Sunday, November 06, 2005

No go

Well I finally talked to my boss. He never said a word about it so I had to approach him before he left for the day on Friday, my last day. I tried to keep it light hearted.

Me- I have a feeling your trying to avoid me regarding the proposal I gave you.
Boss-No, I'm not trying to avoid you, we can discuss it.
M-Well we don't really have to talk about it, I pretty much figured out your feelings by what you said a couple of weeks ago.
B- Yeah I thought that said it all.
M-Well is there any room for discussion about any type of alternative schedule?
B-The only alternative would be a 4 day week...Where you work 10hrs/day.
M-Well I don't think that would help me any because I would still need to get FT childcare, so I'll keep it M-F.
B-I did look it over, and asked some other people in the office and it just won't work with the structure of things.
M-Oh. Well there are a couple of things I wanted to let you know. When I'm here I'll give 100%, but right now I already take some work home to do and I won't do that anymore. My time at home is for my family now. This might mean things don't get done here as quickly as possible so that's something we'll have to work out. Also, I plan to breastfeed and as stated in our handbook I'm going to have to have a place where I can pump 3 times a day.
B-How long will that take and when will you need to do this?
M- Well I'll need to use someone's office and I'd do it during my regular breaks. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once during my lunch.
B-And then you'll take it to him?
M-No, I'll put it in the fridge here to use for the following day while he's at day care.
B-Oh, well I'm sure we can work something out, even if you have to rotate offices. Hey maybe we'll add on a second story with offices and a day care. (dry laugh)
M-Sounds good to me.
B-Okay, well I'm going to be leaving in a couple of minutes so make sure you keep in touch.
M-I will.


So now I'm going to spend time before birth trying to find childcare where I feel confident leaving a 3 month old. During this time I'm also going to see how well we do with my pay cut. I might extend my leave and take FMLA, which I think I can take up to another 6 or 12 weeks unpaid.

I asked the two people I assumed he "talked" to about it and the one girl, HR, said yes he asked her about it but it was pretty much to find out what he had to do to comply with FMLA. She basically asked him what the big deal was. I guess he wasn't too happy about that response. Then I asked the other person, who I had talked to this about before and he said yes he had talked to him about it and he didn't seem too interested. He went on to tell me that when he had his first he had to make the same decisions and he and his wife decided to cut back as much as possible so she could stay home.

Honestly I just think this is so lame. When I start back on I want to keep a log of how often I meet with him and how often I'm doing things that couldn't be done at home. There are basically two reasons he doesn't want me to do this. One of my many titles is I'm his assistant (not personal) and he wants me available for him when ever he wants. Everyone in the office already agrees that he needs someone who is specifically his personal assistant. This would be wonderful since I hate making his personal dinner reservations, birthday limo reservations, ordering flowers for him mom or wife, ordering special wines, calling about his home property taxes, etc. Just maddening. The second reason is he wants me to do customer service, which I hate. It is so not my personality and I have told him this on more then one occasion, but he doesn't care. It's quite rude actually. Dealing with customers gets me all stressed out and I really don't know how to handle them. I'm non combinational so I usually try to get someone else to take care of them. That's just the customers that call or email us. There is a whole other group of people that we actually pay someone to call and ask how there experience was. I HATE solicitors so if it was me on the other end of the line I would already be ticked off by the fact that they are calling, most likely at dinner time. Even if I really didn't have a problem with the company I would list anything I disliked, and that's exactly what happens. It just such a bad concept.

Anyhow, I'm rambling now. I would quit my job in a heartbeat if I could, but the pay is okay and I don't think I could find something better. I will be looking though.


Estelle said...

your non combinational huh? never heard that one before.
sorry he balked.

Tanya said...

Oops, non confrontational :)