Y'all Ain't Killin' Me

Lists, tips, tricks and stories from an IT professional in corporate America questioning the "status quo" of useless meetings, needless overtime, senseless overwork, and unnecessary stress in the workplace.

[theinvisibleman247]

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[theinvisibleman247]

Workplace Tales: Part I - The Demand to Fight Traffic

"Begin at the beginning," the King said. "Go on to the end and then stop." My ending hasn't been written yet, but that's one of my favorite quotes. If you're reading this, and haven't walked a mile in my shoes, you're probably thinking I'm a) lazy and don't like hard work or b) wondering what the hell happened that made me so cynical. So let's start with my first job out of college. I worked a few odd jobs and wound up in Rental car. I wanted to be an editor but the $8.26 an hour salary would've kept me living with my parents for a long time, and it was boring when I tried it at a small publishing house. Like, mind numbing dull, and barely enough pay to afford the gas to drive there. Rental car started off great. The salary sucked but it was ten per hour with guaranteed ten hours OT every week. HR set me up with an office four miles from the apartment I could now afford in a halfway decent area. I had an awesome boss. We made a good team. I was happy and having fun helping customers those first few months. Until... I would go home for lunch and make food to conserve money. One day when I came back the city manager was there. He asked where I'd had lunch. I said I'd gone home. He asked how that was possible and I explained how close I lived to my office. "Oh, Hell no," he declared. "I have to fight traffic, everyone should have to fight traffic." I thought he was joking. He was all angry about it. But I brushed it off as just talk. He transferred me to an office thirty miles away a week later with an a-hole boss who spent most of his time not at the office and taking his wife out in company cars. This boss left me by myself there nearly every day. I was not trained any further, not allowed to take any breaks for an eleven hour day plus four hour days on Saturdays. I had to manage the office, the customers, and the fleet with little training or experience. He wrote lunch breaks out of my time sheets even though I never took one because "HR insists you have a break." I was like but you don't give me breaks. He said he didn't care and he didn't need HR harassing him. Duly noted. Naturally I began to resent him. Circumstances be damned, I was killing it there. I put together a business plan that turned us profitable, only first year branch in the nation and history of the company to manage that. We got a satellite where he stuck me in a tiny room by myself with no breaks at an auto repair shop. Still didn't pay me for them. Had me running the main branch remotely or running between the two all day. He dumped management of schedules and everything on me as we hired help. I figured out how to get my people on 42 hour schedules with more time available if they wanted it and trained them how to get bonus money from sales by explaining my business model and cost of cars on the lot vs charges, which gave us so much freedom to make a killing while keeping costs low for our customers. My people loved me and everyone wanted to work in my branch when I went back to the main office full time for the area. We had like zero absences, zero turnover, and no customer complaints because I took care of my customers too. This is why I know for sure that happy, rested employees who feel like they are being taken care of will out produce overworked employees who feel the opposite. Only problem was no one had my back. I was pulling 58 hours a week at six days a week as an assistant branch manager. I won numerous sales contests - I found honesty with customers won me trust and respect and best of all, no guilty conscience. My reward for this? Because I worked so much OT I made 12k more than a branch manager and got half the bonus, which wasn't a lot but he was getting huge bonuses off my work and taking credit for much of it behind my back. So my reward was they offered me a ten thousand a year pay cut to work at a branch 45 miles from where I lived in the worst neighborhood in the area. I declined. They were gonna do it anyway until... I hadn't been able to renew my car registration. Where I lived, it couldn't be done online. I was always working through their open hours with no breaks. So I told my manager I needed a morning off to handle it, as a neighborhood police officer had pulled me over the night before and said he'd give me two days to fix it. You'd think for the company's top young manager they'd be happy to give me a lousy half day off. Nope. He had plans to take his wife for ice cream and then was going out of town for a week. It wasn't his problem. I should go to hell. I was like oh hell no. I checked HR policy - if given twenty four hours notice, time off requested couldn't be denied. I rarely took off and had plenty of time accrued. I told him that and he reiterated that he didn't care and whined to the same city manager who'd moved me so I could fight traffic and waste money on extra gas. He sent me a lovely threat not to take off via email, despite my having written approval from HR, which Id shared - by this time I was saving this stuff, and also the criticisms and complaints about my employee schedules, my desire to be paid for all hours worked, etc, and being threatened about that. I had a thick binder full of abuse. So I was like screw this guy, I have rights. You can make me fight traffic or whatever but you don't own my time. I didn't say that but I again informed him of my conversation with Hr and re-forwarded their support and told him I would be in at noon and to make sure we had coverage. Which he did not do. So I showed up at noon after I took care of my business at the DMV - which took three and a half hours because, DMV - and found they couldn't even figure out how to turn on the lights without me between three city managers, or get the computers on. I received a stern hour lecture and endured much whining about defying them and they suspended me without pay for insubordination. Let's recap - I'm 24 years old at the time, and the brightest young manager with the biggest potential in the region. I'm throwing out game-changing, innovative ways to trim budgets, rent a lot of cars with upgrades and extras because my costs are low and I can do it cheaply for my customers, cutting on labor costs and making employees happy with an option to work a flexible 42-52 hour week by choice, unheard of in the industry, without sacrificing branch or satellite coverage. I'm one of their top sales people on top of that and so good with customers than when I had to fill in at other branches or was dispatched to them to teach them how I handled the budget so well, my customers found out where I was that day and followed me, drove miles out of their way, because I was the only rental car employee in the area they trusted. What did I get for being an excellent employee? Squat. I got bullied, overworked, and they were always trying to take advantage of me. My innovations were lauded at the corporate level but roundly criticized locally because other managers couldn't figure out how to do it. No support. No rewards. Just a load of stress and drama. But my suspension time exposed my lazy manager, big time. Seriously, dude went on one or two sales visits a day and handed them off to me to talk to the customers then went home or out with his wife (seriously, he barely put in thirty hours and only came by on weekends to pick up upgrade cars like convertibles and Jaguars that were against company policy for him to take. I ran the office, both satellite branches, managed and train the staff, managed the fleet for three locations, handled all the customers and businesses and our relationship with the airport crew responsible for delivering and picking up cars). And my city manager, who'd taken credit for some of my innovations, could not answer questions about them because he'd never asked me how it worked and could not figure out how I'd done it; I shit you not, they called me in during the suspension to give a presentation to upper goddamn management on it. You'd think a smart company would have been like, "he is 24. He can revolutionize this thing and give us a chance to compete with Enterprise," as they were a new entry into the segment at the time, "we should promote him and get him into corporate to do business strategy and training." Nope. I got offered a nice 12k paycut to go work at a branch forty miles from my place, where cars were being stolen at gunpoint three times a week. Not their fault I made all that extra on OT. Salary is not negotiable but here, you can drive this Taurus. Sometimes. If you have to rent it or it gets stolen you can call someone for a ride or pay for a cab. WTF? Anyway, I sent in my emails after a VP came by specifically to see me while my boss was out bowling. He smelled something fishy and encouraged me to talk to him, because he did think I was the future. I did, and suddenly they couldn't get me back to work fast enough. Corporate was pissed, HR was pissed, and everyone from the regional manger on down got reamed out for it. But I was done with them, and rental car. Who would want to put up with all that for 11.50 an hour, plus eighteen hours of OT a week order, do great at it, and be offered a hassle and pay reductions in return? How does that even make sense? And, despite all the broken laws and HR policy violations, none of my managers were fired or even suspended. I knew I would never make it anywhere in that company so long as they were involved in the power structure. Protection from retaliation is a load of crap. They were angry that I'd dare stand up for myself and demand to be treated fairly and in line with my value to the company. They acted about how you'd expect. I played out the string at a friend's branch - thirty miles away, of course - and went to Wells Fargo to be a Credit Manager. I don't mind putting Wells Fargo's name out here. Their corporate trust division is the BEST place I have EVER worked as an adult. I have never been any place that treated the employees as well as I was treated at Wells Fargo. But that's a story for another time.

[theinvisibleman247]

The Curious Case of the Collapsing Coworkers

I’ve been in three positions - my last three, actually - where either I have gone down or I have seen coworkers go down due to overwork and stress. What I mean is, we collapse on the job or end up in the hospital with chest pains, doctors think it’s a heart attack but get confused since the individuals I’m speaking of, myself included, are in their thirties.

I was 31 when I had to have a heart cath procedure and was told I needed to seriously downsize stress. If you could see me, you wouldn’t believe I had to do this. I am very fit and athletic. I work out at least three times a week, usually four to five. Lots of cardio. I eat well, not much for fast food. The doctors couldn’t understand how I could be in such bad shape.

Stress. I had a psychopath for a wife (check my relationship blog. Not exaggerating, she got diagnosed) and I was working 50-60 hours a week in high pressure IT support where calls at 2am and on every weekend day were not out of the norm.

I left that company. Went to oil and gas. They have issues these days, as you may have heard. When companies have issues, they cut staff. They don’t cut the workload, though. One of my teammates finally collapsed after being hailed a hero for his extensive travel and sixty to seventy hour weeks on a project with a ridiculous deadline. Doctor’s orders? Rest. And can’t work him like that. It’s too much. He was 39. He did the smart thing and took a couple of weeks off (sort of) to rest and recover. Mostly because they said he wasn’t allowed to drive.

You’d think the company would hire some more help. Nope. That costs money, and money eats into profits, and then fat management bonuses shrink. Can’t have that, so they had him working remote against doctor’s orders and in secret from HR after a couple of days off. Business doesn’t stop because we almost killed you. There’s a deadline to meet, you know. Being ahead of schedule, I offered to help On the project. I thought between two of us, the workload would be more manageable and nobody would have to die over it. Of course, I was turned down by the boss.

“His project,” the boss said.

That was the future they wanted for me. So I got the hell out of there. In my own experience, even that minuscule amount of time off wasn’t an option. I was “needed” so as soon as I was released from the hospital, I had to be online working. At the time, I was on one of those “six month contract to hire” gigs that had been changed to “indefinite contract” because of a “hiring freeze,” which to me is nothing more than a breach of contract that I could do nothing about under US law. I’d been elevated to a management position while under this contract, hence the “needed,” which of course brought no salary increase or bonuses for all I’d accomplished there. “Well, you’re just a contractor,” they would say.

That’s a post for another day.

So I had no time off with a shaky plug in my femoral artery that had already come loose and earned me an extra day in the hospital, because I started bleeding out when I stood up to leave. That’s a frightening experience, let me tell you. It’s five minutes to unconscious and eight til you’re dead. Dead. You want to know why I think all this overworking is ridiculous? Look no further than that. No job is worth dying for, but companies don’t care. The expectation seems to be if you can function at all, you should be at work, not taking care of yourself.

My next coworker who went down is a perfect example of that attitude. He’d been telling me for a while about the fourteen hour days, sometimes more, where he would work off the clock because his department (help desk) was understaffed (department of one. Economy’s tough, you know) and there’d be hell to pay if he couldn’t get it all down for the whole company. But don’t work overtime, they said. We don’t want to pay time and a half. How was he to do all the work then? he asked. They told him to find a way. Without overtime. He’d been doing this for fourteen months, and it’s partly on him for not recording his hours, but his job was on the line and I kind of understand. I warned him about the dangers of stress, which he’d compounded in his home life.

I wasn’t surprised when he came to me and said he’d collapsed on the last business trip. Chest pains. Fell unconscious and woke up in a hospital. Had to have a heart cath on the road. Now, you’d think after surgery and a cardiologist warning he worked too much and had too much stress, the company would gladly grant this hard working employee some rest.

Ha ha ha ha…if you thought that you haven’t been reading this blog. He was discharged from the hospital with the same orders I’d had - rest, no lifting of over five pounds, and if your leg starts bleeding seek emergency care immediately, because if that plug comes out you have five minutes of consciousness and then you’re probably dead. I say again, DEAD.

He tells them this. They expect him to finish up the work for the trip, which involved long hours and much lifting of computer hardware. Hey, it’s not like they had anyone else. Times are tough in the industry, you know. I applauded when he said he told them no and rescheduled his flight to come home early and follow doctor’s orders. This was naturally frowned upon - how dare he take care of himself even though it’s a genuine high risk of death if he fails to comply with doctor’s orders? There is WORK to be done, people, and if he drops dead we can get someone else. And probably pay them less.

If you are reading this, you may never have had to stare death in the face because you were worked too hard. But after you see a team of hospital professionals struggling to stop all your life’s blood from pouring out, and knowing if they fail the next few minutes are your last, your paradigm shifts. The last thing I want now is to spend more time than I already do at work. 8-5, and variations thereof, is a nine hour day, standard. Yeah you get a lunch break, but most people can’t go home. So they stay in the office and companies get free hours. If you’re pulling regular OT you should probably add an hour to the totals you have in your mind. 45 hours of my week, plus commuting time, which adds an extra two hours to that nine hours I’m already away, is more than enough time spent on a vocation. When I am on my deathbed, I’m not going to be wishing I’d spent more time at the office - I’ll be wishing I’d spent less. I’m young enough to make a positive change now in this area, and I’m well on my way to achieving my goals of work life balance. But it’s tougher to do than it sounds. Our culture has become a work-a-holic culture, and anything less than nearly killing yourself for your job (who, by the way, will get rid of you without blinking an eye should their bottom line come up in the red) is not acceptable.

And even if you nearly do, don’t expect any sympathy from the company. You’ve got projects due, and there’s a deadline to meet, you know. You can rest when you’re dead. Which, you just might be soon.

Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine. We could just hire someone else, but it’s much more cost effective to dump the work on your teammates or another department and save some money on that salary of yours.

I just find that hard...it's hard to find...oh, well. Whatever.

Never mind.

[theinvisibleman247]

About the Salaried Thing

My entire life, I’ve heard that what you want is to become a salaried employee. In theory, this means you get the schmancy job title and any prestige that comes with it, a higher salary, and better benefits. Corporate types always say, “you get paid the same no matter what it takes to get the job done.” Sounds like a great deal, right?

Slow down. That’s only in theory. What it really means is they don’t want to pay you overtime for all the overtime hours they plan on having you work. Some folks say, “The OT you would’ve gotten is factored into the salary total.” Well, in theory, that’s probably true.

The reality is something else altogether. And many companies abuse the status of “salaried” and use it to pay less for more work.

And what about the opposite? I am a highly efficient worker. I think fast, move fast, work fast. I am always ahead of schedule and I’ve only ever had one boss who could keep me busy eight hours a day. Well, most of the time. Sometimes I even turned in her ridiculous amounts of assigned work early and they had to go find more for me to do. So let’s say I fulfill the duties of the job I have been hired for, on average, in 30-35 hours a week. Let’s pretend I have a counterpart who takes fifty five hours to do the same work. Now, we are both paid similarly and are salaried employees. But having fulfilled my responsibilities and turned in my deliverables, shouldn’t I be able to go home and still get paid the same? If it doesn’t take me forty hours or more, shouldn’t they be happy? And why should I have to hang around the office or do even more extra than I already do to fill in a forty hour time card?

Again, that stated purpose of salary is like the company saying “we will pay you a flat rate to complete this work.” Well, I completed it, so what’s with the evil eye when I leave on time, even though I really should be able to bail any time I want under this arrangement? I can guarantee you I won’t be paid OT for working over forty hours, but I will most certainly be docked if I put in 32 and don’t use PTO, regardless of whether my work is finished or I’m way ahead of schedule on my assigned tasks.

I really don’t honestly get this, other than appearances or something. But I think “salaried” should work in the same way for people like me who don’t need forty hours to get it done, and get it done right, as it does for someone who has to spend longer than forty hours to do the same thing. Everyone is different. Just because it’s easier for me, I don’t think I should be penalized.

My hope is one day I will find a place that is happy I’m knocking the work assigned out of the park and who doesn’t care when I’m there, because I’m killing it and getting them what they need early or, at worst, right on time for when they need it.

Right now all I get is people staring at a clock and celebrating folks who do less in more time because they stayed at the office from sun up to way past sun down. Sure, they are missing their deadlines and turning in subpar work. But they put in 13 hours yesterday. By the way, we’re going to need you to pick up the work they aren’t getting done and fix what they did do, because it’s wrong. Also, can you coach them up to your level?

Oy vey.

What I see is an inefficient worker who needs training or someone who works in an understaffed department. But what do I know? Everywhere I go, that’s what’s happening and I end up with yet another “super job.” No raises or bonuses or anything, just taking the load off others and providing training. And still crushing it in under forty hours, leaving on time, and people gawking and not understanding how that’s possible even with the results sitting right in front of them.

Management reaction is usually this: let’s not reward this guy or let him do his thing and leave early because he’s always ahead of schedule. Never, ever pay him a compliment. Who cares if we reviewed it and had to grudgingly admit that it’s really stellar work and people are thrilled it’s happening so fast that it has far exceeded their expectations on time to deliver? It’s not like he’s putting in fourteen hours a day. Only thing that matters is how much time you spend In the office, how much sleep you lose working, and how much danger your personal relationships are in.

That’s commitment. That’s sacrifice for the company. Doing a great job in forty hours or less means you are lazy and don’t work hard enough. You should be doing more, even though you ask for more to fill up the time and we can’t come up with anything else to assign you. So here, run these meetings we scheduled to start well past your usual quitting time. Don’t even think about coming in later to keep it to eight hours. We will have you in the office fifty hours a week yet! Ha ha!

Seriously, that’s actually happened to me. Many times. So here’s hoping that reasonable company with good management who rewards this kind of thing is somewhere out there.

In the mean time, I’m not holding my breath. It seems a reasonable expectation, but I’ve seen little at work to suggest that “reasonable” and “work” go together in this world today. Or at least, here in the good old U S of A.

[theinvisibleman247]

The "Super Job" Thing

I’m contacted many times daily by IT recruiters. I have a pretty versatile skillset, and there are a lot of jobs open in my area. But I’m noticing an uptick of the so-called “super job,” which is where employers try to cram multiple roles into one to save money. Here’s a good example, which I’m going to break down for you. It is an altered version (I removed company identifying information) of a job description I recently received an interview request for:

“Specific tasks may include but are not limited to the following:

Managing development and assessment of inventory for machine connected locations Reporting on planned demand against projections for machine connected locations Capturing product metrics and reconciling by region and by data plan Regularly connecting with appropriate Telecommunication contacts to determine if there is back billing, Client status of payments, billing information corrections Examination and reconciliation of billing and financials related to application Understanding of application fees charged by the vendor that are related to signal strength or quality, develop reporting Execute audits of orders and disconnects Examination of data usage, and development of reporting Examination of connections and gateway alignment, and development of reporting

SharePoint: Developing dashboards and reporting Enhancements to work trackers Addition of workflow to reporting pages Automating metrics capture and reporting from trackers Integration with Excel for dash boarding

WLAN: Monthly metrics and status reporting which includes: tracking of deployments across the Enterprise, capacity of critical infrastructure (Controllers and licenses, PI hardware and license, MSE hardware and license), demand forecast across the Enterprise Development and publishing, updating information for monthly operational updates

Skills & Capabilities: Advanced Excel expertise pivot tables, formulas, charting Powerpoint expertise SharePoint Developer Data Collection, Data Analytics, Data Manipulation, Metrics Generation Highly self-organized and works without constant supervision Network background and experience.”

Could I do it? Sure, I have experience in all of those areas and I have the skills listed. But for you non-IT people, this is what they’re really looking for: a) a Sharepoint admin and developer (usually 2 roles) b) a BI developer, c) an application support analyst, d) a server/network admin, e) a report writer/designer, f) a level 2 (or 3) help desk analyst, g) a data analyst, and h) an inventory asset manager.

Count those: that’s a minimum of eight roles for one person. EIGHT. Each would be a full time responsibility at a reasonably staffed company, requiring a seasoned asset manager and IT professionals with advanced skills or certified in these very separate areas: Network, Database, Business Intelligence, Sharepoint, Excel, and Programming. I know many IT people who are advanced and/or certified in one of these areas, maybe two or even three.

I don’t know any who are at this level in six. I’m viewed as an oddity by my IT peers because I have a good level of competency in them; “a jack of all trades but a master of none,” people tell me.

But that’s because I’ve been forced into doing this “super job” thing before, multiple times. I know exactly what it means: 10-12 hour days at the office, logging in when you get home, middle of the night “emergencies” where 9 out of 10 don’t actually require immediate attention and could’ve waited until morning, and no real time off because “you’re too important to be out of contact.”

So, this must be a six figure salary to put up with all of that, right? Nope - it’s $40 an hour (83.2k yearly) contract to hire (so no benefits. It says three months but in my experience that always get extended to between 12 and 18 months), and if they hire you expect that number to drop under 80k yearly. Oh, and you’ll be salaried then and lose the hourly rate, so kiss all that time and a half you were getting for the insane overtime hours goodbye.

Thanks, but no thanks, I replied.

Y'all ain’t killing me.

[theinvisibleman247]

Five Sensible Workplace Boundaries to Protect Your Personal Time

Time is the most valuable commodity in the world - once it’s been spent, you can never get it back.  I am not a workaholic.  I have an active life outside of work, and I actively protect it; these are the five boundaries I set right away at any job.

5. “I’m not interested in management.”

You should see the looks on people’s faces when I say this.  I’m what you’d call hyper-efficient.  I can do in forty hours what companies usually need two or three people to do.  I know this because I have trained my replacements and they always get two or three people for what I did by myself. The worst was a job where I served as the lead application systems analyst, the data analyst, a helpdesk support tech, an assistant network engineer, and a sql report writer all at the same time for 16 months. At the decent companies I’ve worked for, upper management sees this and salivates.  I’m not only experienced in multiple areas of IT, I am good with people and good at coaching them up  They’re thinking “management material.”

I’m looking at the 24/7 phone calls, the 12 hour day meeting schedule, the divorces, and the number of guys around me collapsing from overwork and stress being sent to the hospital.  Sure, the money would be nice, but you can’t enjoy it if half is earmarked to go to your soon-to-be ex spouse, you’re exhausted, or in a worst case scenario, dead. I don’t want any part of what comes with that kind of title. Been there, done that. No, thanks.

4. “I’m not interested in leading projects or being involved in project management.”

See #5.  But less pay, more pressure.  No, thanks.

3. “I don’t look at email when I’m not in the office.”

When I leave work, I leave work.   Unless it’s a 24/7 on-call position – in which case, I would not have taken the job – there is nothing you can send me that is so important it can’t wait until tomorrow that I would have any power to fix (”The network is down!”  I am not a network guy.  “The database is down!”  I am not a DBA). I’m not going to babysit my phone in case some workaholic wants something or has a question at 11pm.  If the system isn’t spontaneously combusting and the company isn’t losing money over it, whatever it is can wait until tomorrow or whenever I’m back in the office.

2. “Remove my personal cell phone number from the Outlook directory.”

My phone is my phone.  If you’re not paying for it, you don’t get to use it.  It’s okay for my supervisor or my team to have it (and not abuse it.)  But I don’t need someone from Wyoming who can’t figure out how to log into Windows calling me at 2pm on a Saturday to talk them through it. Especially when I’m Level III and there’s a Level I 24/7 call center and a Level II they didn’t bother to call first.  Just…no. You can give me a work cell phone, but off work is still off work and I won’t be carrying it with me everywhere I go. It’ll be in my work bag at the house until it’s time to go to work again. If it’s an emergency, that’s different, and I’m sure an appropriate level person who has my personal number will find a way to let me know.

And if some enterprising business person takes my personal cell number out of the company directory and uses it? I have it removed and tell their supervisor and my own that it is not to be used for business calls and I will neither answer nor return those calls.

1. “I am not recording this as a PTO day if I have to spend half the day working.”

PTO means Paid Time Off.  Off.  As in, not working.  If I am answering email and phone calls, I am working.  If I have to join in a conference call on my day off because you just need to have my input on something, I am working.  That is not PTO, and we are going to treat it as a work day.  

[theinvisibleman247]

Introduction

I come from a nice middle class family. My parents are still married (high school sweethearts). I have a wonderful older sister and brother in law with a baby niece. I have a pretty, intelligent and successful long term girlfriend who I’m probably going to marry. I'm a successful IT professional. What I'm not is a combat or military veteran, so you wouldn't think someone like me would ever be diagnosed with PTSD and that handling the after effects would be easy peasy.

Wrong. I was, in 2012, after a 6 month panic attack that resulted in my being hospitalized at age 31 with what doctors thought was a major heart attack. It wasn't that - it was stress. That's it - my heart is fine. I'm in terrific shape. I look the part. But stress can and will kill you, as my best friend and brother from another mother found out the hard way when he died in 2014 at age 39. My hope is that by writing things out, I can better deal with some of the after effects of PTSD that are and apparently will be ongoing until the day I die, and maybe give others some helpful tips as to how I've learned to keep my stress levels low and to better manage my relationships at work, at home and in life.