So Sunday was kind of a shitshow at work. For the second time, I stayed longer than I should have. A lot longer. Like, six hours as opposed to four. I think labor laws dictate that once you are working six hours, you are supposed to take a half-hour unpaid lunch. Didn't do that, and I still think that is a mess that my bosses are going to have to clean up for me.
I was under the impression that I would have to stay late. Shortly after I got there, I was told by one of the lab workers that the shipment of pee samples was late. Therefore, I thought that I had to prepare to stay a bit late because the lab workers were going to be late shoveling out the forms to me, which means I will be late in keying and processing them before shoving those folders down the line and getting out of there. Before my four hours were up, I shouted to the lab workers something to the effect of, "Hey, are you still going to be sending forms my way?" And the two people there -- one of them whose face seems familiar to me, one who is new, neither of whom I remember working on Sundays because, as I found out yesterday, the person who was working at that position on Sundays left the company -- talked to each other a little bit before one of them said, "Yeah." Just like I thought.
So I waited. Well, I didn't wait. There were other types of forms I had to work on, and so I did them (slowly -- this will be an important point later in the story) while keeping an eye out on forms that I would need to scan and do. What I got, however, were empty folders. They need to be done in a technical sense, but I was told on Sundays that if there were no forms in a folder, those folders could bypass data entry; they can be handed off from the techs in one department to the techs in another. As I have learned, on Sundays these empty folders usually are the last ones to come out. Also, I was told that if they are the only ones left to be done, I do not need to do them, even if they are passed to our area. I can leave. Actually, I think I had been told by my higher-ups that I should leave under those circumstances.
That wasn't the case here -- well, at least I was not led to believe that would be the case. But as the minutes dragged on, I would see from across the hall an empty folder, and then several minutes later another empty, and so on. Soon, I was bumping up to the magical threshold of six hours (plus I wanted to get the hell out of there), and the important work I thought I had to stick around for I was still waiting for. So I go up to them and ask again, "Hey, are there more folders coming?" And the two guys had a skull session before one of them said, "Nope. All empties from here on out!" That's great, but ... did you know that all you gave me the fifth and sixth hours I was there were empty folders?
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I work for a company whose employees scrutinize work. I like a company, and people, who are serious about it. Then again, if the scrutiny is about my work, well, I don't like that
Monday morning my other boss e-mailed me while I was filing stuff away. She wondered why I worked six hours on Sunday. She's doing her job and checking my work, I understand. So I explain why I stayed so late. She appeared to, uh, not really care about that per se. Instead, she gave me a screenshot of work I did not of the two extra hours I stayed, but the first two hours. I told her what I was doing ... and that was the end of it.
Now to yesterday. Well, let me back up ... these days, overtime usually is not given. However, there have been several weeks so far this year where there has been extra work and so we have been given the opportunity to either stay late or come in early to work. When that happens, there is no need to worry about technically working more than 40 hours. However, when overtime for a week is not granted, the company is coming down hard on not working more than 40 hours. I get, like, a three-minute cushion with which I can go over. But if I'm at, like, 40.06 hours for a week, apparently my bosses catch hell for that, and that would certainly roll down onto me.
I have been banking on a sudden bubble of work to pulsate through the building this week. The week's not over. But if overtime were to be offered, it most likely would have been to either come in early yesterday or stay after yesterday. That did not happen. With a full day on Wednesday, that would thus mean that I can only work ten more hours (give or take) today and tomorrow. My boss wasn't banking on that. He assumed I would be working twelve hours these next two days. (If I do a half-day on Sunday and I'm limited to 40 hours, that means I would have take another half-day Monday through Friday -- do you see what I mean?) I could have waited till this afternoon for a Hail Mary of work to come through, thereby authorizing OT, but if it didn't come through, I would be working eight hours today and thus only a measly two hours Friday, and like I said, my boss isn't prepared for that ... especially if he didn't know I worked six on Sunday.
So I had to raise the issue with him. Just before I left yesterday I had to let him know what happened on Sunday and that as a result, I was at ten hours left. I am scheduled to fill in for someone in Filing Friday morning, then leave. If I'm a sub, I don't think I can deviate from the four hours I'm committed to, which means I would be working only six today. So I tossed out that suggestion, and he agreed. And then he asked if I could speak with him about Sunday. Great.
I had a meeting with him about the miscommunication and the ultimately unnecessary need to stay that late. But that didn't really bother him at all; he just chalked it up to people not knowing how things are done on Sundays. What really bothered him was, uh, my lack of production my first two hours, the same hours my other boss noted to me Monday morning.
Honestly, I wasn't dilly-dallying. There are those other folders that I needed to go through and rub out all the mistakes. In particular (and I won't bore you with the details), there are a subset of these forms that are fairly important to push down the conveyor belt. That's not the main priority; those other forms are. But frequently on Sundays, as you're waiting for those very important forms to pass through the window, you have these slightly-less important forms that are still important, and so you do those in order to fill in the rest of your day (which, again, for me, is supposed to be only four hours). These particular folders are important because many of them have outright mistakes on the forms. The name is illegible, or the code on the form doesn't match the one attached to the sample, etc. There is a process by which you are supposed to look at the discrepancy and decide which errors you can overlook and which you have to keep for others to investigate. These important folders are ones that have, like, 30 forms, most of which have a discrepancy. So going through them takes time. And I took my time to do it right, even though, like my boss intimated in our meeting, other people can do it faster. And so he talked about how I could be more productive when it comes to that particular job, as well as being "visible" by keying in programs whose metrics can be looked at by supervisors like my bosses.
So that wasn't great. What I thought was the biggest problem with what went down on Sunday was in fact an ancillary issue to my bosses, and the real problem according to them was something I didn't see coming at all. But I'll confess something. I wasn't half-assing it on Sunday, and I usually don't on Sundays. But could I go faster going through these forms, and these folders? Yeah. I don't really want to. Why? Because it's Sunday and no one's there to pick over my work. Sure, they pick over my work the next day, but not while I'm there that day, and I feel like that difference is real, not illusory.
And it doesn't really matter because this time next month another person will be working Sundays so I won't have to anymore. The focus on speeding up my rate of production, however, will remain. Yep. They're on to me.
