Month: June 2013

Well, my friends, it has been quite the saga here in Career Catastrophe Land.  I was called on Wednesday and told to report back to Disorganization, Inc. for a two week graveyard shift gig. Ok, nice shift differential plus they’ll feed us? I can dig that. So, I went off on Thursday evening, reported as requested, worked the entire graveyard shift and really kicked ass. The group that was there was really, well, let’s put it this way…. they were not the sharpest knives in the drawer and I ended up doing a hell of a lot more work than the people around me because I didn’t treat it as a social hour.

I did hear the managers of Disorganization, Inc. grumbling about the fact that there were too many temps and not enough work and figured that there was going to be an unhappy ending to the whole thing.

Went home on Friday morning and finally wound down enough to get some sleep.  Woke up Friday afternoon to find 3 voicemails and an email stating that the night shift was cancelled.  Not unexpected but disappointing given that I thought I had two weeks worth of work coming (and, therefore, two weeks of pay, including a metric f*ckton of overtime).  I got a call a while later from the agency saying that I was on the “short list” of people they wanted to come in for the day shift on Monday.  Back to the lower level of pay, but at this point, a paycheck is a paycheck and I will deal with things as they come along.  So, I will go back to work on Monday morning for an as yet undetermined span of time and it will be the day shift and I will just plan on staying until they make me leave every night and be all dedicated and devoted and all of that and we shall see if it ends up leading to something more permanent or at least having the agency call me for future work.

Meanwhile, I submitted a response to an RFP. I doubt I will get the work as it was my first RFP response and I have no idea what they are really supposed to look like.  Still, it is what it is and I will get more practice (hopefully) in the future.  I am still waiting on things to get resolved for another pending project so we shall see how/if that materializes.

In general, though, I am feeling ok about things. I am a little bummed that I will not be back in the “things are ok, financially” zone, but I will at least be able to meet bills for another month, so that will help my mental state some.

So, I got a call last week for a short-term temp job and because I desperately needed the money and because I had nothing else really in the pipeline, I took the job.  The assignment was supposed to be 4 ten hour days. Cool, no problem.

The first day, there were some issues and they let us go after 8 hours. Cool, no problem.  The second day I worked an extra 2 hours… a tich inconvenient, but whatever.  There were actually people who worked an additional 2 hours after the time I left. But, again, we were told that the EXPECTATION was that you would work a 10 hour day.  The third day, they sent us home at the 10 hour mark. Cool, no problem. The last day, I worked an additional hour and a quarter.  However, there were people who ended up staying about 2 more hours and THEY got assigned to go back to the company and work additional days.

I don’t begrudge any of the people who got the extra work. There were a lot of people there who were in even more dire straits than I am financially and good for them (genuinely) that they are getting more work.  But really… if the EXPECTATION was that you were supposed to stay each day for 14 or 16 hours, I wish that would have been articulated.  If it had EVER been put out to the group that, hey, we expect you to work until we kick you out every day, I would have gone on my 2-3 hours of sleep and just kept slogging along.  But that was never either articulated or intimated or even remotely hinted at.

On the up side, I met a lot of really nice people and (maybe) made some friends. But I can’t help but feel disappointed that, even though I was one of the most productive workers the hours that I was there, I was never clued into the key to getting asked to continue on and I know you are probably thinking I should have known that, but they never gave a clue as to when they were shutting things down every day. Case in point, the day they MADE us leave after 10 hours, I had been prepared to work 12 hours.  So I guess I don’t feel like I was adequately informed as to the true circumstances of the situation. And, if such an opportunity ever comes up again, I will just go into it expecting to work 16-18 hours a day and cancel the entire rest of my life for however long it ends up taking.

There is currently nothing pending and I’m more than a little depressed. I just want to get back to having something I can count on.  And I would like it to not come with a big side dish of questioning whether *I* will be sticking around.