Not go at this second, but at my normal time. What are you talking about El Gee? You put in 8 hours, you go home...
Not quite. Like many in corporate America, I live by my cell phone. But I have an added twist to that. I have to be near a broadband intarweb connection with my work PC *all* the time. My new job does not officially give me any days off. I literally work from Monday - Sunday, 10:00 AM-6:00 PM.
Now let me explain that before I ask again if I should stay or go. I go into work at 7:30 AM to manage a ticket queue and be available for local escalations. At 10:00 AM, I am officially the "go to man" for all globally reaching issues. I normally leave the office at 4:30 - 5:00 PM and make sure my phone is on (since the hotline goes to my cell phone via toll free number). When I get home, I am available if needed, but I am not "working". This is my daily routine. I am the only one for all of North and South America to handle Escalations (Escalation = Things are really FUBAR, the process failed, and the customer will lose money if it is not resolved). Escalations are not a daily event (unless someone is politically motivated) and after 2 months of being on the job, I have only gotten 4 informal and 1 formal escalation to deal with. When they do happen, the entire escalation team is thrust into the spot light. Failure to dot the eye's and cross the tee's result in a severe verbal (What in the world were you thinking??) from mgmt. It is a tad stressful. I am not nearly as stressed as my colleagues in Europe...they get a lot of these (3-4 a week) and most likely eat TUMS for lunch.
I tell you this because my wife and I have been invited to dinner and a "surprise" (I am guessing a show of some sort) this evening. Dinner is 20 miles north of here (about 10 miles from home) and is scheduled at 4:30, my normal quitting time, so I would need to leave early to get home and change. From 4:30 to 6:00, I will be 30 minutes from my PC and a broadband connection. After that, I am off the hook and the local escalations (if they were to occur) could wait a bit until I could get home. Local can wait some, global cannot.
I am wondering if I should try to go to the dinner this evening. It would be just par for the course that I go home early and something big breaks, causing me to have to leave the dinner and possibly incurring the wrath of some global mgr I will never meet...
Well, I called my wife and she informed me this is a very informal (jeans OK) event so I can go straight from work to dinner. With that in mind, I *plan* on leaving at 4 PM, pending anything coming up before then. I just hope I can make it through dinner!
1 comment:
I thought about posting a response on my own blog, but it's probably in better context here.
The Company doesn't own you. Yes, you may be "officially" responsible to that phone 10-6 every day, but sometimes, life happens and you can't be sitting by the computer, waiting for a call to come. If they want you available in that timeframe, they should make those your regular work hours - instead of coming in at 7:30, you'd go in for 9:30, and leave at 6.
At my old job, I carried an on-call phone the entire 6 years I worked there. There were several periods where I was on-call 24/7 every other week, or even constantly. Were I to take the responsibility to the level you're describing, I would have become a recluse, a hermit.
Instead, I made a good faith effort to be available and answer the call when it came. But sometimes, I just had to turn around and pass the call on to someone else. I wasn't about to cancel a bike ride I trained all summer for because I was on call. I wasn't going to bail on a nephew's birthday party because I had to stay home "in case the phone rang." And I backed other people up when they were on-call but had to go out shopping, and had to pass the call off to me because I happened to be at home.
Dedication to one's job is commendable - letting the job run one's life is NOT.
You work to live, not live to work. Do your job, but don't let your job dictate what you can and can't do in your personal life. It took me a lot of stress, a lot of lost sleep, and a couple years of poor mental and physical health to realize this.
Life's too short. I hope you left at 4 PM today and didn't give it a second thought.
And yeah, a lot of this sounds cliche, but it holds true in many cases. My current job has NONE of the expectations my last one had and your current one has, and everyone who works there is a lot healthier and happier than at the place I left.
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