The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Another update to the situation.
The job situation is...meh. On one hand, the company fixed the issue of commission being unattainable by scrapping it in favor of a modest hourly raise. If I get the sort of overtime I anticipate (10 hours of OT a week) the new position will at least constitute a meaningful raise, hopefully one where I can start getting ahead even if it won't get me to pre-covid financial status. Mercifully, the company saw fit to send me home for the weeks of Christmas and New Year's and run odd jobs instead of marooning me out of town "training" during slow weeks.
On the other hand, the hours are not fun and training has not been going well. The devil's bargain in "You'll get a lot of hours" is "You'll usually do two hours of unpaid drive time a day, one there and one back.". It's a first world complaint, but I didn't get to have much of a NYE party because I'd worked over 12 hours (including 5 hours of driving there and back) starting at 6AM so I was done for by midnight. The company truck I drive has been this market's service truck since April of '22 and has nearly 150,000 miles on it, so I'm looking at driving a shade over 1K miles a week.
Training has not been what I was hoping for. There's been no theoretical/classroom type training or assigned reading at all (I suppose I should just start binge-watching Micro Matic's Youtube channel.). I feel like it took me far too long to learn what, say, a John Guest fitting is. Service call volume has been very slow in the training market so most of what we've been doing has been low complexity. The week before Christmas was a joke in which we barely averaged a call a day and I found myself organizing shelves in the warehouse. I came in hoping to address my weakest area (troubleshooting a malfunctioning draft system) and I feel like I've made very limited progress there (because we've done very little diagnostic work). What diagnosis work I have seen us do has been of mixed quality and has often struck me more as guessing and aiming the parts cannon. I've been sent on service calls back home and feel like an incompetent hack because I can't give a diagnosis that I'm confident in and/or take far too long on a given job because I'm doing things that I've never done before and spend forever rifling through the truck to find the tools/materials in the truck (I'm going to have to reorganize that thing because it's a barely organized ADHD hoarder mess and it's somebody else's mess.). I am aware that theses things will improve with experience, but I was really hoping to get more of experience during training. Here's hoping this last week out of town will be better in that regard.
Installing cooler units is technically simple but can be brutal if they're mounted high on the wall or in the ceiling. The one we did involved (after removing the existing 100lb) manhandling a 150lb cooler unit up a ladder with one assistant below onto a wall mount 8 feet off the ground, using adjacent shelving for assistance. The 100lb one wasn't fun but was doable. The 150lb one exceeded the limits of my upper body strength (which isn't great due to a half-useless arm from a football injury). Aggravating the problem, the new cooler was larger and didn't really fit on the shelf, and we lacked the tools or materials to revise or replace the mount, so we made it "fit" (The install looked like shit, the sort of stuff you'd take pictures of to post a bad review.). I have no idea how they're getting these things into ceilings on top of the cooler without some variety of mechanical assistance. The only silver lining I have on that job is that I was probably getting sick without realizing it at the time, which probably didn't do my my lifting strength any favors.
TL;DR, I'll make at this job and give it a fair chance for a few months out of training, but it's probably going to be another trip to the occupational drawing board.
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