So I got up this morning to run some errands and the car was giving off this awful, cloying smell of burnt rubber and oil. So, I finish what I'm doing, go home, pop my hood and a coolant hose had ruptured, spraying old coolant all over the manifold, my battery, and the roof of my car. It's not just one of the short, simple coolant hoses, it's part of an assembly and I'm not sure if I can remove this particular part of the assembly without re-assembling everything else. I'd been up for about 19 hours at this point, it was sunday, and I figured I wasn't working (as I've only worked one sunday at this place in the last seven weeks, and that was because somebody had an emergency and needed me to fill in for them) so I went to lay down and take a nap. I got up at around 4 PM and called my boss to make sure I wasn't working and to let him know that I had some car problems so he wouldn't call me if he needed anyone to fill in today, and he gets on my shit for it. The convo went something like this;
Him:"Who's repairing your coolant hose?"
Me: "I'm going to try to do it"
Him:"Well, it's only 4 on a sunday, there's plenty of auto parts stores open, there's no reason you shouldn't be repairing it."
Him:"I mean, you tried to call in yesterday, and the day before because you were 'sick', and now you're trying to call in because your 'car is broke', and it sounds to me like you really just don't want to work."
Me: "Yesterday and the day before, I was extremely sick, and I still came into work, so I don't see how that's at all relevant"
Him:"Yeah, well, you should have already got this done and you should be ready to come into work"
Me: "Boss, I just found out about this a couple of hours ago-"
Him:"You were trying to call me at 11 AM"
Me: "...To find out if I was scheduled to work today"
Him:"You always work Sunday, it's part of the weeke-"
Me:"Boss, I have never been scheduled a Sunday since I started working for you."
Him:"Well, you were scheduled today, it was on the schedule, and you shouldn't have had to call me."
Me:"Boss, I was on the schedule one day this week, on a placeholder, from 1PM to 1:15PM. That has not changed. I've had to call you every day this week just to find out if i was scheduled."
Him:"Well, SOMEBODY must have put up the wrong schedule, because you were scheduled to come in today, I don't have time for this, rush is about to start." *hangs up*
This guy can't manage his personnel to begin with - people get sent home hours early, or work hours later than they're scheduled to, half the people on the schedule show up ten-fifteen minutes late some nights, others show up on time and get made to stand around for sometimes HOURS before the boss lets them punch in 'because he needs to save on labor', and for the last five weeks he hasn't bothered to write up a schedule, and when he finally does write up a schedule, HE DOESN'T SCHEDULE FIVE FUCKING PEOPLE (myself included) probably because he literally saved it for the LAST FUCKING MINUTE on Sunday night and was too tired to finish the fucking thing! This is the third week out of the seven I've worked where I've had to call my employer EVERY MORNING just to find out if I was working or not. I'm sleeping in fucking three hour shifts now because I never know if I'm working. He's had me on the schedule six days in a row now, if he really did have me scheduled for today (I'm well convinced he didn't, since he's hurting for labor so bad he wouldn't have scheduled a driver to work six shifts in a row who wasn't a lead driver or AM) and after subsisting on shitty naps all week (while sick with a strep infection, BTW) I ended up going right back to bed after he hung up and sleeping until three in the fucking morning.
It's time to get out of the pizza delivery business, I think.
So an update to this saga
I ended up calling around trying to find a part for my car, only to find out that the only place to get it is the dealership, and it's part of a thermostat assembly and will run me 200 bucks. That's not including labor, and given that I'd have to remove the entire throttle body assembly and possibly the carbuerator to get this fucking hose off, I suspect I would have ended up having to bring it into a mechanic. I called the boss and told him the situation, he tried to bully me into going to a junkyard asap (even though I told him I wasn't sure I could do the repair and KNEW I didn't have the money, as my bank account was negative and my wife's was <20 dollars) and I kind of just blew him off for a week while I waited to get money and tried to figure out a workaround
The workaround was to take a brass barbed fitting from the local ace hardware (3.50 cent part) and basically splicing the hose that was ruptured with it. All told the actual repair cost less than 5 dollars and took less than a half an hour to complete. But as I panicked and scrambled and worried about what I was going to do with my finances this month, how long it would take to get current with my shitty minimum wage, etc, I realized that this job isn't fucking worth it anymore and the extra 20 hours of free time I have a week are coming at too steep of a cost. So I took some time to put my resume out, and by the time we'd finally gotten the car fixed, I got a call from Siwell consulting, a company who apparently does Verizon's internal IT helpdesk, and got the job a couple of days later.
Pay's great, but the position is currently temporary - some extra help since apparently they decided to do a mass Lotus -> Outlook migration at the busiest time of year for the company. The trainer and manager of the dept. are both pretty confident my class will get made permanent long before the temporary period ends, though, and even if we don't, I'll have plenty of time to save money between now and february to get me started on my plans for the future, so all in all pretty great times.
It was also a huge relief to call my asshole manager at Papa Johns and tell him I was seeking employment opportunities elsewhere.
