

[exiledv2.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.
What is it that you do exactly?

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Heh. I work in a call centre. My actual title is "Predictive Dialer Administrator".

That means we run and monitor the dialer jobs, monitor the agents, do attendance, set up schedules, maintain the extensions, order headsets, run reports for managers and operational strategy, do testing of whatever new equipment or calling scheme the O/S department or managers come up with, and are first-step tech support for the agents. Two or three really big jobs and five kajillion little piddly time-consuming ones.

With five people in runs really smoothly. With four it can be done but it keeps us on our toes and it's pretty tiring over the long haul. With 3.5 it's just not physically possible.

[exiledv2.livejournal.com]

Ah, got it. You do what my manager does, minus the tech support part. I would almost be tempted to apply for a position with you, except that my primary background is the IT call centre and I avoid management/administration jobs in call centre environments like the plague. Also, moving to Canada from the states might be problematic.

But aside from my good-natured bitchery, I can see why this would be a piss-off. I've encountered similar, uh, routines as axel describes in filling key personnel position and I frankly think it's a load of bullshit. In a month, they'll be panicking and asking why bleep this and bleep that aren't getting done in a timely fashion and the issue of not enough people will be brushed aside. *grump*