Category: Family

Apparently I was prescient. Between the time I wrote my last journal entry and today, the “rocket scientists” in management at work decided that scheduling was the problem.

In truth scheduling is a problem, but it’s not the only problem.

The scheduling problem is that they don’t have enough people on the phones when they need to have people on the phones. But this is not the only problem, it’s one of the top 4 but not the single problem.

Management however thinks it is, and they’ve decided to reschedule folks. BUT they’ve decided that to be fair, they’re going to change everybody’s schedule, not just make adjustments in the areas that need to be adjusted.

The practical upshot of all this is everyone’s schedule is going to be totally randomized and while I haven’t been too thrilled with my schedule (5am to 1:30 Sat through Wed) it’s at least been workable.

Yeah I don’t have any time for social events, or friends, and I’m never off work when “Normal” people are likely to be so I’m never likely to be able to engage in activities that other people like me are engaging in. But I don’t have to deal with the absolutely horrible San Diego traffic and I have a couple of weekdays off so I can deal with things like Doctors, and car service.

In short, I’m not happy, but I’m made the best of it.

NOW that’s all likely to change. For me, I can probably adapt if I want to. But for other people who have kids and familial obligations this process is creating a panic.

See, the geniuses are assigning everyone a random number and that number will determine your new schedule. You have no choice and no options.

I don’t believe for a second that it’s going to be random. I think that the Supervisors will gather in a conference room and they’ll pick folks for their “Teams” (I use that term loosely) they’ll put all the “Highest” performers on the really nice schedules and the “lowest performers” (In terms of how many phone calls the person can take in an hour) or the “Troublemakers” (In term of people who ask questions or are thinking or problem solvers) on the crappiest schedules. There will be nothing random about it.  

Wow, that sounds like the first moves of every fascist regime on the planet. The only difference is, in a fascist regime the “Troublemakers” go to prison or re-education camps. At the company they’re sent to the gulag of shitty schedules. Then again, I guess I trust management about as much as I trust a fascist regime.

This is nothing more than cowardice on the part of management. They want to be able to hide what they’re doing behind a facade of “randomness”. They want to be able to say, “It’s the luck of the draw, even when luck has nothing to do with it. 

I can’t abide that kind of slimy, passive aggressive weakness. 

I work with a Single Father, and another Father whose wife also works. The one guy’s wife works 2 hours from where they need to pick up their kids from daycare after school. So like a responsible Dad, my coworker leaves at the end of his shift to pick up his kids, then he takes them home gets their homework and dinner started. When his wife comes home, they finish dinner together and have some family time.

The single Father is in a similar situation. He must pick up his child and there is simply no other option. 

For both Fathers, If the kids aren’t picked up on time, the daycare facility calls Child Protective Services and says the children have been abandoned.

Neither of these responsible men have family in the local area. But of course since they’re men no-one gives them the slightest consideration regarding child care.

When these men said, “Wait a minute, we have to see to the needs of our children. We’ve  selected and worked these schedules because of our familial obligations…”

The company’s response was;

“We cannot make accommodation, you’ll have to make proper arrangements.”

SAY WHAT????

I just love how things are only sexist when women are involved. It’s just as sexist to assume that a man can make other arrangements.

The only “other” arrangement is for these guys to find employment elsewhere. Especially since the company is only giving us 2 weeks to adapt. These men are not newbies, they’ve been with the company for 2-3 years.

These men aren’t the only employees affected, there are a lot of single mothers in exactly the same boat.

So tell me… How the FUCK is this going to help put more people on the phones? Given the choice between their children and their job… Parents will always put their children first. But losing your job places your kids at risk too. The deciding factor then becomes, “How has this company treated me?”

That answer is glaringly obvious.

The Company you work for couldn’t give half a shit about you as a person, your family, or anything else. Therefore it’s time to bail and fuck the company as hard as you can when you leave.

“Family oriented?”, “A great company to work for?”, “A place where you can thrive, and grow your career?”

Forgive me if I appear cynical, when I call BULLSHIT on that statement.

If management thinks hold times are long now… OH baby, just you wait.

This isn’t about making things better, this is about power. Management wants to remind and reinforce the message, “We control you. We own your ass. You have no choices, you have no future, and you exist to service our whims.”

It’s what I’ve said multiple times, every policy this company has, is punitive.

It’s not about cost effectiveness or efficiency, or even some high minded ideal of helping their customers manage an incurable disease. It is first and foremost about hurting the people who are supposed to be “Bright”, “Shiny”, “Happy”, “Helpful people”, that do the actual work.

Management is completely oblivious to the powder keg they’re sitting on, while they’re playing with matches. It’s a powder keg, of their own making. For me, the question is; “Do I want to be around when it blows?”

I think not.

In the past year;

We’ve been hobbled with shitty software that was supposed to replace more or less functional software we were using. It hasn’t!

Because of the shitty software, we now have a whole series of exceptions that we’re supposed to remember. If we encounter one of these exceptions. Then we have to document in the old software. If however, those exceptions are resolved, then we have to manually copy what was entered into the old software into the new software, noting that we did this and that the old record is superseded by the new record and also in the new record we have to document what the old record number was.

If document qa doesn’t like what we did or why, the’ll have us move all the information back to the original software, if someone else in document qa doesn’t like that, then we move everything back into the new software. This is a completely manual process and you can’t bring  a document back once it’s been deprecated.

The new software can present as many as 15 pages that we’re supposed to fill in, however I use the term “page” loosely.

Usually a “page” contains one or two checkboxes and a “Next Button”. Each press of the “Next Button” requires that you wait 20 to 30 seconds for the next “page”, also containing only 2 or 3 checkboxes to display.

God help you if you have to edit anything because the person on the phone changes their story, or if document qa comes back asking for clarification. There is no way to display the entirety of the record and edit one item, you have to click through the whole document again, with it’s attendant 20 to 30 second refresh per page even if nothing was changed.

Can you see part of the problem?

If we’re entering a large number of records to document each of the events described in a phone call we’re already at a disadvantage. It’s one document per event. 

The people taking calls, are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Each call and any events described by the caller must be documented before moving on to the next call. So depending on the number of issues to be documented, it may be 10 to 20 minutes before you can answer the next call and it’s interesting that 10 to 20 minutes is almost the exact average hold time.

Coincidence? Probably not.

Management’s solution is not to admit that their home grown software solution is a colossal failure and 2 years of “programming” has produced nothing but a steaming pile of shit,

Their solution is to keep whipping the employees for not working fast enough, or hard enough, while at the same time whipping the employees for making mistakes.

Uh yeah, that’ll make things better.

Employees have responded, by calling out sick more frequently. This exacerbates the problem because the scheduling is not set up to accommodate the number of people calling out sick.

The scheduling disaster can be laid 100% at the feet of a single individual whose job is to run a single piece of software called Workforce Management. In the 2 years I’ve been at this company… This idiot has never gotten it right.

Instead of having shifts that overlap by 30 or 45 minutes, This idiot has one shift ending on the hour and the next shift starting on the same hour.

He’s looking at shifts as mechanistic, as if he’s turning off one machine and turning on another.

Unfortunately for him, that’s not the way people work. People get sick, their kids get sick, they have car accidents, get stuck in traffic, have family emergencies, and all the other stuff that happens in the real world. The company and employees do not operate in a vacuum. Regardless of the fact that his surname is French, this is not a plantation in The Caribbean, where he has slaves in the slave quarters ready to jump at his whim.

He is a singularly unattractive person, so I suppose he’s never had anything like spontaneous sex, or anything else that’s defining as human.

I can only imagine what it’s like for someone who might be interested in climbing in the sack with him. “Oh? Sorry we’re scheduled to have sex from 10:30:00 to 10:30:02, 2 weeks from now, on a Tuesday.”

Were he to overlap shifts by 30 minutes, he’d have access to people from the previous shift who might be willing to work a few hours of overtime to pick of the slack for folks that called out.

DUH!

What completely astounds me is that the “Management”, all well educated; think that this is going to solve the problem. So much for that expensive education morons!

The beginning of the solution is simple:

Fix the shitty software, or go back to the software that works

Rework the schedule to add coverage in the time periods that you need it. That could easily be done by a simple shift of 30 minutes and most folks in their existing time slots would probably be able to move forward or back without much disruption.

Hire more people to backfill the deficiencies.

Do away with the stupid attendance rules that make it more advantageous for an employee to miss an entire day if they’re going to be 5 or 10 minutes late. It’s well known that the company has nightmare parking problems and the city as a whole has nightmare traffic. For god’s sake it can take you 15 to 20 minutes to find a parking spot. It’s like a mall on Black Friday there.

That’s just advice from a simple country bumpkin whose looked at, and lived with the mess.

Oh, and it’s high time to fire that Workforce Management analyst. His contribution is not helping – it’s hurting.

Honestly, I think there’s something else afoot.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the company is getting ready for a sale. The top execs are getting their “Golden Parachutes” packed and they’re going to leave a disaster in their wake. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been at a company where thats happened.

Either I’ll have a job when the new schedules come out, or I’ll quit the day the new schedule goes into effect. When that day comes, I’ll identify for everyone, the company I work for and I fucking dare them to mess with my first amendment right to speak my mind.

Well, I’ve been looking for something new anyway…