I did a bad bad thing.....

Once my company vehicle broke down and I fixed it.

I got in trouble from the head beancounter for being "off the road" and messing with the vehicle on company time.

I pointed out that the labour rates at any real garage are quite a bit more than I am paid, never mind the wait time....and I had actually saved them a lot of time and money. Nevertheless I was told to NOT do that again.

Arighty.......I am not paid to think.

So yesterday the company vehicle breaks down and I take it to a proper garage as directed. And sit there like a lump, not working, in their waiting room anyways. It costs three times what I would have cost for me to do it and takes a lot longer too.

Now I am in trouble again LMAO because it was expensive....I told the new beancounter these were my orders and I could have just done it myself for a fraction of the cost but wasn't up for the bawling out.

Now it is apparently OK for me to repair my vehicle......

If they'd pay to get their damn server fixed they may have been able to email me this new policy........and any other info I am not receiving by mental telepathy!

More FUBAR FITA at it's finest....no wonder I don't care.....

Not in the Loop as there IS no loop,

The Proof

Things happen for a reason, and today (as I sat in a dealerships waiting room being bored to tears) I found some stats in the newspaper that I've heard for YEARS and am not suprised haven't changed. It backs up my last post.

For every dollar a Canadian male earns a Canadian female earns .65 cents.
(and my discount at the store/gas station etc for being female is...what?)

2/3rds of minimum wage earners in Canada are female.
(and how many are heading up families, without a dime in child support?)

Am I suprised? Hell no! Am I disgusted? HELL YEAH!

The reasons are many....there are quite a few areas where a man without a post secondary education (or the means to obtain one) can still make a decent buck. There are very very very few for women.

(I am not counting "escort" or "mistress" here....)

We end up in what I call "the Pink Collar ghetto". Customer service, office work etc........all notoriously underpaid and chronically underpromoted. Often running the show and catching the mistakes of the overpaid higher-ups on a day to day basis. But when something good becomes available we are passed over.

Let's take construction. Even if we can and want to do the work no one hires us. More of that unspoken silent sexism that is still rampant. Old men, WAY past their best before dates with outdated attitudes to match...doing the hiring. I stopped applying for such jobs when I started thinking of hitting them, just to show them how freakin' unfeminine and physically capable I could be.....

Society tells us that if we say something we are "bitches" or "feminists" and so many stay quiet. Yeah...and they used to tell us to let the rapist have his way and we wouldn't get hurt......how'd that treat us? I'll take the shiner and go home with my pants on...and HAVE!

Did the Black people listen to a society that wanted them to sit down and shut up in the back of the bus? Thankfully for them they did not, and look at the strides they have made compared to us women. We need to raise holy hell as they did, and we also need to quit being such a good deal for employers. Refuse to prove ourselves or work hard...for what?

More responsibility and no extra pay is what!

They get 65% of my effort, if that hahahaha. Then I work on my own (male dominated-motorcycle painting) stuff on the side...and make in a weekend what I'd make in two weeks for the corporate old boys.

The stats I have quoted here were true when I was twenty years younger...so what has changed? Fuck all, in my experience. Sometimes I wonder what I would tell a daughter like me if I had one....part of me would want to tell her to milk them for all they were worth while she looked good, and that's sad.

Hey one good screw deserves another ;-)

In Defiance,

Nice

One thing that probably contributes to my utter contempt for things corporate is the fact that sexism is still rampant-so they can't pat us on the ass these days....so what?

Their views are still colored (if they are that way) and they act accordingly. From a boss I once worked for who put his mistress in charge of us with a fat salary (and holy hell....said woman had the IQ of a potato) to this latest batch of goofs who only speak to the male, out of three regional managers.

I assume my female colleague and I are just smart enough to obey orders and they have already decided, without ever talking to either one of us, that we are stupid.

We have no worthwhile thoughts or solutions, only the male is worth asking anything of. They have been this way since day 1.

Now that we have completed installing a huge new program for them they are looking for someone to run it. Again neither of us were even asked, I found out today they are interviewing tomorrow.

With the way I am, well I am NOT suprised hahaha....I wouldn't consider me either. Because I long ago saw this circus for what it is and refuse to jump through any hoops for them. I am far from stupid.

But what about my female cohort who does not display the ignorant attitude I do? Their mega hoop jumper? The GOOD Dog and responsible corporate denizen?

She wasn't considered either and is fully capable of doing the job.

How sad is that? The one who is nice and worked herself into the ground for them....the one who hospitalized herself with stress for them. Ignored as certainly as this smartass coasting undriven one~yours truly. The position being offered would be a lot less stress for her, if that was any concern of theirs-and they've shown it is not.

Now some clown gets to waltz in and just "manage" what we did........how nice. I suppose we now go back to our neglected other job and try to clean that mess back up while someone new gets a shiny new operation. That we built. Where was anyone while we were DOING it? The hard part is OVER.
What this says to me is that we are just considered glorified grunts.....ooooooooh I have a business card........so whoopee for me I'm a corporate cleaning lady.

I've earned this attitude. As a young woman I was optimistic, hardworking and vowed to myself I'd never get by on my looks, I am too damned smart to have to.
So THERE world!

Twenty years later.....time and again I've seen bimbos get ahead (after giving said "ahead").

And even better, I've never been taken seriously....no matter how I behaved myself or dressed or even with a Trade (704X Fitter) license in my mitt. I'm sooo damn cute (operative word is DAMN). And looking young is great...until you realize people don't listen to you much, and don't look at you as knowledgable. Even talk down to you, as if one was a teenager..."When you get to be my age".

"Oh yes Wise Sage, three years older than me...what is the secret to Life?"

My experience in the workforce has shown me I would have been much better off swinging around a pole for a living and just being smart with the money for the early retirement age. Or maybe I should have stayed with bartending. With my IQ, with my mechanical ability and artistic aptitude, with everything I ever brought to the table worthless beside........my ass in some booty shorts.

Look at the media...society is still extremely Cro-Magnon in it's typecasting of its female people. Rap videos are a great example. A very pervasive attitude. Men want to look at women in various states of undress and that's cool....most of my pals are men...I get it....but how about in the damned workplace valuing and rewarding the rest of us a bit more? Economically. We have other parts.......

How about also taking into account that our outsides do not often match our insides? I have big butchy looking female friends who can't change a spark plug or their oil...and many biker male pals who can't either, come to think of it hahaha...........
Meanwhile I can rebuild a motorbike myself. Stereotypes........this one is tough and this one is dippy and that one is......

There's a few rude men who crossed my path that learned looks can be deceiving. And a lot of dudes who likely stayed stranded on the side of the road after I stopped and offered to help them and they giggled me away. It's 2009. We have a Black President...when maybe 200 years ago they were still treated like slaves!

But a woman handy with a wrench is still FUNNY and CUTE and very often still ignored? WTF? We have not "come a long way Baby", not near long enough for my liking.

When I look at my past workforce life I realize I could of had a ton less stress and ended up with a lot more, taking any one of the many "cute female positions" one can take advantage of.

That's just a piss poor state of affairs, to look back and see that. I'm glad I don't expend any energy trying to impress these clowns-I got the same as the ones who did! Hahahahaha!

Howling at the Moon,

No allies

There is a public service-type ad running these days. A guy at his office late at night trying to close a deal, all stressed out to the max.

His "other self" is standing there telling him to say screw it and go home. The man eventually does. This ad is not selling anything, it's being run by the Heart and Stroke foundation to send the much-needed message that if you let them the corporate pigs will happily run you into the ground.

But I knew that.

Bad Dog has no allies. The rest of the office is quite willing to kiss corporate butt until it kills them. Even after we allegedly agreed to let them fall on their greedy faces this time rather than work 24/7 to pull their mangy hides out of this latest fire. Nothing like charging in for the revolution just to have everyone else turn tail at the last minute......again.

So I guess I alone will refuse to work this weekend, and everyone else will do their best to save these human pieces of pond scum from their own cheapness. While our staff quit at an astonishing rate after being ripped off by these ass clowns the underpaid supervisors jump in to do their jobs. We can't do anything about them being ripped off, so we'll just pick up the work. What are we-a deranged version of Greenpeace?

"Save the Goofs?"

Over my dead body.

These guys need a reality check, and us fixing everything time and again is not doing it. But as the good Fidos and Rovers wag their tails after getting booted, I'm about to bite as I've already growled.

They need to learn that in North America people will NOT work for two dollars an hour.

You can tell people something only takes "ten minutes it's very easy" but after they realize it takes six hours and is a total clusterfuck that bullshit song falls on deaf ears. If you pay them for ten minutes after it took six hours they will never do it again.

If you treat staff like goofs they will leave, good and fair supervisors can only make up for so much. And eventually if any of the supervisors have any balls they'll stop picking up the slack.

I cannot wait til the day I get to walk in that glass and steel workhouse and tell them to shove it!

In Freedom,

Sunday

Monday wrecks Sunday...time creeps on until it is again time to be a wage slave. YUCH!

I'm sitting here dreading the total disaster that lurks at the office. I didn't create the disaster but I know the people who DID will throw blame anywhere and everywhere.

Funny stuff, blaming people who were not given proper training, enough of or even the correct materials...and were told to STOP half way through. And on it goes.

Being Bad Dog made me stick up for them haha, and list the reasons this project was going off like a lead balloon. I also threw in that ASKING the people who are "on the ground" might have been a good idea. In fact I likely said too much......I know "business" and "honesty" are not in the same playbook and I should have just jumped on their bandwagon condemning the workers for the mess.

Hate me see if I care. Fire me-give me my severance-I'll enjoy the chance to really speak my mind. Little do they know Bad Dog, whom the find so obnoxious, has been playing nice

Between my counterpart who works in another city and myself they would have gotten some useful info that could have alleviated a lot of BS if they ever had the sense to ASK the people who execute things like this day in and day out.

But business is a backwards foolish world in my experience-why is being smart cause to be ignored? I've found that is the m/o at almost every place I've worked. Are people's egos so fragile that they would rather stumble around screwing up rather than just ask others (and god forbid it would be one of the minions who does NOT wear a suit haha) for input or listen to observations that are valid? I thought the purpose was to make money. Efficiency usually contributes to that.......hey how about not doing things twice and three times....there's a brainstorm!

One of the things I really dislike about business type people-not having the guts to just admit they screwed things up royally. Or even, barring that, just NOT blaming others (who were hogtied from the word go) for what they know is their OWN doing. Too proud to listen to or ask for advice? Rather lose money and staff over it?

Know it alls. Money does not equal brains and it sure can't buy commen sense. That is very apparent. People with grand ideas and no idea how to execute them. Runaway egos that refuse to ask for help, but instead just want more and more out of the workers to clean up the mess they made. Work harder not smarter......WTF nice company motto.

Is it just me who finds this all so very very stupid? At my workplace it sure feels like it.

SIGH.........I've wasted enough time thinking about this which I cannot change. Guess I'll go in, do my time and keep my ideas to myself.

In Freedom,