Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Time to quit your job.

In one of my previous posts I described in great detail the reasons I quit just one of my jobs. This is not a very good idea because many potential employers have underlings who are Internet savvy and will most likely find your own diatribe.

I would not want to work for an employer who had any fear of being exposed for the kinds of behavior found in my diatribes anyway, as my accounts of employer behavior is factual.

One day soon I plan on becoming an employer. I hope I have learned from my experience as an employee and avoid the common practices of some of my previous employers.

Here are some danger signals that will lead to shortened job experiences on your resume. Try to avoid them if you can:

1. You are hired by a contractor who tells you he is your manager, but then he tells you to report to someone else who is a manager of his own department. You are given an assignment by the first manager, but the second manager assigns you other tasks that interfere with your original task.

2. You work at a location where your manager is in charge of budgeting your work hours and payroll, but his manager, who happens to also be the franchise owner, hires friends and relatives on your payroll budget, at twice to three times your hourly wage, forcing your manager to cut your work hours.

3. You are hired by a family owned business that is also micro-managed by all of the family members equally. You are assigned a task individually by each family member who in-turn, discover you are performing work assigned by another family member. You become the center of a dramatic family squabble and then you are blamed for not completing all the tasks assigned in a timely manner.

4. You are hired part-time at a retail store and are regularly scheduled to close the store late at night and open the store the following morning while other certain coworkers mysteriously and regularly avoid this type of scheduling conflict.

5. A certain employee gets his or her hours switched more frequently with the rest of the employees.

6. Your job is to dispense natural gas but at close of business you are told to enter false information about the quantity of gas remaining in the storage tank, so the sales for the day are balanced. You discover that the tank is short by about twelve gallons, probably for than a year before you started working at that location. In a few weeks you will be assigned the responsibility of opening and closing the store by yourself.

7. Every time a customer uses a piece of equipment they must break a plastic seal. You are to charge the customer for the use of that item if the seal is broken. Unfortunately, your manager didn’t order new seals for several weeks. The equipment use charge is around seven dollars and occurs no less than five times per day.

8. As a safety precaution you must refill the wiper fluid tanks on all of the trucks you rent. Unfortunately your manager has not had wiper fluid available for refills for about a month.

9. Your manager is in a domestic relationship with one of your coworkers, who just happens to be terrible at counting the cash drawer and often comes up short at the end of the day.

10. Your work requirements often cause employees to work double-shifts because you cannot leave the property without being relieved by another employee. There are not enough employees to cover for an absentee, or other employees simply don’t answer their phones to be called in to replace a sick or otherwise absent employee.

This barely scratches the surface. I’m sure you had other red flags at your work. Scheduling conflicts are a fact of life and you must accept them as a general rule, but the most important red flag of all is the potential for you to be a scapegoat for a criminal employee or boss. If you are given a piece of equipment at work, be sure to write down serial numbers and carefully document where, and under what conditions, the piece of equipment is stored when you are not using it.

If you work some place where cash drawers regularly come up short, or there is regularly active accounting fraud or waste, discontinue working there immediately.