So I work in manufacturing. That being said, I’m sure some of you understand the amount of bs that goes on in these plants lol. Well, get ready for this one ‘cause today has been a DAY.
Without going too much into it, I work in an auto manufacturing plant on 3rd Shift. Our work schedule is also just a little weird. Because our employer “wants us to get our full 40 hours a week,” they have us come in 2 hours early on Sundays instead of just paying us through lunch lol. The solid majority of my co-workers (even my direct supervisor, which is a lil surprising) are great! A lot of us have stayed on this shift for our supervisor and for each other, as we’ve been through a lot together. The only bad part is that, as someone who’s been on this shift for the past year and a half, they’ve changed our schedule three separate times, objectively had our shift working ~60 hour weeks for almost a year while first shift was working an average of 48 hrs a week. It’s been fun to say the least.
Sorry for rambling there, but let me get back to the main point. I sorta implies this earlier, but in case I wasn’t clear, our normal first day of the week that we work is Sunday night, into Monday morning. For the holiday, we ended up getting Friday until Monday night off. Makes sense, and we still get our three day weekend. (This has been our first weekend in the past month that’s been more than just one day off as well.) As it turned out, however, we were told on Wednesday night of last week that we would have be here by 7 PM Monday night. Again, that is three and a half hours earlier than our normal start time on Monday nights. Now, upon asking 1st shift as they were coming in Friday morning (our last “night” working the week before), I found out that they started at their normal start time on Tuesday: 6:30 AM. We were told that “they were still figuring out what time we would get off at” when we left that morning. Knowing my employer, I had a gut feeling our shift was going to be until 6:30.
Turns out I was right! We come into work last night (tonight sorta for me lol) to a…completely empty line. Not sure what caused it, but basically (like what feels like way too often) things were down and we were not moving. As of right now, we’re not moving. Last I have checked, we were approaching 4 hours of DOWNTIME, and we are well over that now. I don’t understand why they even have us here. We’re literally sitting around barely doing anything. It’s nice we’re making money this way, but frustrating as there are so many other things I actually would want to do that I could be doing with my time right now.
The absolute cherry on top is that we have a cafeteria that serves food at our workplace. It’s rather convenient, as it’s a bit hard for me to meal prep (i’m trying to be better about it, but I got the good ol’ ADHD lol). Now, since we came in early, our lunch (instead of being around 2 AM) was at midnight. We were told the cafeteria wasn’t going to be open for the holiday. However, when I got down there, there was a nice sign right in front of the cash registers stating that “[Theyre] closed for the holiday weekend, but will be back Tuesday at 12:30 AM!” Yeah, the end of our thirty minute lunch was the start of the time they began to serve food. All it would have taken was for someone in upper management to check a SIGN that’s been available to see most likely for an entire weekend. The best part? This isn’t even the first time this has happened to us. There was another time we had to come in early and the cafeteria only opened right after we finished our lunch.
Honestly, I just hate my job. It sucks because it seems like there’s nothing else as good in the area when it comes to pay and benefits. (All things considered, we make good money, have good health, dental, and eye insurance, and we get ~4.5 hours of PTO every two weeks.) Without a degree, and for as long as I’m here, I sorta feel stuck. I wanted to reenroll this fall semester, but they’re talking about changing our schedule AGAIN (it’s just a rumor, but rumors like that tend to be true around here), and I didn’t want to deal with the potential stress involving that. Not really looking for advice. I’m tired and am just looking to vent. Appreciate y’all for letting me do so <3