orbitalfreak said:
Then there are those who ask you "Will you just do my homework for me?" People who stop you in the halls or cafeterias asking for help because they recognize you as a tutor, and they don't care that you're off the clock or that the tutoring lab is open with others ready to help; they want you to help them because you're right there.
Yeah, it's people like this that burned me out of tutoring math... I tutored for ten years, most of it on my own time and for free, but I just got too many of these types in a row.
The girl who wanted me to do her homework for her, while she read a magazine. Did she think I'd come to her high school and take her test for her, as well??? She was definitely the last straw. After her, I've been very reluctant to get near a student who isn't taking math because they want to learn. It's also why I know I'll never be a math teacher: I can't handle the thought of dealing with hundreds of people who are in the classes only because they're being
forced to take them.
*****************
Hmm... Worst job for me was the time I worked for a subsidary of a big East Coast manufacturing company. I spent three years working for them. I can tell you, someone who is a native-born Californian should not be working for an in-your-face New England-type manager!
Three years, I worked grave shift. Three years, I dragged myself out of bed, decided whether or not to get a shower (shaves were a "once every two weeks" decision), eat "breakfast," drive to work over a backcountry road laughingly called a Highway (one lane each direction--with the only alternate route through an even
more messed up route), work eight hours, go home, and
try to sleep.
Try to sleep, I say, because of the neighbors. Do you know what fun it is to have an open field replaced by fifteen houses? The sound of quails replaced by the sound of: drums, go-carts, skateboard ramps, defective car motors (does it
have to be revved up ten times before driving, and does it
have to be started thirty minutes before leaving???), and loud arguments. Heck, I'd even take the smell of skunk over having those neighbors!!!
So I'd get up at night, with only at most three hours of sleep (none of it REM sleep, so I'm totally exhausted), drive to work over the worst road for a major commuter route, work throughout the night without anything allowed to relieve the boredom (people can go off for a half-hour to visit or take several fifteen-minute coffee or smoking breaks, leaving their stations unmanned, but heaven forbid that I read a book two paragraphs at a time, while staying at my station and actually getting work done!!!).
Meanwhile, the "golden child," who manages to somehow get work done at twice the rate of anyone in the company, to the grandiose praise of our manager, is found out to be falsifying data. On a government contract. Which sets back our production for six months, and costs the company over $9M to retest
everything.
Oh yeah, that was a fun job. No-one listened to my complaints about the hardware being screwed up, until I threw a hissy fit for the engineers. At which point it was found that, yes, even though I don't have a degree, I can notice that the same position reports the same errors, again and again and again...
Oh, and that's also the job where I had a bone dislocated in my foot, preventing me from walking for six months (and it took three years before I could walk without a very noticeable limp). Where I had the tendon in my thumb crushed due to poor equipment design, causing me such pain that even holding
one piece of paper was impossible for me (another six months of pain and suffering, with continuing bouts of "trigger thumb"). At no point did I ever file for workman's comp, I worked through the pain to keep putting out parts.
But then the corporate types decide to close down the plant... "Everyone who stays for the next nine months will get big bonuses." Yeah, right. First thing they did was contact all the employers in the area, and inform them they'd file lawsuits if they poached employees. Next, they worked people like dogs. Oh, and they laid off all but a skeleton crew by the six month point, so guess there wasn't many bonuses after all...
But I wasn't there. I gave notice after I heard about them shutting down the plant. I knew, by then, what type of company it was. I had seen them go back on their promises again and again. I'd seen them treat their employees with no respect and no trust. (Okay, the woman who was the drug addict, who stole thousands of dollars of equipment, that could have been a problem... And the tester who falsified data, on a government project, risking the government seizing the data and giving it to another corporation, she was bad as well...)
They still got me twice after I quit. First, when I applied for rehabilitation (I was barely able to walk, much less stand, and my right hand--I'm completely right-handed--was unable to hold a pen or anything), they denied I'd ever been injured on the job. They refused to deliver my medical records. They completely ******* me over...
The final ******** was my IRA. I'd invested over $10,000 in it. It's now worth about $4,000... Great job, guys! Your corporate culture is doing wonders for my stock portfolio! (Oh, and about half of that drop happened before the internet bubble burst, and they weren't an internet company anyway, so they're just a major corporation that is seriously mismanaged...)
