My job is a certified QC inspector in my manufacturing field. I am very good at what I do and am extremely confident in my abilities to locate issues and resolve them (which there is a lot of here). To set it up, I'll say my finances are based off of a 50hr work week which includes overtime, and that overtime definitely helps to pay bills. Cutting my hours with no warning really fucked me at a time I needed it most with my wife out of a job and supporting 2 kids has been brutal. I have been pissed for this whole time but where I live there's nothing else in my field and started a side hustle of lawn maintenance to pay bills.
Cue the story. 6 months ago we have a meeting to go over a new contract and by the look of it this job/customer is extremely picky and requests a specific amount of QC paperwork submitted. Easy for me… but within a week of starting this contract my work decides it's time to save some money and cuts the overtime for a lot of employees, no questions asked. I was put on 4 day work weeks which means I will be gone for Friday and Saturday while production continues.
I speak with the top boss at our location stating we signed a contract saying our company will produce the QC docs… but if I'm not here for 2 days of the week we will not have them. They said “sorry it's not in the budget to keep you on overtime”. Well, I can see the writing on the wall with a grin but I keep my mouth shut and then go straight to my office and create an excel spreadsheet with every single part listed in the contract (it's a lot). For the coming months I kept track of every single individual piece that I personally inspected with a green box and put a red box when I was not present to inspect which won'thave paperwork. News flash, it was basically a checkerboard with some areas just completely red. And also thank ctchulu I documented it all because it saved my ass
Fast forward to 2 weeks ago there's a meeting with the project manager who sees my spreadsheet and she is absolutely shitting herself finding out that almost half of the job wasn't documented. Shit. Hits. The. Fan. Said PM now contacts the legal department. The big boss I specifically told this would happen to was now part of an investigation as to why we couldn't produce the contractually obligated documents. They had the cajones to approach me and ask me to fudge the numbers so we can give them something and I flat out said no. It was one of the greatest moments in my professional career. You personally fucked my family cutting my finances and have the balls to approach me and ask me to “just help us out” which I could lose my certification over. Within 2 days I was back on a regular shift no questions asked and life is going back to normal. Win for the little guy