And the other time I worked for Zee Germanss...
I've told stories in the past about them, but I suppose it bears repeating myself a little here...

When I graduated from Engineering school I had been working for several months in a German-owned semiconductor plant as a Process Sustainer. What does that mean? Simply put, if one of the machines stopped in mid-process I had to recover the wafers (carefully), measure the film thickness on them, then calculate a new polishing time for them to salvage them. Also, when we ran the qualification tests on the machines to ensure that they were running properly, if they failed the test I was the one who made adjustments to them to get them to run again. This meant that I had to work on shift, specifically the night shift. It meant working from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am on a two-days-on two-days-off rotation, which meant that in order to see my girlfriend or my kids I had to shift my sleep cycle on my days off. And that translates to a permanent case of jet-lag.

So the plan was for me to graduate, work as a sustainer for a year and then move into an engineering position. I graduated (and immediately got a serious pay raise, as I was now a degreed engineer) and continued working as a sustainer... for the next three years.

See, that plant has a high turnover rate among people in supervisory capacities, mainly because they ask the supervisors to accomplish things and then set roadblocks in their way. I went through three supervisors in my time there, and the last one didn't like me much because the Maintenance guys resented having an engineer working on shift with them and took to badmouthing me and sabotaging me at every opportunity. I tried pleading my case, to no avail. I was stuck in that department with no hope of getting off shift and being an engineer.

Meanwhile they expanded the plant, which meant that the sustainers were spread thinner. They hired a few more and promoted a few people into that position, some of whom I trained. The only thing was that everyone wanted to work the new equipment, which meant that no one wanted to come over to the older section where I was to relieve me for lunch or breaks, and the woman who was supposed to be working with me insisted that they were far too busy to spare her to cover for me. As a result I was pulling pretty much an entire twelve hours on the floor and even when I went down for food I was called on the radio and often had to go back up to take care of something that the Maintenance clowns had done to make a machine stop processing, which meant that I came back an hour later to cold food.

The last straw was my annual evaluation. I was given poor marks and was going to be subjected to disciplinary action because of two errors I had made in the past six months.

That. Was. IT.

I called for a meeting with HR and outlined all of the above. The disciplinary action was dropped and I was told I would be getting my raise, but I was still to be a sustainer for the foreseeable future because they couldn't get anyone else. I replied simply that this was not acceptable, and I was resigning as of that moment.

I saw panic flare in the eyes of all of them as they realized the impact of this. They told me to take the weekend off with pay and think about it and get back together with them on Monday morning, which I agreed to do. But when Monday rolled around and I asked them once again if they would transfer me to another department as an engineer they still refused, so I flatly told them I was done. Half an hour later I was outside with a box full of my stuff from my desk.

Fast forward a year and a half. I was back there again as a contractor, working in the Facilities group, pulling 8-5 and getting paid a lot more. My job took me back up onto the floor sometimes, and I stopped by to see my old co-workers.

Apparently after I left they forced the woman who refused to work the older machines to do exactly that. On top of that, no one would come over to relieve her for any breaks, so she was permanently pissed off, and was in fact now going through a divorce as well. My old supervisors were found to be incompetent and had been either demoted or forced to find another position elsewhere in the company, where they could do less harm. The Maintenance clowns who had made my life hell had been put into supervisory capacities and were now understanding why I had protested when they refused to replace parts as I had asked, and now had to deal with snippy Maintenance techs themselves- and their attitude toward me was vastly changed, to say the least.

It's not often that you quit and then get to see the effects of your absence on a company, but I got to. Apparently I set an avalanche in motion in that department.

Have fun, you miserable twats.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 22 May 2008, 13:54, Reply)