Under New Management

Originally Posted by SampMan87

I am one of three photo technicians. One of us is out sick, as he got his tonsils removed for whatever reason. For the two weekends that I've had to work without him, it has been utter hell. There are seven days in a week, two shifts a day, plus the one shift that I usually get stuck with, helping unload the truck on Wednesdays. So with the one photo technician out sick, That leaves two of us. Two people, even working seven days a week, is not enough to cover all the shifts necesary. A simple concept to grasp, yet the creator of the schedule continues to put the other photo tech at the front register instead of using that valuable asset to cover the photo lab as any common-sense-bearing human being might do. This leaves me to cover photo in it's entirety when I am there. Not only is it incredibly difficult, but it really wears me out. My workplace performance has even gone down since the shift in scheduling.

I'm going to be a supervisor in September, and I'm already preparing for at least one worker to either not show up for his shift or to be very late. Maybe I read the paragraph wrong, but did it just say that you work 7 days a week with two shifts a day? I don't know how your store handles shifts, but that sounds a little abusive without the fact that you have to do all of the photo work.

I've been lucky to have transferred a couple of times before the CIO decided to change managers in my technological job. However, my journalism part-time job recently hired a woman that makes Avril Lavigne look like a caffinated cheerleader. I've worked at the paper about a semester longer than her, but turned down the job offer b/c my other boss would have had the lazy slacker mentioned in the first paragraph as a supervisor and I couldn't let that happen.

She had a test run in May and the play I was reviewing was having their dress rehearsal on a Wednesday (which was when the paper comes out). So, she has me go there on a Tuesday and tells the photographer that the dress rehearsal was that day. She tells me that she wants the story in by 8 p.m., but guess what...the rehearsal doesn't start until 7:30 p.m. I run out of the building before 10 p.m. (when rehearsal was almost over but not quite) and start working my fingers to the bone b/c when a photographer called her about it starting late, she tells me she wants the story by 10 p.m. The play is a musical comedy, and those normally run for long amounts of time.

Not only does she have these unusual deadlines, but she had the nerve to tell me--someone who has been working there longer than her--that I need to remember to use the inverted pyramid method. Seriously, I have not received complaints from any of the other editors before and theatrical articles are a bit different than the usual "inverted pyramid" method depending on what the article is about. Also, she tells me hours before the event starts that she wants me to interview all the candidates and record the results of the college election while doing a review on some fancy dance that is going on at the same time and wants it done by noon (the results were not announced until midnight and the losing candidates wouldn't answer my questions until the next morning).

The only real trouble that I have from the main supervisor of my job is that he knows I'm what you call a "worker bee". I'm one of those people who arrives on work on time if not early and is willing to do her job as efficiently as possible. However, he does expect me to do the work of 2-3 people at the same time sometimes because most of our older workers are graduating and the only returning younger work that isn't new is lazy and has barely missed being fired at least four times for not showing up to work. It's not the supervisor's fault I guess as much as it is the staff, but it still sucks to be the one that has to take on all the work.

Jam it back in, in the dark.