Monday, October 21, 2019

Farewell, Overtime

There has been a lot of shuffling at work, and thus a couple openings.  One of them, crafted by my boss, was a weird weekend-wraparound position; you would jump around departments, just like I do, but you would work Saturday through Tuesday for ten hours each day.  Absolutely weird, but the requirements of the departments my boss oversees demands a jack-of-all-trades job like that, and he is banking that someone who wants to go to school during the week would take this full-time job.

In the meantime, we all were told that we needed to take up slack.  Specifically, there was some filing that could be done late in the week; we were told we could pick up an extra half-hour of overtime to file away stuff and/or catch up on work that's still to be done.  Also, there is one person out on Data
Entry every Sunday, if only for about half a day, but someone had to do it.  Actually, it was just me and the woman who screamed, "YOU'RE LATE!" at me who was picking up the job in the interim.

Miraculously, a couple weeks ago, someone applied and got that wraparound job.  It was a guy who used to work there, but got laid off after the company moved his department to another state.  He had been gone about 18 months, but apparently he liked working there.  I don't know if he's going back to school, but he jumped at this job, and he's been on-ramping/training ever since.

That included Sunday, when my boss asked me to join him out at Data Entry (or DE) in case he had questions about anything he came across.  (He did have some; I didn't know how to answer; he called another person on her day off.  Yeah, I ain't no trainer.)  But that is basically it.  My boss told me that instead of doing eight, 8 1/2 hours of work on Sundays, like I had been doing when the Vikings weren't playing at home, I could get in early to file, but once the main work at DE was done, I should go.  It is expected that he is taking this Sunday shift from this point forward, and this ostensibly also means no one needs to come in and do an extra half-hour in Filing each week, either.

And you know what?  I'm kind of upset.  I mean, I don't have the right to expect OT.  But I had been doing it for almost two months now, and I obviously miss the extra money in my paycheck.  But I also miss the environment I worked in, especially on Sundays.  Sure, I have to wake up and come in early.  But in Filing there was one other person there.  She's nice.  We don't talk a lot, but when we do, it's an interesting conversation.  And then around 10 I take a break and then go out to DE to wait for applications.  This whole time I am by myself.  There is no one to track if I'm getting back to work on time.  I don't need to use headphones so I don't bother my co-workers because there are no other co-workers.  So, I can turn up the radio third shift people use so I can hear Vikings games.  Also, I have turned up the speaker on my satellite radio to listen to soccer matches.  People pass through, but they don't care that I'm blaring the radio, because that's not their department.  I am my own boss on Sundays.  No one's bothering me.  And it was glorious.

And now it's over.

I miss it already.

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