On paper, my job is pretty good. 80k salary plus any overtime pay. I pay nothing for my wife’s and my health insurance. They match half of 7% for my 401k and guarantee a 4% raise every year. Also I actually like my job (helicopter mechanic). I just can’t stand my boss. He just tries to micro manage too hard, he has no experience on the helicopters we work on and tries to tell us what to do. He orders us around and gets pissy when we say something like “that’s not how this works” or “according to the FAA we can’t do that”. The company has a policy that we can not work more than 10 hours a day because you just shouldn’t be working on a helicopter if you tired or exhausted. So…. This guy expects us to work 10 hours a day and be on call 24/7. I left another company to come to this one 4 months ago, in the interview I asked if I would be on call and they said “no”. After about 3 weeks of working here another employee quit and they put me on call to fill in for him. I told him that he told me I would not be on call when I interviewed, he said “ that was then, this is now”. I reluctantly accepted and he knows that I’m not happy about it. I guess I should mention this boss started his job here about 2 months before I started, he is a new boss and knows that no one here has any respect for him because it’s obvious that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. We all describe him as “if Michael Scott was suddenly in charge of a helicopter med evac maintenance branch”.
Getting back to the not getting along with your boss part, last week I had some car issues and had to take my car to the shop. (He knew this) My wife had to drive me to work the next day. I got to work at 6:04 am. He wrote me up for being late. Yes, I was 4 minutes late to that day. But the kicker is other people showed up later than me, there are co-workers that show up a few minutes late every day and none of them have been written up. He singled me out because I gave him some backlash about being on call and is on a power trip trying to prove that he is the boss.
I’m glad I had this opportunity to vent.