I'll be vague about what I do for work, but I work with large industrial printers. My department has 4 from one Japanese brand and 1 was that custom built for our company. The Japanese ones cost $60,000 each, and I imagine the custom one was even more than that. I only started here this year, but every day is more frustrating than the last – we routinely have 2 of the printers down for maintenance for weeks or months at a time. I assumed there were supply chain issues with getting new parts in, until I was told that our manager, K, just refused to order them because they were too expensive. Meanwhile late orders pile up because our equipment isn't operational.
I've heard through the grapevine that before K was hired, there was a big round of layoffs. K tried to hire them back for lower pay. Astonishingly, not very many took her up on that. About a year ago, she laid off all but one maintenance staff member. We have no one to maintain hundreds of thousands of dollars in machines. And that $300k number? That's just my department. Elsewhere in the building are many, many more industrial machines that are even more expensive. And all that critical maintenance now falls to us operators.
Without regular maintenance, they have slowly broken down. I went from having almost no problems in any given week to 3 of our 4 printers being non-functional for weeks while I try my hardest to fix them. Something I WAS NOT TRAINED TO DO. I accidentally broke one of them more while trying to fix it a few weeks ago. Our quotas are impossible to meet even with perfectly functional machinery, and this week, all my time has been taken up by attempting to clean and fix my printer. I have gotten nothing done, which makes me more stressed because my numbers look like shit.
When I told my supervisor (not K) that I might need to take a mental health day because of this, she told me that cleaning and troubleshooting is part of my job. This goes so far beyond troubleshooting. I cannot fix this – I've tried for days. There is something WRONG with it, and I can't tell what, and apparently that means I just need to try harder. I'm at the end of my rope. She said that they cleaned it and it was working now. Ignoring that all this week, whenever I've cleaned it, it's worked for 30 minutes before breaking again. Cleaning, btw, takes about 3 hours. If I have to do that twice, that's my entire shift gone.
One of my coworkers has been here for 17 years. She says that right now, they have the least staff they've ever had. She's alone in her department for second shift. I only have 2 coworkers in my department.
I wasn't trained to do maintenance. I'm not qualified to do maintenance. There is no one here to train me even if I wanted to – but at the end of the day, that isn't my job. This company is going under, and I've been job searching for months. They only care about short term profits – laying off staff and pushing whoever remains to work harder and harder without considering the long term health of the company. One of the third shift operators just quit and we were told that now our numbers need to go “through the roof” as if we weren't already doing the best we can.
Fuck this place. The first chance I get, I'm quitting with no notice.