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Despair, but hope!
I’ll start with despair. My work situation has been bad. We’ve been dead and so I’ve been dead. I took the service tech position expecting 45hrs a week and daring for 50, and have wound up struggling to hit 35 while riding the clock like a rented mule. The driving remains insane; I’m on pace for 60K miles this year, and oh yeah we’re into week six of a fleetwide maintenance freeze so I haven’t changed the oil (but have added oil out of my personal stash) in 15K miles in my company truck. Our phones were shut off for 8 days, allegedly a coordination issue with the new people who’ve bought us out. I hope (and, cynical as I am, expect) that they’ll make payroll on Friday. I’m bleeding working this job, and hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from my supervisor almost feels like gaslighting. If I’m one of the top techs in the company while barely doing anything and usually failing to hit 40hrs a week, what are the rest doing? I literally cannot afford to continue working this job. Upon telling my (divorced) parents about the job situation, both have offered a rent free place to stay and get back on my feet. I’m glad to have that option, but oof that hurts and I’d have to get rid of my cats (I…uhh…kind of like the little fuckers, and I don’t want to move if I don’t have to.). I’m on the verge of applying to a local box factory. It’ll suck, but if it’s as advertised there’s lots of overtime available.
Let’s move on and give a cheers to hope! I had a round one interview with a trucking company today for a position as a dispatcher and it went well. This lead has been months in the making, but I think we might finally be getting somewhere. The local guy (who I’ve known for years from my time as a bartender and would be my direct supervisor) clearly wants to hire me. He played it cool, sat on my application, and allegedly of the ~80 applications received mine was one of two his boss forwarded his way (better to let it be his boss’ idea to hire me). The way he tells it, I’ve got it in the bag, but of course I’m going to do my best in terms of interview prep and so on. I’m actually interested in the job (Trucking dispatch seems like a logical path forward from all but running a third party food delivery company.), and while I anticipate a learning curve I am confident that I can learn the job and do well. The local guy tells me that he’s dead convinced that I’m the guy for this job and spent more time trying to sell me on the job than interrogating me on my past experience. We’re more than in the right place in terms of compensation. I’m not going to count chickens until I make it and sign an offer letter, but holy shit I’m excited and this might really be my path into something better and a company that I can grow into.
OP's prior post
Your job sucks. It sounds like the company doesn't want to pay its staff and is having cashflow issues. Expecting you to do massive long round trip drives and pressuring you to not count those hours somehow (eg your lunchbreak was while you were on the road or some similar bs). Also not paying maintenance on your truck so you have to pay for maintenance out of your own pocket?
Of course. They're underpaying you and you're working for free. He will say whatever he needs to to keep you bleeding for the company and his own KPI's.
I know you're already doing it, but get another job ASAP.
Correct on all counts. The company (at least from where I'm looking) is clearly struggling for cashflow, and thus we get issues like personal vehicle reimbursements being paid chronically late (not an issue for me, but a chronic source of drama with the line cleaners), fleet maintenance freeze, overtime crackdowns, issues ordering inventory, layoffs, and so on. The job would be tolerable on paper if I were actually paid for all my drive time, but as it is I'm expected to drive 10 hours a week (barring the rare exception in which I get a call in the town I live in) for free.
With that, things were slow in Q1 (averaging two calls a day with occasional line cleaning days) but have gone from slow to apocalyptically dead in Q2 (Rarely more than one call a day. I had a whole week where I ran one billable call.). We lost a major line cleaning contract to a competitor and instantly laid off a quarter of our market's line cleaners (One was a new hire in the middle of training!), so I've been spending most of my time covering (now quite barren) line cleaning routes for the guys we laid off. My supervisor has all but given up (Today was one of her Thursday sickouts after having been seen at the bar the night before lol.) and just tells me to do whatever and find some lines to clean or go to the storage unit and rearrange my truck when I don't have calls, whereas before I would get a list of spots to hit in order of priority.
I doesn't take a degree in economics to see where things are going. Relative to most markets for service techs (who have apparently been quitting en masse in other markets) the service area in mine is gigantic. It can be made to work given sufficient call volume that I drive to the city 2.5 hours away (or better yet the city an hour away, but that's where we just lost that line cleaning contract) and have three calls scheduled or the 1-2 calls are sufficiently lucrative. When the call volume drops, we lose economy of scale and wind up doing money-losing things like sending me to the same city a 5 hour round-trip drive away on two different days in the same week to run two different one-hour calls. Adding insult to injury, the "run one call and then clean lines" routine isn't even productive for line cleaning because the cleaning routes are heavily morning-weighted to hit places before they open and are serving product. Tomorrow I'm going to drive that 2.5 hours for a 10AM call (Can't do it any earlier than when they show up.), and then am assigned to "clean whatever you can" in a city an hours' drive away, so I'll be showing up in the middle of places' lunch rush trying to clean beer lines on a route I've never run before. Such productivity!
In all seriousness, I hope my supervisor is keeping it professional, putting on a brave face, and looking for jobs herself instead of drinking the kool-aid because this situation isn't looking very tenable. I would be far from surprised if the new investors take one look at the books from market to market, start shutting down marginal/money losing markets, and pulled out of our market entirely.
On the bright side I submitted the necessary information for my background check at the trucking company gig, and hopefully we'll get to the interview next week.
Really hope it works out for you. I've been in jobs before where the collapse is inevitable and its a horrible feeling.
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Yeah this was a red flag to me as well. @solowingpixy maintenance on the company owned vehicle is their problem, not yours. Stop paying their bills for them posthaste, and if the truck dies because they're too cheap to change the oil that is just how it goes. Sucks to suck, as the kids say.
Yeah, if there's a next time (Uh, I don't know how many more "next times" can be done before the oil in there turns into 100% sludge.) they're getting invoiced for it. As it happened, I just didn't want to go on a 10 hour round trip drive mostly through the middle of nowhere knowing full and well that the engine was 1.5 quarts low, and I had a jug sitting at the house.
Want to know the punchline? That 10 hour round-trip was for nothing because the parts they sent me with didn't fit.
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