Am I being unreasonable? At my work I am frequently told that I am a valuable member of the team and that I do a good job, which is cool. However, actions speak louder than words. Frequently my managers (top heavy company) do things that, to me at least, say that they don’t have faith in me.
Here is a classic example, which is happening right now. I have designed a heating system for one of our customers. It is a kitset only contract, the customer has to find a welder to put it together. He is aware of this- I checked when this was questioned! It is important to remember that I am the only person who is fully conversant with this project- I designed it, did the checklist, priced it, did the contract, liased with the customer when he accepted the contract, did the drawings, ordered all the parts and sent some parts out for outwork, (we are a small company, and I have a fairly broad job description) Every thing is under control. Or so I thought.
Last week I found out that my managing director (MD) had decided that we were doing the installation. I found this out from our storeman. I know that the customer was not consulted about this, and he is slightly puzzled. We don’t have welding staff capable of doing this work reliably- they will tell you that themselves, this is why we didn’t include it. When I questioned my MD he said, “I don’t like open ended contracts” and went on to insinuate that the contract I had done was poorly worded. He’s only ever glanced at it. It’s not open ended, far from it, everyone knows exactly where they stand, or at least they did.
Then late last week I found out my MD was out in the truck, picking up the boiler (which was not part of the contract, the customer decided to buy his own boiler) and was taking it out to the site- 55km away. Again he hadn’t talked to me about it- I found out from the storeman at smoko and promptly blew my top. With good reason, for a start the rest of the kit, which could have fitted on the same truck, wasn’t ready to go- not that he’d even thought to take it or ask, so money was being wasted. Secondly there was a very good reason why the boiler couldn’t be put in place, if he had put it in place, we would have had to move it again to be able to do the job. The GM here knew this and tried to stop him, his attitude was “I’ve done this before, I know what I’m doing” so he went anyway. MD hadn’t taken his cell phone, so I had to ring the very bemused client, and his wife had to pounce on him as he drove past their house and tell him to ring me. God knows what the client was thinking.
Last night as I was leaving he said that he wanted to see the drawings for the system, as he “will probably make major changes”. It’s designed. I know it will work perfectly. 95% of the parts are ordered and sitting in our store, the rest are being made elsewhere. It is too late to change and not waste money. I said, “if you change it I’m going to spew” and gave the reasons above. He backed down a bit, but toady he wanted to look at the drawings to "make sure it will work". Arrogant little fuck, I know more about this sort of thing than he ever will.
Today I found out that he had gone out to the site again to do some work on a separate system at the same job, again without asking me for a drawing. The saga will doubtless continue tomorrow.
I did another heating system in Oz. The MD’s son was doing the grunt work for the welder (despite having alienated several customers by stealing from them, etc to support his drug habit- over and over again I hear that he will never work for us again, but they keep hiring him. He has stolen $1000’s from this company- the most blatant being when he sold the bloody lounge sweet in reception to some dodgy prick while we were all here, supposedly they were doing a swap for a nicer one, he called his mother who was in hospital, she said “no way”, he hung up the phone and said “yep it’s sweet”, we never saw the other lounge sweet, now we have two cheap metal chairs…supplied by our receptionist) Sorry- rant within a rant. He rang up to winge at daddy that it was too hard to push some rubber hose onto some hose tails I had gotten made. He accosted me in the store, in a good loud voice so that the three guys working in there could hear, saying the hose tails were too big, the rubber hose was too thick, you fucked up etc etc. I said- “get some rubber grease” and proceeded to show him how I could push the two together by hand without the grease. I was still ‘at fault’. He made sure everyone found out by discussing it again at smoko.
It goes on. I did a big heating system in Oamaru, and at the same time I arranged the installation of an expensive new piece of technology that could make both us and our customers a great deal of money. MD comes back from Oz and interferes- not with the heating system, that works perfectly, no this time he meddled with the new technology, deciding that we could ‘save some money’ by sourcing a critical component locally. Not only did this cost more, it caused at least four catastrophic failures, all of which I had to fix at the companies expense, requiring many 12 hour plus days with no extra pay, my wife at home with two small kids by herself. Word got around, our customers do not trust the new technology as ‘it fails all the time’. Genius!
The crux of it is that by:
1. altering my designs or ignoring them, then blaming me for all of the inevitable faults…
2. immediately assuming that I am at fault when problems arise…
3. taking over and then not even talking to me about projects that I solely have handled since their inception…
4. overriding my carefully considered decisions without consulting me…
I feel like my input into this company is not valued or respected. I am frequently put under significant pressure to do the above work, and when it is altered, ignored etc, I feel like I may as well not have bothered. I heard that for most people, feeling valued in their job is more important than how much they are paid. I can quite believe it. We are going through a very slow period at the moment. People have been made redundant- I am assured that I am too valuable to loose, but at the moment I can’t see many good reasons for staying in a potentially unstable company where my input doesn’t really seem to be valued. All I want is to be able to do the job I am paid to do. Am I being unreasonable????
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Originally Posted by Riff Raff
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