Waiting. That is the worst part of this job. Well, the worst part that isn't explicitly any particular person's fault. Right now, I'm set up to go on a job on a drilling rig, which means the rig will call when they're ready for us. This time yesterday, based on their progress, the estimate was that the job was going to go this morning. In cases like that, I don't set an alarm and I wait for a phone call to wake me up or I simply wake up on my own. I think you can figure out which one happened. As it was, I ate a leisurely breakfast and went into work to get a few things done and see what we knew about the rig's progress. Sometime tonight, probably before midnight was the word. Given that, I came back home and did whatever it is I do here and basically killed time waiting for the job to call. A couple hours ago, I got a call from work and figured it was time to go do what it is we do. No dice, it was just an update. The rig had been broken down for most of the day and the estimate was that the job would now go tomorrow morning. It looks like I'll be going to bed whenever I can fall asleep and wait for a phone call to wake me up again.
If you're thinking that it sounds like I scored a free day off from work today, then you're missing the point. For starters, I rarely spend most of the day not at the office even if I know I'm on a job that might go that evening. Lately, there hasn't been as much for me to do around the office so I knew I wasn't going to fall behind on anything urgent if I didn't put in a full office day. Either way, it's not really a day off from work if you didn't know about it in advance and spent most of it expecting to be a phone call away from the office. It disrupts your schedule of when you're going to rest and eat and sleep and whether you can start that load of laundry without getting a phone call in the middle of the wash cycle. Trust me, getting that phone call and having to put your wet clothes in your bathtub when you go to work isn't all that great. (To explain, I live in an apartment and thus share three washers and three dryers with 40 other units and don't want to be one of those jerks who leave his clothes in the dryer for two days, especially not the dryer that doesn't have a timer on it.) Additionally, if we're now going on a job tomorrow that should have gone today, it means we can't be on some other job tomorrow. People and equipment have effectively sat idle for a day waiting for a job that, given the rig, still might not even go tomorrow morning. Most of us would rather not be forced to procrastinate and instead get the job done as soon as possible. There are certain things I do procrastinate about like my taxes (don't worry, they're done), buying plane tickets, and expressing personal feelings, but doing my job isn't one of them. It drives everyone just a little bit crazy waiting for a job to call.
This post was originally intended to be about rules. Part of the waiting problem is that the wage guys who are DOT drivers can't get hours as easily. They can't simply hang around the yard all day doing maintenance because then they might not have enough hours left to drive when the job calls. Therefore, they have to be at home off the clock and twiddle their thumbs like me, except I know I'm getting paid either way. They don't have the luxury (in this scenario) of being salaried. There are ways around that and it would be naïve to think that DOT driver logs are a perfect reflection of their on and off-duty status. As a supervisor in this capacity, I can never ask someone to alter their logs and clock their time in a certain way. However, I can keep track of how long we've been driving and working and figure out if people should, in theory, be over-logged and thus unable to drive. And when they say their hours are still good, not a lot of questions get asked. If someone is working in the yard, they should be on-duty, not-driving and that doesn't count against driving time, but it does count against overall on-duty time. That person might drive a truck that night and then not have enough hours to drive the truck in after the job. Say person number two is at home working on his fence, so he is logged as off-duty. Then he goes in to drive a truck on the same job that night like the other guy and then when they're all done, this second guy has enough hours to drive in. Both guys have been up all day and night and both may be physically and mentally capable of driving, but one can drive and the other cannot. That's what happens when you try to guess what the rigs will do.
There are plenty of non-DOT, company-specific policies for me, as a non-DOT driver, to violate. And I'm know I've broken many of them, some of them several times, and a few of them practically every time I go to the field. Compliance is hard and time consuming and sometimes not the safest thing to do. I'm put into the field in a supervisory role and asked to make a lot of judgment calls on my own. If I feel it is safer to not follow a particular company rule, then I won't follow it. This hardly makes me, or anyone of us, free-wheeling, shoot-from-the-hip, reckless people. It just makes us people who would rather get the job done without being bound to policies that sometimes don't help. In the end, there are so many rules, procedures, policies, and standards that you're practically guaranteed to break one of them and not even realize it. Sometimes, it makes me think about 1984 except the worst thing they can do is fire me, not torture me with rats. I think.
3 comments:
Do you get any complaints by breaking some rules from time to time? It reminds me of an old running joke around the auto assembly plants - how many people and and how long it takes to get a light bulb replaced?
If a worker finds out he has a burnt light bulb in his work station and needed replacement, any sensible person just grabs a 10-cent (they buy them en-mass) light bulb and get a step ladder, takes out the old one and puts in a new one, then dispose the bad bulb. Simple, right, oh no, not so fast, according to the union.
He has to fill in a request for a job to be done (replace the bulb) and gives it to his foreman (no women work in the auto assembly plant in those days), then the foreman checks to see if the light bulb really needs to be replaced! Oh yes, then he signs & sends the request to be approved by his boss - the general foreman. Once his boss approves, (this could take days if not weeks before the approved request comes back to him in his little mail box) he then takes the request to the maintenance department foreman who will write up a work order and passes it down to the housekeeping dept., also takes days! The housekeeping foreman gets to decide who will do this job. First, he would send a man with the stepladder and put it in place. Second he would write up a request slip and send another man to the supply room to obtain the light bulb (the slip is for inventory tracking). Once the man gets his light bulb, he would come to the station where the ladder man is waiting (this takes some coordination). But they cannot change the bulb according to the union rule, that's not in their job description. The third man comes and holds the ladder; the fourth man climbs up the ladder and changes the bulb. the fifth man takes the bulb and disposes it in a safe manner (according to the EPA rule) because the bulb contains some level of toxic material. Then the process is reserved. And finally, a report is written that the job is well done. There is a lot of waiting here when you try to get 5 people to be at the same place & time.
Now you wonder if that's the reason why it costs so much to build car in the US.
As far as the laundry thing goes, though, you can do what I do and leave a post-it note explaining the situation along with your laundry basket and telling the next user not to feel bad about removing your laundry and then you get nice return messages with smiley faces drawn on them from the mothers-with-small-children demographic. Plus it builds social capital, which I know it high on your priority list.
Holy smoke. Just think about the possibilities that you can meet some mothers with young children in the apartment complex. Those mothers probably will dry your clothes, fold them or even iron them. Finally stack them nicely and deliver to your door when they see there's light in your apartment. Bet you my last dollar that they already know who you are - the handsome dude down the hall or up the floor!
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