Well, the weekend is here, at least almost. For me it's the last
day of the weekend, I go back to work tomorrow. Saturday. It sucks, but where I
currently work the weekends are actually the nicest days to work. No
hassle. No hubbub. No supervisors leaning over your shoulder.
Where do I work.
A water trucking company.
I quit the grocery store after 3 1/2 years back at the end of last
November. I can't say I don't miss it. I do. Though obviously not all of it. I
was getting to where I genuinely enjoyed myself at work. But... there wasn't
much in pay in advancement.
The grocery store is locally owned. The owner is still pretty
active. There's a general grocery manager and then the owners youngest son who
is learning the trade to take over duties for when his father (and uncle who
runs the hardware store adjacent) inevitably retire. Each department then has
their manager. For the last 2 years I was there I was an assistant manager.
Filling in the day to day between managers, covering their shifts as needed.
Mostly though I bagged, stocked and checked like everybody else. Then the end
of October something happened.
I hurt myself.
Nothing terrible, at least I don't think so. While crossing the
street in Salt Lake City on the weekend of Halloween I step wrong and sprang my
ankle pretty bad. I had to stay off of it for a week. So while sitting bored at
home, lamenting the loss of income, (which I'd experience a lot of a few months
earlier after having surgery for a hernia), I perused the job boards and saw
that the water trucking company was hiring. I printed off an application,
filled it out and turned it in when I went in for my doctor's visit
at the end of that week.
Well, long story short I got the job. The biggest reason was the
loss of income. I hurt my ankle, but the job at the trucking company requires
me to be at a computer all day. I could have gone to work had I been working
there. Not so at the grocery store. My last day was the Saturday after
Thanksgiving. My first day at the trucking company was December 1st. I've been
there almost 8 months.
The job itself isn't bad. My responsibilities consist of looking
at orders that have been completed by drivers. Tracking them to verify there's
nothing fishy going on with them, double check that who we're charging and what
we're charging is correct and approve it. It's
a pretty short process, taking anywhere from 2 minutes to 10 minutes depending
on the order.
Now, for some people, they may not know what a
water trucking company does. Well they haul water, specifically water for
drilling rigs, work over rigs, and waste water away from oil well locations. It's
part of the oil industry. They do water dirt roads (to keep the dust down), and
there are a couple of trucks in each area that a specifically used for hauling
potable water. There are occasional jobs for domestic services as well.
But mostly they haul water to and from oil wells. They also haul drilling mud
to drilling rigs as well as brine. Both are used to suppress gasses and fluids
in the hole while it’s being drilled.
The job doesn’t suck. I actually enjoy it for the
most part. Though… like the grocery store, I have nightmares (real and
imagined) of becoming stuck there indefinitely. Beholden to the job because of
the compensation it gives me, not because I love doing it. I have decent
benefits, medical, dental and eye-care. The money is good as well, I’m making
nearly 350 to 400 bucks more a pay period than the grocery store, and this is
one of the lower paid positions at the company.
There is a political climate however. While
getting along with my supervisors fine, their immediate supervisor(s) seem to
have it out for my department. There’s tension there: We get blamed at times
for things that we have no control over, we also get blamed for things that are
our responsibility. But the environment is stressful.
I don’t care about that. I’m confident in my
ability to find another job. After I’ve been at the company for a year or more
I could probably even find another related job in trucking. That being said, I
will have to quit eventually. I need an environment where I don’t have to
continually self-censor on politics, religion or societal issues. Given the
nature of the company, and the location, that’s simply not going to happen
here.
There are current events, which I will save for
another post in the near future, that worry me that I’ll have to spend more
time working here than I first anticipated. I have a lot of thinking to do over
the next couple of days, and weeks. But till then… Yeah, I should probably hit
the hay. Work comes early at 8:30, it’s better than the 3:00 I have to go in on
other weeks.
Labels: Personal
posted by F.G. Shaw @ 11:55 PM
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