I would have hit 8 years at this company in September, so I didnt quite make it to 8 years, but I was close. I worked in the funeral industry, for a company you probably havent ever heard of unless you work in the industry. When most people think of the industry, they think about Funeral Directors or Morticans, I wasnt one of them, you can think of what I did as a subcontractor of Funeral Directors. The company I wored for manufactured and placed in the ground, the concrete burial vaults most cemeteries require these days. We are the background you dont think about when attending a funeral, but we are the ones who make everything actually happen, while the Funeral Director arranges the time and dates of services.
For the first 4 years I worked here, I worked on the manufacturing side of things. Its a precast concrete plant. We mix and pour concrete in house for the burial vaults, as well as some other precast products. It was a fine enough job, some days worse than others, but was better paying and offered me access to more skills than my previous job working at a K-Mart. After a few months, I started being asked to come in and work on Saturdays. I was still young, and wasnt being paid all that much at the time, only $11 per hour, so I didnt mind coming in and getting a little bit of overtime. My Saturdays in the shop would usually only be 4-5 hour shifts, and they wouldnt be every week, but they would be at least 2 weekends a month. This continued on for several years, and it started to wear on me a bit, but at the time, I didnt mind too much.
Then I was getting ready to buy a house, I had some money saved up, the Market wasnt nearly as crazy as it is now, I had good credit, but wanted another pay raise to help compensate for the additional expenses of owning a home. So i got my Class E License to be able to drive the comercail trucks and started driving for the company, and thats when shit started to go really downhill, slow at first, but gradually gained acceleration until I just couldnt deal with it any more. The first big problem was my training. Whenever we would hire a new employee or train an in shop employee to work in cemeteries, they would typically get 2-4 weeks worth of consistant daily training with expierenced drivers to learn how to do the job. I didnt get this, instead my training consisted of being pushed out on a truck with another employee wo wasnt a full time vault man, but was instead a helper that would go and assist a driver if they were injured and couldnt do the job on their own. dispite my protests to go and train with someone more expierenced, i wasnt allowed to. I wasnt even allowed to go out and train daily like other drivers, I would only be sent out with this helper when we were busy and they needed an addional hand out of the shop, then they would send me out.
I should probably explain a little bit about what my job actually consisted of as a vault driver. The concrete vaults we burry people in weigh between about 1800 – 3000 pounds, depening on how big or fancy of a vauly you purchase. As a vault delivery driver, we would have our paperwork that tells us the name of the deceased, what cemetery, and what time the service was. So I would go to a cemetery take the vault off the truck on a battery powered machine that rolled it to the grave, place the vault either in the grave or over the grave (depending on the type and how fancy it was) and then set the equipent to lower the casket into that vault. Often times it was also my job to set up the canopy tent and chairs. So all that stuff you see at the grave when yo go to a funeral, thats what my job consisted of. Many factors came ito play as to how easy that job was to complete. If the grave was close to the road, on flat level ground, with no upright headstones in the way, it was a cakewalk. If the grave was on a hill, in between 2 upright headstones, or even with just 1 upright stone on one side, it was quite often a massive pain in the ass. That would be escalated to be even worse if it was raining or snowing, or if it had been raing and the groundwas wet.
After a month or so of going out and setting vaults 1 or 2 days a week, management decided i had had enough training (I hadnt) and started sending me out on my own, but mostly to local cemeteries that are easy to work in and with other drivers nearby who would be able to come and assist if i ran into problems. And this, was probably the best times I had as a driver for this job. Mostly easy days, not far drives, it was all good, I started to drive more consistantly and frequently because at this point, several of our full time vault men had quit and moved on to other jobs. I essentially became a full time vault driver, without ever asking to be, because at the time I didnt want to be. I had only gotem my License and started driving for the company to get a raise, plus get more consistant Saturdays to pull in more of that Overtime pay. But i soon found myself going out and setting vaults every day, and it was ok, for a little while.
By mid 2019 i was a full time driver. At this point I didnt mind. Working out in the cemeteries was mostly an easy enough job, and bad days would be rare and infrequent at this time. Ya sure it sucked when it was raining, or snowing, or very cold out, but most days it was fine. For the most part I'd have pretty normal days. One of the biggest benifits of this job was the fact that we would come in at 7am, leave the shop with our vault by 7:15-7:30, I could usually get set up within 2 hours or so of arriving at a cemetery, and then have the rest of the day to just wait. This was great, because often times I would have a service that would be in the afternoon, so I'd bassicly have all day to fuck around and do what I wanted. This would include things like go shopping, or even go home if I was nearby. Or if i wasnt, I would just bring my 3DS or PSP and play a video game, watch youtube videos, etc. It made for an easy relaxed job.
But it was around this time a deal went through and new owners bought the company. and this started the massive downward spiral that eventually lead to me no longer working there. The culture started to change, things started to become more strict and much more micromanaged. The changes happened slowly, but we could tell, the culture of the company was changing, and new rules were coming down from higher ups. The company was going to put GPS in all the trucks and they wanted to cut everyone back on overtime. and while these things are understandable, these in combination with the changing culture, made me start looking for another job… and then COVID happened.
At the end of 2019-early 2020, as im sure yall remember, shit got weird, and shit got bad for us in the funeral industry. at the beginning of the pandemic, certain stipulations were put in place that limited gatherings of large crowds of people, and I was definately worried about it. But livining the midwest and having to provide funeral services for many rural communities, there were alot of people who just didnt give a shit about the “rules” because they thught it was a “Liberal Hoax” Funerals were supposed to be limited to maximum 10 people present, this often didnt happen with crowds of 20-50 reguarly arriving at the cemeteries. We were no longer suppsoed to lower caskets in front of families unless they stood at least 10 feet away, many didnt care. On top of this and other things we got busy. We went as our plant averaging about 5-10 services per day, to an easy average of 15-20 daily. This led to many, many long and tiring days. easily pulling 10-12 hour days with 2 or 3 services per employee per day, every day for 6 days a week. It was tiring, it was frusterating, and made even more so by people who didnt want to wear masks of follow the gathering guidelines of the time. I desperatly wanted to quit at this point, but I didnt because of COVID. I knew at this job I would at least have a consistant paycheck, we werent ever going to be shut down because the dead need to be disposed of, theres just not enough space to keep every corpse on ice until things let up.
Things continued on this way, but restrictions eased up over time and things seemingly went back to more normalcy. We stayed consistaly busy tho with the higher than typical death rates caused by COVID. And then, shit started to get worse for me in some very specific ways. By this point I was as good at this job as anyone else, and never really needed help when setting up, so management started sending me farther and farther away. For about the last year, I would consistanly have between a 45 minute up to an Hour and a half drive oe way to get to the cemetery they wanted me to work at that day. This meant that if a funeral service was going to be early in the morning, like say 10AM graveside, I wold need to come in extremely early to make it to said cemetery to do the 2-3 hours worth of work it takes to set up a funeral. Or, and this was even worse and would happen even more often a service would be late in the day, a 2PM chapple service usually wouldnt show up in a cemetery until 3 or 4, then stick around till 5, then an hour to close the vault and load my truck, followed by that same 45 min – 1 1/2 drive. I was consistanly the only one who would be getting back to the shop that late, every day. Dispite my complaints to management nothing about this changed. I would get and early or decent timed service, only if there were no late services or services far out of town for them to give me.
Then the scheduling issues started to get even worse. Because of the nature of the business, the schedule for the next day wouldnt be made until the night before. So this would mean that the schedule for Friday wouldnt be out until 2:30 in the afternoon on Thursday, and so on and so on for every day. The rule had always been “If the schedule wasnt out by 2:30 on any particular day, it would be sent out to all drivers,” and the other rule was always “the schedule for Monday will be sent out to all drivers on sunday”. One of the first scheduling mistakes happened one sunday before a Holiday on Monday, I spent the day with some friends drinking and never got a copy of the schedule, so seeing as it was a holiday that monday, I assumed we werent working, because thats how every holiday was handled before hand. And then 2PM rolls around on that monday and I get a call from the secratary asking me where im at. Confused I explain, and apparently we were supposed to work, but noone realized I hadnt show up to work. Noone realized the Vault for a funeral for that day was still sitting in the shop, noone realized my personal vehicle wasnt there, and noone realized my work truck was still there. No member of manangement ever said anything to me about this, I wasnt written up or reprimanded, It was never even mentioned to me. Then other scheduling errors started too.
There wold be days I wouldnt leave the shop until 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon, and the schedule for the next day woudnt be made yet, then it wouldnt be sent out. So I would assume I needed to show up at 7AM like normal, only to come in and find that I was either scheduled to come in early or late. The first time this particular thing happened, I was scheduled to come in at 9AM due to a late service and them trying to avoid unneccary overtime, which would have been fine, except i was never told to come in at 9, so I showed up at 7 and clocked in. Management pulledd me aside and asked me why I was there early, and i explained, exactly as I did here, and told him if he wanted me to clock out, I was going to clock out and go home because im not going to stand around for 2 hours at the job not getting paid because they dont have the courtsey to tell me they want me to come in late. They said it wouldnt happen again, then not 2 weeks later the opposite hing happened. The put me on the schedule without informing me like last time, only this time they expected me to show up at 5:30AM for an early service an hour and a half away. I was PISSED. I spoke with management again about this, they assured me it wouldnt happen again, it did. Both of these types of instances kept happening about once every 2 weeks or so for the last few months. Dispte me constantly talking to management about it, nothing changed. Finally I said the next time this happens, I'm just gonna trun around and leave for the day.
And then it happened again, I had gone on vacation for 6 days and the day I came back I was on the schedule to come in at 6AM and noone decided to tell me that. So I turned around and got in my car and left. I was dialing the office to leave a message saying I was calling in when I got a call from on of the managers. He said I cant just leave because I dont like the schedule. I explained to him again, its not about not liking the schedule, its about respect for your employees, and Im just doing exactly what I said I was going to do o prove a point that your cant keep messing around with my schedule without informing me. I told him to conside this me calling in for the day and that I'd be back tomorrow. But I never went back, one of my friends said he was going around the shop yelling, mad, and complainging that us divers dont do anything, and that he fired me to my face, and that everyone there is expendable. 2 more people got fired within that week. I know a fe more are on the verge of leaving too. I tried to call my plant manager a few days later, just to figure out what he wanted me to do with my keys, uniforms I still had, and weather my final paycheck was gonna be direct deposit or paper, but as soon as the secratary connected me to his phone, he picked up and then hung up on me. So fuck him, fuck that job, and fuck that industry. This post is long enough, but ive got many more stories about how bad that job can be, and about how shitty management can be, maybe at a later point ill tell some of those stories.
If your still reading, thanks for sticking though to the end. Ive taken a few months to write this because I wanted to let myself calm down and get the story straight without being mad and ranting. I could have handled that final day with more professionalism, but they werent treating me with any, so i figured Fuck em they dont deserve me being professional.
Tl;Dr : Management kept changing scheduled start times without informing me, so I finally got fed up and just left.