| reply to Mce Saint
Re: Good idea Mce Saint,
THANK YOU. You are the first and only person here to explain the difference between "Required" (meaning the company desired way), and "Optional" So very well put by you.
They may CLAIM it is OPTIONAL but most often it is a CHEAPSKATE American Corporation ALWAYS looking at the BOTTOM LINE. NOW with this ECONOMY and GAS at $4.00 in CA already EXPECT MORE LUDICROUS "OPTIONAL" Corporate COST CUTTING RHETORIC. All this while manufacturing, airline and credit card call centers are ALL SENT OFFSHORE. Again for cutting the budget.
I am a 53 year old male. When I was in my early 20's and paying for college, I worked for the "OLD" AT&T. I did directory assistance in the Orange II office. We covered all of Southern California BACK WHEN 213 & 714 AREA CODES were the only ones for pretty much ALL of SoCal. NO COMPUTERS, we had LARGE METAL FRAME directories on three sides of us in our cubical.
We had 28 seconds to look up a number BY HAND if it was busy, and up to a whole 32 seconds if it was busy. AWT Average Work Time = Time on the clock DIVIDED by Number of calls.
AT&T kept 82% of our and the Orange I office on one of three parts of job dismissal. The first was simply a "friendly discussion" with your supervisor. I didn't know that it was a FORMAL EVENT on my employment and the Fist Phase of "Job in Jeopardy". Third Phase was Dismissal.
They had (and I understand that till very recently some Telcos had), "Quiet Rooms" one for men and one for women. Each next to the same rest room. At times coming or going to work, or lunch we could pass by and hearing women who had been working there over 20 years crying because of the "Job in Jeopardy" situation.
If we wanted to go to the bathroom they had a RED LIGHT over the supervisors desk by the door. When you went out you had to sign out, with the supervisor recording the out time, then you would flick the wall switch to turn the RED LIGHT on so others waiting their turn would know someone was out. ONLY ONE PERSON out of 200 could be out to the bathroom at one time. A record of how many times and how long you were gone in a week or month were reviewed with you if you were going too long or too much and of course it went in as part of your OFFICIAL REVIEW and FRIENDLY DISCUSSION.
The process of waiting your turn to go was problematic to say the least. Each Directory Operator had two plastic cards one blue one red, each just smaller than an index card. We would first have to look to see who (out of 200 people) already had their Red card clipped to the top of their cubical partition before us, AND REMEMBER who had theirs up first, as others were putting theirs up after yours.
The blue cards were if we wanted to ask a question. We could not go "offline" to the system by unplugging with out the supervisor making our position "busy".
When we came for start time and return from lunch we HAD to line up at the door and ALL come in at once. We would for starting our shift "hot swap" out from the person leaving the position.
The regimentation and discipline were worse than the Marine Corps ever was. :-0 |
