Work

[Jesse]

That's shite, and very familiar with that pattern as my wife works retail and goes through similar each year. It's absolutely wank, but have you tried gig work (Uber/Deliveroo etc.) to help you bridge the gap in the hard times?

[Mr_Danger]

Yeah if you drive and don’t fancy getting the sweet smell of chicken McNuggets in your upholstery then Amazon do what looks like pretty decent flexi time work. Book in for a two hour slot and I’m sure it’s only local to where the depot is. 
 

I do not miss retail though. I used to throw them loads of extra free time and go above and beyond my duties just to be the one who got the extra few hours here and there. Fuck retail.

[DCW]

Government here have unilaterally reduced remote working days for 2 departments, producing no rationale for doing so. Only a matter of time before other departments are told to do the same.

Bloody depressing they're starting to roll back the only positive to come from covid in the public sector here. I get more done, am more focused/less distracted and don't have to waste 2 hours of my day on a poxy bus to answer emails or do my case work. 

Union are making the right noises, but are fairly useless in practice.  Ugh. 

[Briefcase]

21 hours ago, WyattSheepMask said:

Not sure where else to put this but I just need to get it out somewhere.

I work in retail and we seem to be having our annual “thanks for all your hard work over the Christmas period, here’s your reduction of hours” phase as they look to “protect the profit” of the business by cutting back on payroll.

What that means is that everyone is down to their contract hours. No one is on a full time contract, so hours vary. Mine is for 16 hours per week as a minimum. 
Im currently on £11.60 p/h, and I’m beginning to worry about how long it’s going to last before hours improve again. 
The last two years it’s just been a tight couple of months, but 2022 was an especially tough year and hours were so hard to come by for most of the year and I was fucking miserable just trying to get by. 
As I result I’ve got about £3k on my credit card, which I really want to get cleared (I’m fucking sick of credit card debt), the car’s MOT is due in April and I’m just beginning to panic a little.

Are you able to put holidays through? I have also worked in retail/hospitality and used to put through holidays in January whilst hours were low, I know it's not ideal as you want holidays to be used if you have plans but might help you get by and if you have a few weeks of crazy hours then it should hopefully balance out.  

[Egg Shen]

I was in retail for about 20 years and the constant threat and fear of restructure wasn't nice. Looking at how minimally staffed a supermarket is now compared to when I started is mental, they can't scale it back much more surely.

At Tesco there was rumors for about 9 months that they were restructuring the management side of things and would be getting rid of most team leader roles, it seemed to drag on forever with no one ever giving you a clear answer. I finally got a phone call on my birthday of all days from the store manager telling me that I was losing my position. Cretins.

[Tamura]

@WyattSheepMask can you not claim Universal Credit as well? I only have two contracted nights per week plus generally one night's overtime (or more if I'm feeling like it, which isn't often the case right now for reasons mentioned on the previous page), but also have an ongoing Universal Credit claim which tops up my wage when I don't work much overtime. As long as you're earning more than the Administrative Earnings Threshold (currently £892 per month) you don't need to look for another job or attend the job centre to get hassled, you just get paid the money automatically as they get told how much you earn every month by HMRC.

[Mr_Danger]

So I didn’t leave Royal Mail in the end. I cancelled my resignation at the last minute and fucked up my payroll over Christmas. I’ve had some health issues over the past year and the security of 11 years plus continuous employment with full pay sick leave after the first three days was telling me to give it another year.
 

To that I’ll add I think I’ve found my version on Branquey’s work place nemesis. He’s a sucky little twerp who failed at being police and has recently volunteered to rejig peoples rounds so that some are easier and some are harder. That might not seem like a big deal but to us it’s like crossing the picket line. You never go out of your way to help management screw over a colleague and the fact he openly put his hand up to do it shows what a twat he is. You’d say fair enough if he had aspirations on management but he doesn’t. He simply wants a modicum of power and has had half the office up his arse all week in fear for having 20 minutes extra work. Not me. I’ve been my usual delightful twatty self and simply let 2 or 3 select people know that if he puts any extra on me (he’d been going around saying I’ll definitely be getting a load extra) I’ll refuse and tell the new manager that he’s only putting on me because I’ve spent the last year calling him a nonce for shagging the 17 year old apprentice. Followed by a hearty chuckle and a “No I wouldn’t really do that to now 18 year old apprentice, it must be bad enough for her as it is” Funnily enough he had a change of heart and has made a point to go around telling people that 17 year old apprentice came on to him and was making all the moves etc.

[SuperBacon]

National apprenticeship week.

Monday went to a secondary school and presented to years 10 and 11. In their actual classes. Was absolutely terrifying (mainly due to my 15yo telling me "They're gonna eat you alive bro") Also got to witness the school during lunchtime which was like a warzone.

Tuesday evening, event at the school attended by around 200 pupils and parents (cannot reveal too much information but this is a school in an area with high levels of deprivation, so this was an incredible turn out and hopefully developed some future apprentices or sparked their imagination)

Thursday evening, event at another school attended by around 150 pupils and parents. One student dapped me up (how you doing fellow kids?) after they learnt my surname and said that's "the sickest surname ever" Got to mess about with a space shuttle engine. 

Today delivered an information session to around 60 Ukrainian guests to teach them about their options with apprenticeships.

Absolutely love my job sometimes. I'm knackered but it's well worth it.

[BomberPat]

second week in a row that I've come on-site for a piece of work that can't be done remotely, and I needn't have bothered.

Last week it was for a meeting that the chair was insisting on doing in-person, only for me to be told on the day that the chair had been ill and working from home for several days, so would have to join remotely. Then it turned out that the room I had booked, and been assured was set up for hybrid meetings, had no camera or microphone, so we gave up and did the whole thing remotely anyway.

I was starting to feel ill that day, so already resented coming in when I needn't have bothered, and by the end of the week I felt like absolute shit - cancelled all of my plans at the weekend, just felt utterly rotten, and called in sick yesterday. But I knew that no matter what I had to come in this week for at least one day, because I've been given a job that involves updating a system I can't access remotely - it's a job that is completely outside of my team's remit, which I have argued for the last three years shouldn't be our responsibility, but it still is, and every year they spring it on us with barely any notice and a ridiculously tight deadline.

I figured I'd just struggle through it and come in to the office today, and then I could hopefully get most of the job done, and at least get a sense of what else needed doing. Came in to an absolute mountain of emails, way more than is normal for having missed just one day of work, and to find that for the one job I'm here for, I can't do half of it because the other people who should have done their bit by now haven't yet. So feeling a bit fucked off.

On top of that, it's freezing in the office because there's maintenance being done on the boilers today. Something they never bothered telling us, because in the grand tradition of universities everywhere, they scheduled the work for "when nobody is working", where the definition of "nobody" is "absolutely everyone but the teaching staff". 

[BomberPat]

this week can just get in the bin.

On top of ongoing fuckery around this job not getting done, and it still being freezing in the office, everyone just seems to have gone slightly mad this week.

We're a small team, and smaller this week, because a few of us are on leave. People at my level (bottom of the ladder) are expected to work on this big curriculum job this week, and two people (one at my level, and their manager) have been asked to cover the day-to-day stuff and financial queries while we focus on that. Except this morning they seem to have forgotten that, because they're flinging a load of finance queries my way, including some that the other person who's supposed to be covering initiated, which concern departments I don't normally have anything to do with. Which feels a lot like passing the buck on problems they can't be arsed solving.

So, first enquiry. Someone is starting a new contract, the department want them to start work on Monday, but they haven't completed a Right-to-Work check yet. Literally not my job to do any of this, but I was asked to keep an eye on emails to see if one comes in. I was asked, incidentally, by the person who's job this week is expressly to keep an eye on emails because I'm expected to be focused elsewhere. The email that came in wasn't sufficient, so they asked me to send a link out for them to complete an online Right-to-Work check. Fine, did that.

I then get a Teams call from someone I don't know in HR, absolutely irate that I would tell somebody that we can accept a photograph of their passport as a valid Right-to-Work check, and that they assumed that my team had received proper training on this, and should know this, and should instead be sending them a Yoti link. Except I didn't tell anyone we could accept a photo of their passport, I told them very much the opposite, and I sent them a Yoti link in the same email. Just a complete stranger phoning me to shout about how I shouldn't have done what I didn't do, and should do what I actually did, without giving me any space to reply, or listening when I did. Just a bizarre interaction from start to finish.

The other email trail I got forwarded to me was somebody complaining that they hadn't been paid. They went over our heads to one of the heads of department who hired them as a guest lecturer, and complained that it's unacceptable, because they've been waiting for payment since they completed the work in December, and the head of department kicked off about how unacceptable this all was. Funnily enough, the person left out that they didn't actually submit their pay claim to us until January, or that we contacted them at the end of January to let them know that their payment had been rejected because they gave us the wrong bank details, and then didn't update us with the right details for another week. So they haven't been "waiting since December" at all, have they? We've been proactively trying to pay them, and fix their fuck-ups. Funny how they left all of that part out.

[SuperBacon]

Really unwell this week and was supposed to be in an office today for co-working planning (not that urgent) I work from home but am out and about all the time apart from Mondays in the head office, shouldn't have gone in Monday but felt OK and being out made me worse.

Was also originally a whole day and then the morning got booked up with 3 online meetings anyway so that's half the day not needed in a physical place.

So I told them I'm quite unwell, coughing, spluttering, don't really want to be around others etc only to be told its fine the desks are quite far apart? 

Said well 3 hours of the morning is online anyway so I'd rather not make myself feel ill thanks and we'll rearrange.

Was met with umbrage and I can tell the person is pissed off. Last time I fucking worry about others.

[Devon Malcolm]

Might be the first time I've had cause to post in this thread but I started a new job last week.

I was headhunted by someone who left the company we both worked at together and I'm now working for a site on a contract and I'm no longer freelance. The team I'm working with are ace and I've always had a good working relationship with the person I'm working under again. I always felt more loyalty to her than the place we were previously at because she was the one who kept me in work and shielded me from major issues at the previous site.

So while the work isn't riveting, it's far more settled and reliable and has arrived at just the right time as I'd become far too familiar with my overdraft. It's 4 to midnight from Sunday to Thursday and, honestly, the hours are perfect for me as I now have daytimes all to myself as well as the carer hours 16yo gets. The only downside is I no longer get Friday evenings out as I'm round at my parents but I do get Saturday afternoons instead of Thursday evenings.

Oh yeah, I'm on my shift. Anyway.

[gmoney]

On 12/20/2024 at 12:51 PM, gmoney said:

We've had a restructure at work and a change in shift pattern, but with no reduction of work obviously. Change took place at the beginning of December, one our busiest periods. It's been absolute chaos and mistakes are being made now that are probably going to reverberate well into the new year. I've got 4 days off over Xmas starting on 23rd. I'm begging for them. 

Well work did get slightly less shit after the Christmas period, but it's still a bit of a shit show. Luckily I've managed to bag a secondment to a much more interesting area of my company. It's a lot more hands on, and an area I've always found fascinating. It's covering someone's maternity leave, so might not be forever, but even if I do come back, it'll be so good to get a break from my current role.

[DCW]

Realised today that my new manager since before Christmas doesn't know my full name, and has put my wrong surname on my folder in the shared drive that we tip stuff in for them to review. Interesting to see how long she takes to cop it. Being kind, they don't strike me as a person overly burdened with excessive thoughts, so I reckon at least another month. Starting to feel a bit Frank Grimes-ish!

[Thefatduck]

As I see it you have a number of options.

1. Do nothing. 
2. rename folder and tell her. 
3. rename folder and don’t tell her. 
4. tell her your name. 
5. hire a barbershop quartet to serenade her with close vocal harmonies of your name over and over again. 
 

I know which one I think you should do.