So I work for a rather large delivery company with a blue smile on their vans. Believe it or not, on paper, I actually LIKE my job. The starting pay is decent, you don’t have a manager/supervisor breathing down your neck, and the job is ridiculously simple. . . ON PAPER. While there are MANY things I could say, about how f'ed up this job can be, and how they have tried and are trying to micromanage every aspect of it, I'm going to talk about a particular app we are forced to use called MENTOR. Now this is a driving app that monitors your speed, use of seat belt, how hard you accelerate, brake, turn corners and mess with the phone and is TERRIBLE at it, however, this isn't the micromanaging part. The mircomanaging comes in when you “break” any of the myriad of, frankly vague, somewhat arbitrary rules in the app.
A little further background. On the app, it has a point system. You have to maintain a score of 800 out of 850 on the app. Because of how ridiculously easy it is to run afoul of this deeply flawed app, this is not as easy as you would think. Your score can easily plunge by hundreds of points in a day and it can take weeks to get back to or above 800. Not only that but then the app generates video of how to avoid your 'mistakes' in the future. This is where the micromanaging comes in.
You can, eventually, get your score above 800 again by consistently driving perfect (according to the app) each day. To accelerate the score going back up faster, you can watch the videos and answer the quiz at the end of the video correctly. The job used to make watching those videos mandatory. You could easily generate 1 to 3 videos a day, every day. If you didn't keep up, like me, you could easily have over 20 videos in a 2 week period. The boss would put out a company wide memo that we had to watch the videos to remain in compliance or we could have routes taken out of our schedule or even be, eventually, terminated. Now I like driving. I hate what amounted to taking traffic school every other day. So that's why my videos were piling up unlike the younger drivers who just blindly did as they were told. What really irked me was the only time anyone could watch said videos was pretty much during our time off or during lunch. So I would get calls from my boss telling me I had to watch the videos. Now he's a pretty cool guy. He only called us because corporate was breathing down his neck to make us watch them. That is, until I started asking 2 vital questions.
ME: So WHEN are we supposed to watch these videos?
Boss: Just watch them after work or when you're taking lunch
Me: So I'm supposed to do this work when I'm NOT getting paid?
Boss: No, you don’t. You only have to work when you're getting paid
Me: So when do we watch them then? We can't do it when we're loading the truck, driving the route or delivering. Are we supposed to do it when we get back to the wherehouse but before we clock out?
Now when I started asking these questions, I had been not so quietly spreading this to the other drivers who also stopped watching the videos on their own time. . .
The blue smile company still requires is to log into MENTOR. However they have stopped asking us to watch the videos and do the quizzes.