In 1988 my employer, a local systems integrator who is no more, eliminated me and several other employers in an effort to recover from the effects of fiscal malfeasance by one of the principals of the company. Problem was, they tried to recover without ditching the guy who caused the problem, and without his ceasing the malfeasance. A few months later they were dead, but that’s another story about corporate jackals.

The job search didn’t go very quickly; the typical IT help wanted ad read something like, “Seeking 25-year-old MBA in computer science with fifteen years experience in a system exactly like ours.”

To tide me over, I signed on with a temp agency and was promptly placed in a part-time data-entry slot in a magnet wire plant. I had previously worked several years for another magnet wire manufacturer, and knew the product lines and technology well, and the boss soon found enough work to give me 40 hours a week. The job I was doing would have paid around $25 - $30K plus benefits as a full-time regular employee, and I was pulling in a rollicking $5.25/hour with no benefits other than workman’s comp if I got hurt on the job. Overtime applied only if I worked more than 40 hours in a calendar week, and I got no paid vacation or holiday time.

Magnet wire manufacturing is a continuous process, and wire mills generally run 24/7, holidays included. I worked (and I mean WORKED) Thanksgiving Day and the Friday after, both holidays on the company calendar, for $5.25 an hour straight time, while the two twenty-something fork lift operators whose job requirements didn’t even include literacy, pulled down double time at $20 an hour looking at comic books in the office.

After I carped long and persistently, the boss got me a big raise to $6, and told me that he was working on getting me a permanent slot if I was interested. Another manager whom I knew from my previous wire mill job informed me off the record that the company had a hiring freeze in place, and that any outside hires had to have personal approval from the CEO.

After six months at hell-hole sweat shop, my job search paid off and I landed a good job with another company for $35K plus benefits and a $1,000 hiring bonus. That came about just a weak before what I had expected to be a bleak, impoverished Christmas.

Oh, and about the comic-book browsing fork lift drivers — I read in the paper about a year later that one of them had been arrested, along with his brother. They had murdered their grandmother, rolled her body in a carpet, and stashed it in the attic of the garage at her lake home, and were looting her substantial assets to buy themselves new cars and such. What a waste! If they’d just been smart and careful enough to not get caught, their value systems would have made them CEO material.

I sat in the hotel bar and drank Jack Daniels and Coke, renewing my tawdry affair with American cigarettes while listening to two rednecks debate whether you should stop and help someone you just hit with your car. When they agreed that you wouldn’t have to help a black guy, I figured it was time to go back to my room.

Good times…

When I worked for GE, and later for Lincoln Life, I grabbed at every Saturday stayover I could get. Usually, the company was quite willing to pick up the extra night in the hotel and the extra day on the rental car, because the savings in air fare more than made up for them. I had a day on the company’s tab to explore local historic sites and scenic venues and soak up some of the local color. Some of those stayovers were in backwater places, but I always felt like the time was well spent. You don’t have to be in a tourist mecca to find interesting experiences, unless you’re an unimaginative nincompoop.

I even had a pretty good time in Youngstown for a couple of days. I’ll admit, going beyond that might have stretched things.

The place I’m at now has a lot of long-term workers, but I want to laugh when someone who’s been there forever gets celebrated for all their time. Being a young’un, I know I certainly won’t still be hired here in a few years at the most. “Career status,” my arse.

A newspaper which shall remain nameless brought a job candidate in for an interview over Thursday and Friday. They told her they were sending her back Sunday to save money, and she valiantly agreed, but they neglected to arrange any sort of Saturday activities/lunches/whatever — they basically left her in her hotel room in a mid-size midwestern city which shall remain nameless, and also has a really, REALLY dull downtown.

So she watched a Spectravision movie in her hotel room.

When the bill arrived, the editor of the newspaper wrote her a furious letter, demanding reimbursement for the…ready? Ready? Yes, the outrageous, inexcusable SEVEN-DOLLAR charge.

To her credit, she wrote him a furious letter right back, and didn’t take the job.

When I think back on all the down time I had in full-time salaried jobs, and the evenings and weekends I had to spend in the office when poorly managed projects were in crisis, being paid hourly as a contractor seemed a much better deal for me, and for the company, too.

(It also allowed me to stay above the fray of office politics, which are always much more venomous in an atmosphere where everyone’s fearful of getting shitcanned on a moment’s notice.)

To me there’s nothing worse than having to sit in an office with nothing to do and not being allowed to make use of my time in any other way than pretending to look busy. If there’s nothing to do, I shouldn’t have to be there. If there’s something to do on a weekend, fine, that’s when I’ll be there.

Reading this thread today is strengthening my resolve to remain self-employed, but these days finding a free-lance gig is just as hard as finding a full-time job. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not who you know but who you blow.

My colleague was sent to a conference last year, and our employer wanted to save money on her airfare by getting a Saturday stopover. She spent a full day cooling her heels in the conference city, and gave up a weekend with her family to save the company money.

She asked if she could have a day off in lieu of the day she spent on the road, and was told that “professional development is a perk, and anyone who wants compensation for a perk won’t be getting any more perks”.

We have now instituted “perk time” for all the extra hours we put in here and there that our employer thinks we should just give away. We are just awful, us Gen Xers.

Tenure rules.