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  • Overworked and under-appreciated...again

    They're clamping down on overtime at my workplace.

    I understand that the wage costs are pretty high, but it's frustrating. Rather than accept the fact that their long time employees are only trying to do what's best for the business to maintain the image we have spent almost 20 years building, we are being made to feel as if we are ripping the place off by scamming overtime.

    I am a perfectionist, I guess, and I hate to leave a job half done.
    There are times when I will stay after my shift, just to make sure a job is finished, or so I don't have to deal with it the next day.
    I always felt I was doing it for the company. There was never any attempt to get extra money on my pay. That never crossed my mind.

    I just have so much work to do, and cannot get it done during working hours.
    I have had 3 weeks worth of paperwork building up, because I can't get to it.
    I start it, and something always comes up.

    It never used to take me that long to do my paperwork, but the new computer system, and the bookkeeping style of the other store that was adopted, (rather than the one we had used for all those years), is to blame. It's much more complicated now.

    At the old store, when an item was returned defective, it was not added back to stock. Pretty simple. With this system, it gets added back to stock, so I have to go in and put it on a special form to remove it from stock, then when the credits come in, the office applies the invoicing to that form.
    I have to break down all my credits according to special codes and then restructure all the credits that I have already entered, so it's like doing three or four times the work now.

    Yesterday, I tried again to do my paperwork, and I might as well have been standing in the middle of the main street in our town, because it was nothing but constant interruptions. Stupid, needless questions that people were asking just because I was standing there.

    I don't even have an office. I have to stand at a counter in the middle of the warehouse, trying to do what other people do while sitting in a comfy desk chair, in an office away from the madness of the main sales floor of the store.

    The store is trying to do an inventory setup so our computer counts are accurate.
    The other store didn't have an accurate stock count, but we merged both inventories, so their errors are now compounded if we also had discrepancies. We were better at keeping count, but there were a few mistakes and shortages. I have complaints of missing stock, only to discover that this was already noticed weeks ago, but nobody did anything about it, and had assumed I would handle it, but because I had so damn much on my plate, I assumed someone else besides me could actually deal with it, or I forgot, or else the note is buried somewhere under my mess of papers.

    I am getting department heads coming to me, asking about missing stuff. I have to go and do a lookup of all my claims, and in some cases, I am finding that the moronic pricing crew about whom I spent all those months complaining, have screwed up. They told me that stuff was short or a shipping error, so I claimed accordingly. Now, I look back and find we did receive the item, but they had forgotten to scan it in, or they lost the price tickets and just assumed the stuff was sent wrong, so I sent I back to the warehouse. They priced the wrong items, mixing up SKU's and claimed things as over when they were short, or short when they were over.
    That was when my table was piled so high with months of crap, and I just dug in and started claiming because I didn't have time to check each item against the shipping lists.

    We also have items that were returned defective, but for some reason, never made it to my table. I have no idea where they are, but apparently because I have amazing psychic abilities and god-like powers, I am supposed to know exactly where the item is.

    My nerves were shot by the end of the day, because I would be concentrating, trying to make adjustments so an item got taken out of stock properly, or didn't get taken out twice, and someone would just interrupt every few seconds, and I would have to try and retain my place in my mind while shifting to concentrate on what was going on around me.

    I ended up staying after my shift and went upstairs to the closed office. I kept the lights off so nobody would know I was there, and worked steady for about 4 hours...and I still didn't get it done.
    I still have another 4 hours of work to do.
    I am planning to go in later and get it finished or else it will be another week, and by that time, I will have even more paperwork piled on top of that.

    I know I will take all kinds of crap for it, but I have to get it done.

    They just don't seem to understand that.

    Instead of thanking people for putting the store first, they are punishing us for taking on overtime.
    One woman, who has worked there as long as I have, got called to task for having 15 minutes of overtime.
    Another one was told that, because she starts so early in the morning, other staff feel they can start early, and are ending up in overtime.

    The problem is, the employees at the other store we merged with, are not really company oriented.
    They really don't care.
    So, we "old-timers" have to pick up the mess and mend the fences with our customers, who are getting increasingly upset about the drop in quality of service.

    I am getting crap ordered in wrong, but left in my warehouse for me to deal with because "the other guys" don't bother to follow through and get return authorization or find a way to sell the item off.

    Anyway, this is probably long enough, and I needed to vent.
    Too tired of living and too tired to end it. What a conundrum.

  • #2
    It's ridiculous that a good and conscientious employee like you has to put up with so much nonsense Ree, but that seems to be the way many workplaces are going nowadays. Anything to save a penny, and all the while they're losing dollars (or pounds or euros etc, as the case may be) through stupid workplace practices like cutting off overtime.

    At this point, imo about all you can do is get as much done during your shift as you can and let the rest go. Hard to do, I know! If you get noise from higher-ups that things aren't getting done, let them know: you are one person, you have x amount of hours to do your work, and you are doing all you can.

    Don't feel guilty about this. You are a better employee than your company deserves.

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    • #3
      Well, that's the way it goes at my store too. If the third shifters have to stay late to finish a truck, then they have to leave early one day to avoid getting overtime.

      Which really puts you in a hole if people have to leave an hour early on a truck night, and then you have a reduced crew to finish backstocking, and then they end up having to stay late.

      Fortunately, we usually get ad done early on Saturdays, so it's not as if people leaving early cause the rest of the crew to have to stay late. Usually, after we finish ad, we do odd jobs around the store and the backroom that need to be done.
      Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.

      "I never said I wasn't a horrible person."--Me, almost daily

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      • #4
        As my Project Management teacher said in her Quotable Quote for the week a few weeks ago: The reward of doing a job well is the chance to do more work.
        I forget precisely what the chapter was about, but I figured I'd toss that quote out there.
        "I call murder on that!"

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        • #5
          Quoth Juwl View Post
          As my Project Management teacher said in her Quotable Quote for the week a few weeks ago: The reward of doing a job well is the chance to do more work.
          Well, I've heard something like that said about pinball...

          (I've also seen it a few other places, too, FWIW.)

          Comment


          • #6
            Sorry that it's happening again Ree... I too get overtime - but I haven't been freaked on about it - yet... I'm at the point in my job that I have 3 staff members that I'm trying to juggle shifts with and I have to hire another on top of them as well... As it is I'm still getting overtime - trying to cover shifts that I can't get covered and make everything run smoothly...

            I guess the only thing you can do is do your job to the best of your ability and know that you're doing it right. If the company takes you to task on it, give 'em shit back...

            Happy Thanksgiving hon.

            RB

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            • #7
              I feel your pain, Ree.

              At one of my previous jobs, I was in charge of the network server. We'd been having problems with it, so I got stuck working on it. One night, that damn thing failed while I was trying to run the backup No matter what I tried, it was dead. I spent a good 3 hours on that thing to see if I could get it running. I thought I might as well try to fix it, rather than come in to a dead server (and pissed boss) the next morning. By then, it was 8pm and I was tired. I still have no idea, but after turning it on for the 52nd time, it suddenly came to life. I ran the backup (it worked, yay!) and left around 8:30.

              When I tried to claim the overtime for it, he flipped. Apparently, I was supposed to work on the company server on my own time, and it "shouldn't have failed in the first place" Uh, lemme get this straight: You buy a cheap POS server (which is wearing out, BTW), you don't give me the necessary tools to keep it running correctly, don't want to replace it, and don't want to pay me for wasting 3 hours of *my* time on it

              He tried to shaft me on the overtime...which I eventually got. And no, since I no longer qualify for overtime, I refuse to work after 5:00. If the new server fails at 5:01, I'm not working for free, so it's not my problem again until morning. I hate to sound like that, folks...but it's kinda the company's fault
              Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines. --Enzo Ferrari

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