Saturday, March 27, 2004
IT'S A METAPHOR! LET'S STOMP ON IT!!: There's a fluorescent light at work just before you get to the men's room that's been burnt out since at least before Thanksgiving. Unlike the other parts of the ground floor with the ultra-high ceilings, ths light's only a few feet above your head as you go in. If somebody bothered to tell another person, it could be fixed very easily, but it's been left as it is since last year.
There are a lot of periphreal things that simply aren't right at this workplace; for instance, if the toilets overflow, there's no on-hand maintenance man, so you've got standing water on the floor until the next morning. The heat in the main workspace never works right, so you get consistently cold air in the winter; the reverse is true in the administrative office, where they're burning up most of the time. I've only seen the guy who allegedly runs the place on the ground floor once in the entire year. He's actually there, but he spends all his time in the administrative offices during the day shift; the single time he's actually spoken to anybody who wasn't a supervisor was to browbeat us for not meeting production on a study, communicated in open threats of termination, and what he said showed he was utterly out of touch with the day-to-day reality on the job.
Actually, a lot of the "motivation" comes in implied threats these days. As a call center situation, they have actually mentioned the spectre of outsourcing to help spur on production. Most of the people on second shift are college kids, or the emotional equivalent, so none of this has the desired effect. They're just marking time, some even making a conscious effort to stay under production so they can be sent home at break, which is an utterly alien attitude to me. If I'm not there, I don't get paid, simple as that.
Taking all this into account, I'm thinking that lightbulb as a perfect representation of why I've been in the same rotten, ultra-low-wage job for almost a year. The bulb's been burnt out for a long time, but I've gotten used to disappointment and things simply not working out to plan, so I just left it alone for awhile. And now it's been one whole year.
(reads the above again)
Gah, this blog is starting to look like a BLOG. Gotta fix that somehow...ummmmmm...uh...JANET JACKSON'S TITS!
...
Well, it worked before...how about the dream I had last night? The government was trying to help Australia avoid some catastrophe by shifting it through the center of the earth to the other side of the globe. Unfortunately, it got stuck about halfway to the core, and nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.
Well, it's gotta mean something.
Anyway, if you've been wondering why I haven't been doing more entries this month, the work thing is probably the reason. It's the only one I'm giving you, anyhow.
There are a lot of periphreal things that simply aren't right at this workplace; for instance, if the toilets overflow, there's no on-hand maintenance man, so you've got standing water on the floor until the next morning. The heat in the main workspace never works right, so you get consistently cold air in the winter; the reverse is true in the administrative office, where they're burning up most of the time. I've only seen the guy who allegedly runs the place on the ground floor once in the entire year. He's actually there, but he spends all his time in the administrative offices during the day shift; the single time he's actually spoken to anybody who wasn't a supervisor was to browbeat us for not meeting production on a study, communicated in open threats of termination, and what he said showed he was utterly out of touch with the day-to-day reality on the job.
Actually, a lot of the "motivation" comes in implied threats these days. As a call center situation, they have actually mentioned the spectre of outsourcing to help spur on production. Most of the people on second shift are college kids, or the emotional equivalent, so none of this has the desired effect. They're just marking time, some even making a conscious effort to stay under production so they can be sent home at break, which is an utterly alien attitude to me. If I'm not there, I don't get paid, simple as that.
Taking all this into account, I'm thinking that lightbulb as a perfect representation of why I've been in the same rotten, ultra-low-wage job for almost a year. The bulb's been burnt out for a long time, but I've gotten used to disappointment and things simply not working out to plan, so I just left it alone for awhile. And now it's been one whole year.
(reads the above again)
Gah, this blog is starting to look like a BLOG. Gotta fix that somehow...ummmmmm...uh...JANET JACKSON'S TITS!
...
Well, it worked before...how about the dream I had last night? The government was trying to help Australia avoid some catastrophe by shifting it through the center of the earth to the other side of the globe. Unfortunately, it got stuck about halfway to the core, and nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.
Well, it's gotta mean something.
Anyway, if you've been wondering why I haven't been doing more entries this month, the work thing is probably the reason. It's the only one I'm giving you, anyhow.
|| Eric 3:11 PM#
