For the last year I've been doing data entry for one of the free government phone programs. While it was great getting to work from home and not being on phones, that's where the 'great' ended for this job. We're paid $12 an hour. We have no control over our schedules whatsoever to the point that management has sent out emails to remind us the 'when you agreed to the job you agreed to work as business needs dictate'. Basically, you work what they give you and be grateful for the opportunity. This includes if you have kids, are going to school, have another job, etc. No set schedules. On top of that the schedule runs Sunday through Saturday and they don't release it until Friday night. There have been multiple times where I'm scheduled 8 to 10 days in a row across 2 schedules just because thats how they wanted to schedule me, and doing it that way they dont have to pay overtime.
The benefits they offer are so bad we were told in training not to waste our money on it because it does almost nothing and is hardly accepted anywhere. There is no 401k, bonuses, raises, pto, sick time. Literally just $12 an hour and you get to be home. And you have to provide all the equipment.
All of that is bad enough but at least I could be home right? Not paying gas and running my car into the ground driving all over.
The work itself is fine, in fact I love doing data entry. For this role we review applications and supporting documents to make sure things match up. Not too hard until you get to the fact you have about 2 minutes to review between 3 and 10 documents for letter-perfect accuracy and if you miss one letter being off the entire application is overturned. We have to maintain an error rate under 2% which is roughly 1 mistake a month. Got 2 mistakes this month? You're sent home to think about what you've done. You need to do 30 applications an hour perfectly for 8 hours a day every single day, which gets even harder because we're forced to stay on a team's call for our entire shift with 60+people. The managers are coming on the call ever 5 to 10 minutes telling us to be 'focused' and 'keep the consistency' which is really hard to do when you're having to listen to a ton of people constantly talking, their music in the background, managent berating us for not working faster.
Even with all of that I was mostly OK. Frustrated yes, but OK. I was averaging 30 or more applications an hour and hadn't gotten an overturn in months. That's when I find out that the field agents and customers we review applications for can see our FULL first and last names, and they were not shy about making sure they new who we were. On multiple occasions we've had applications be denied because they didn't do them right just for it to be sent in again with notes threatening us BY NAME. That was my last straw.
I've spent the last 8 months applying for everything and getting nowhere (I'm sure a lot of you can relate). Finally last Tuesday I interviewed for a back-end data review position at a bank in a town over and they offered me the job that same day. 401k matching up to 4%, 80 hours pto, 80 separate hours sick time, all the insurance I could ever want (including pet insurance), and a pay bump to $15.50 an hour. I no longer care that I have to drive 40 minutes both ways, sit in an office all day, or dress up for work again. I'm going to be treated like an adult and paid Iike one ($15.50 an hour is really good in arkansas where I live).
I have vacation scheduled for my old job from May 5th through the 12th, the new job starts on May 15th. Guess whose never coming back from vacation!
Thank you for reading my rant, it doesn't serve any purpose but dear lord I needed that off my chest.