That's what my manager told me recently when I tried to call in sick. I was suffering from one my occasional migraines and, if you've never had one, you just can't begin to understand what it's like. Excruciating pain, nausea, dizziness, confusion-all par for the course. Light is painful, sound is painful, movement is painful; you know you're in for a 12-14 hour hell on Earth.
Not exactly conducive to driving a utility truck and climbing utility poles.
But we've been busy lately. In fact, we've been on forced overtime for months. That's what happens when a company lays off 49% of its field work force. They have to find a way to cover all the job commitments. And what better way to do that than to further squeeze the workers "lucky" enough to still have a job?
"Oh, you were hoping to go up north camping this weekend? Sorry, too much work." "Your son has a baseball game you were planning to go to? Forget it, customers come first."
"You're sick? No time for that. Suck it up and get to work."
Get to work and work harder. Work faster. Work longer hours.
My manager is actually a good guy. He has as much say in company policy as I do; in other words, none whatsoever. When he tells me I can't stay home sick, it's not him talking. It's his boss who got it from her boss who got it from his boss etc... all the way up to corporate headquarters. The stuffed shirts with their three-martini lunches and four day golf junkets who have absolutely no clue what we actually do when we report for duty; those are the guys who decide there's just too much work for me to stay home sick.
All that overtime makes for some fat paychecks and I realize that in this economy complaining might seem whiny. I have unemployed or underemployed friends who have said as much. But my point is it doesn't have to be this way. The company could hire back some of those laid off workers; they're out there and they've already got the skills and the training, they could come back to work tomorrow. The company could hire and train some of those underemployed friends of mine, spread the work around a bit, get more people participating in the economy.
Sooner or later my company is going to have to hire. The youngest guy in my dispatch garage is 36. Most of us cluster in age between our late 40s and late 50s. It gets to be awfully hard to climb poles in subzero temperatures when you're 60 years old. I'm 47 and some days this job just kicks my ass. I really wonder if I'll still be able to do this for another 18 years.
Used to be that you'd come in from the cold for the last years of your career and work in dispatch or one of the call centers. Those jobs have all been outsourced now. Now if you want to reach retirement and a full pension, you keep working 80 hour weeks in the cold and the heat and the rain and the mud and the dogshit and the poison ivy.
We're supposed to just be glad to have good-paying jobs. Quality of life does not enter into the equation.