I need to rant about my day, it was the worst I've had in a very long time. It's going to be very whiney, angry, and probably hard to understand until after I edit it a few times, so if you don't need that in your life right now, you've been warned.
My job involves doing out-doors manual labor with heavy-ish machinery. The company I work for is small, just a few senior field technicians and we hired new guys so that each technician gets a helper. One of our senior techs called out today so I got his work and his helper dumped on me today. Helper is one of these people who think his mouth works the same way as his heart, meaning that he thinks that if he stops using it then he'll fucking die.
One of my jobs today was borderline not-doable with our machinery, so I thought I would try and see if I could get the client and my boss to agree to calling the gruesome parts of the job off. I asked Helper to go tell the client we couldn't get our machinery to the job site and even if we could that the gradation was too steep. Helper's job was finished and I thought I should stay on my machine to get the job done, and delegate the message delivery to him.
Well, turns out Helper completely undercut everything I asked him to convey to the client. Instead of telling the client simply that we couldn't do the job, helper explained how we just might be able to pull it off but that I said we shouldn't. When the client pushed back, Helper completely fucking caved and said that he thought this job (that I would be performing, not him) was completely doable. At this point, I chose to stick to my guns and insist that newby doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, but both the client and Helper are good-old-boys and I have a non-regional accent so guess who the client believed…
Then I call my boss to try and resolve the issue, tried to explain that the job looked dangerous to attempt and that we wouldn't get ideal results even if we did, tried to lean on the fact that I have the better part of a decade's experience under my belt… Only to find that Helper has already called the boss about this issue and undercut me to him as well.
And as if things couldn't possibly get worse, I had a part break on one of my machines. It would have been do-able to just continue working with the broken part, not ideal but definitely still could have pulled it off, but this fucking idiot noticed and told the boss about it. That meant we had to sit around for fucking ever to wait for boss to show up with a new machine. One that's way harder to use than my usual one, and big surprise, boss decided to stick around the job site to make sure I exerted myself as hard as possible.
I'm sure I've had worse luck on a job but I seriously can't remember when. You know that comedy trope where there's a sly character trying to sweet talk someone, but then the clueless dumbass friend character points out all kinds of counter-arguments to everything you say and fucks up the whole thing? And then they get back in the truck and the dumbass character says “Man, sure does suck that Boss and Client wouldn't just let us drop that part of the job, huh? And too bad Bossman was here, he sure did make us work harder than we would have if he wasn't around…” And then that boot-licking tool had the balls to complain about how late we ended finishing up. He blamed our 4 hours of overtime on the 30 minutes I took to eat my lunch, guess I should have just done that back-breaking labor on nothing but cheetos and red bull like he did.
There is no advancement in this job. The biggest raise you will ever get here won't ever be enough to keep up with inflation, but new hires don't seem to learn that until at least 2 years into the job. That means I'm perpetually stuck with morons who think they're gonna get a big raise if they point out things that mean far more work for no extra pay. It feels so hopeless right now…