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"A" Temping Company (Part One)

Lets talk more about the whole assignment I got in trouble for because at the end of the day what else do I have to do with my life right now, I have a big pile of ironing and some dirty dishes!

So I hopped onto an assignment it was a big assignment which needed 10 people for the day time and 10 people for the night time. Neil suggested that I use the bus rather than the car to get to and from work and that should be a blog entry in itself.

I used to have to get up early, get myself to the bus stop that would just get me there in the nick of time, so I would have to run down the road.

My first day on the job was laughable, what should I call the client.....................let me think. I'll call them Integrity. Why you ask, well this is one of Integrity's "core values" there big on that sort of stuff in Canada but to be honest I'm not sure if Integrity knew what it meant.

So I press the buzzer to get in, the receptionist was sooooo slow at actually approaching the door. I think in her past life she was a sloth. She never smiled, I thought maybe I needed to see her a few times. So I walk up to the counter and she asked to see my ID. I looked at her and turned white, what the hell did she mean ID! "A temping company" told me to wear blue or beige pants and steal toed shoes but nothing was said about an ID.   Was I going to be made to go home? I was made to sit in a corner while I saw other temps come in and show their driving licences, my blood was boiling. Before I got this assignment I had to have a security check where was that? are you telling me there are lots of young ladies called Cassie from "A temping Company" trying to get into the building?

So I'm sat there while they are trying to get in touch with "A temping company" in order to get a copy of my passport. Jesus Christ I felt like I was in customs. After about 15 mins another temp from "A temping Company" came through the door she didn't have ID either because she had got there by bus. Sloth told her that she needed it if she wanted to work. I said "Come and join me, I wasn't told this either!" The woman was just as annoyed as me, probally either worse she was mouthing off louder than me. So this was the first impression of this assignment, totally disorganised and unprofessional, this was the tip of the iceberg. Now lets be honest here, of all the important things why didn't "A temping Company" tell me I needed ID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We might as well have been called the social misfits temping agency, the work ethic of these other temps I was working with was unbelieveable. Was I seriously being compared to these people. I found the majority of them to be quite odd, I tried to keep my mouth shut and just get used to them.

The first day was training day, we were taken to an upstairs lunch room and introduced to our supervisor now what can I call him that rounds him up nicely.................... lets call him Mr Scattered. He didn't have a projector so he was off for ages to find that then came back then he didn't have this then went away and came back this went on for an hour. Can you believe this, I was being paid to just sit there and do nothing. Some people like that sort of thing but i'm a worker, I come to work and get paid to work, I hate the fact when I haven't got anything. Can companies afford to loose and waste money like that and there was seven of us $98 down the drain on nothing. If you knew you had a load of temps starting wouldn't you get your crap together and have everything you needed to conduct a meeting? Is that not just common sense.......................... I often wonder about people I really do.

So when Mr Scatter got his act together there was a whole presentation on Integrity as a company and how to do the job.    We went from one room to the other Mr Scatter kept forgetting to bring things to be honest I was having to control my giggles, I was kinding it embarressing and laughable. What a company Intgrity was turning out to be.

During all these meeting I noticed one of the misfits seemed to be falling asleep, i'll call her McSleep. apparently she used to be a manager at a well known fast food company and she knew how to do tax, that's why she was working as a temp.   Yes McSleep was going to sleep, I ignored it and tried to keep my focus on the training.   The whole day was spent doing a computer test and reading paper, it was full on.

The next day we were let loose on work. So the first stage of the job was Archive boxes of paper, it was full of paper. Within this box there were files and most files had there blue sheets, the blue sheets were the barcodes for the computer softwear. The softwear seperated each blue sheet to make a file for the PDF, the end purpose for the client was to give him his disk and 1200 boxes were now going to be on a few disks.   It sounded fantastic, what a great idea. Big oil company didn't have to hold all that paper and Integrity got paid lots and lots of money.

So our purpose was to sort through the boxes, take one piece of paper lift it up, check there are no staples, post-its blocking information, no dog ears which were turned over sides. It had to be a perfect sheet of paper that could go through the scanner as easy as possible. Small items had to be flagged with bright red cards, the job wasn't rocket sicence but it was repetitive. There were a lot of boxes to go through.

The assignment started well, we got to know every aspect of McSleeps life, how she meet a guy over the internet from Africa and fell in love. She went over to see him and he stole money off her. It was quite the story, she had lots of them. She always knew someone that was dying, had hip replacements, or some other form of sickness that they had to spend so much time in hospital.

We spent two weeks doing that untill one day Mr Scatter wanted two people for the scanning room two people said straight out they didn't want to do it . Now lets stop, as a temp are you not told what to do, can you really say no I don't want to do this that or the other? Miss Team Leader said she was not going to do it and firmly put her foot down. Miss Team Leader is one of the other temps but she later promoted herself and I'll get to that story.   It put the fear into me about scanning, was it really that bad. Most of the temps refused to do it and got on the band wagon. Mr Scatter chose Doppledanger and McSleep.    McSleep was over the moon she thought she had got this big promotion but the sound of the scanner may have been like a lullaby to her and yes you guessed it she kept falling asleep. She actually fell asleep on the job can you believe that?   Now let me tell you "A temping company" only deals in Specialized Administraion Professional remember that one. Cough Cough.

So McSleeps days were numbers, she had to go home and count sheep there and that's when I was asked to become a scanner, I thought whatever, may as well. Scanning wasn't that bad but everday I didn't seem to be getting the same numbers my doppledanger kept getting, I was getting about 5 a day but doppledanger got 10 maybe even 14 at times. What was she doing that I wasn't and it turned out she was picking her boxes alot more wisely than I was. I had this problem at the retail store, fudge the figures to make yourself look good! My problem with that was all the boxes need to be done wheather there were half full or full. As the weeks moved on I was still hitting low figures and needed to start "playing the game".

My figures started to increase, I started to find out what box number I needed to be at before lunch and if I needed a light box or not to get me there. The tracking forms were based on box number not paper number so the whole tracking sheet information keeper system was floored. How does Integrity know if it was a hard box or not? So my integrity was being damaged, I was letting the system beat me! no I wasn't proud of myself I turned myself into a cheat because I didn't want to look bad. It was either jump on board with the tricks of the trade and look like an all star or quite possibly get fired because my numbers didn't look good "on paper" What I normally like to do is fight the system and tell them their figures/targets are BS, there was no way you could do eight jam packed boxes in a shift. You had to look in them in order to twick your figures.

The weeks went past and over time Dopledanger and I started to notice the quality of work coming to us was getting worse. Staples were being missed, post it's were being missed our productivity was being slowed down so much.   New people were coming in and not being showed how to do the job properly the whole training we went through the new people were not getting. The original misfits were leaving or being fired for crap work. Every mistake that was being noticed was being writtten down by either doppledanger or myself, the worse of the bunch were now getting told to shape up or walk out the door.

It got so bad I had to e-mail "A temping company" I wanted them to deal with the bad workmanship. I didn't say anything bad just that some people seemed to be getting bored of the work and it was directly affecting both my work and doppledangers.   In the end "A temping Company" had to come out Mr Scatter started to get annoyed about the "useless" temps. The day and the night team all got spoken to and told to shape up.

The night sanners were bad, they only ever pushed out 7 boxes between all three even till the end of the contract. Both doppledanger and i tried leaving them the "easy" boxes but still the same totals were being done, there was no rush for them to finish. I remeber one of them says "the longer the contract the more money I get" Later I was to find out it's not just the temp saying this!

To be continued ..........................

Posted: 02:34, Wednesday 10 November 2010

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Here we go again

It seems that the Temping company may think that i'm a little too much to handle!

I guess I am upset about it, I see myself as a bloody hard worker, my co worker phoned me last night to say that she was called in yesterday but there was no word for me.

My meeting with said boss that time must had completly rubbed her up the wrong way, yes I demanded a pay rise other people doing less work than me for a different temping company on the same project were getting $2 more. Her excuse was at least I had a job! Come one be honest, you would be bloody annoyed if you were being paid $2 less thats $80 extra in your back pocket a week!

Well I am still glad I stood my ground and had it out with her that day, I have no regrets at all. I took all that crap from the spa because I didn't open my mouth and this time I did but I may have got just a litte carried away, but bugger it.

There is an e-mail asking me to call the temping company and this is the goodbye and good luck one I know and I think she is dreading having to speak with me. I'm sorry guys but I still have to go out with a bang, I'm going to still give her a talking to. I can't believe she is portrying me as an unemployable for just sticking up for myself.

As an expat I have learn't that I have to stand on my own two feet and get a thicker skin I've said this over and over but it's bloody hard work living here. At the moment I'm thinking it may be the end of the road for this expat life, I feel that at each and every Canadian job no one stands up for what is right. What the hell is wrong with people nowadays!

My list of things to tell this woman are:

I was nothing but hardworking and you shouldn't have employed me if you wanted it any other way, I can't believe that you are portraying me as unmanageable.

I never started the wage war ********** did and spread it around like wild fire, she was the instigator of most of the gossip and falling outs and spread endless amounts of information about people. Of course examples will be given to back up my claim.

Maybe I should have got on with what I was surposed to do and ignore everything that was going on/wrong. The reason I complained was the fact that it was affecting my targets, is that fair? Someone else was stopping me from doing a god job at my own tasks!

I'm not sure if this so called boss is going to listen to me, probably not lets be honest.

I've applied for three other temp companies lets see what happens, i'm just not sure what lies ahead but i'm homesick and miss our British working culture of hard working people. I miss straight talking people, who don't arse about and tell you like it is. It's nothing but endless riddles here, no one wants to know the truth they are too busy with their heads in the clouds or stuck up their own fat arses to even care. I'm sick of the whole networking crap in order to get a job, here. It really is that bad, everywhere not just the office jobs but every single scummy job out here. There is no real interviewing process it's WHO YOU KNOW.

There is something to be said about our beautiful country and culture, we should be proud of it and I now feel that I turned my back on it. Our families miss us dearly, and I feel I've been one big fat selfish bitch for coming here, at what cost emotionally not just myself but everyone. I feel the experience has given me strength to believe that we did do it, we should be proud at what we have achieved. I now beileve that you can do whatever you want in life, the world really is your oyster.

Will I ever stop telling people who have bad principles in working life or personal what I think of them, hell no, no way ........ why? because that's Cassie. She will tell you how it is because that's who I am. If you don't want to know the truth then sorry it bloody sucks, but I strive to be honest to myself and others each and every day. I live my life trying not to have any regrets and this means general conversations where I think damn I wish I would have said that to major decisions in life.

No COUNTRY or PERSON will ever change who I am and who I am meant to be.

Posted: 04:04, Tuesday 9 November 2010

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Temping Job

So I rolled onto a temping job and it just wrapped up. I was there from the back end of August till this last Friday.

It was a job for a document company, it was a big scanning contract to transfer a load of paperwork to PDF. There were people that had to prep the boxes of paper so they were scan ready for the scanners.

I started in prep as did my fellow scanner buddy then we got moved about three weeks later to start the scanning work. We were good at what we did so we got left there.

I have never in all my working life been teamed up with someone who has such a very similar working style as me, we were both a pair of workaholics, we had no breaks and probally even only took a 20 min lunch because we wanted to get back into the scanning again.

We had a great laugh and I made another gresat friend out of it. It was a very big contract and needed 10 people for days and another 10 for nights to get it done as soon as possible. The trouble so to speak started when my temping company couldn't find all the people needed so understandably the company approached another temping place and brought in more people.

Can you see where this is going, yet?

So people got talking and one person found out that the other temping company were paying $16 an hour and we were only getting paid $14 so yes the shit hit the fan big style.

Everyone sent off e-mails saying how unhappy we were about finding this out. The response wasn't good either our boss had to come in and tell everyone tough crap we aren't giving you a pay rise but me and my work mate put our foots down as we did more work than any of them put together. Our targets were always over the amounts they wanted and the response was an extra ...............................twenty-five cents!!!!!!!!! Yes OMG!

The temping company was also going to give us a pizza party for our last day, well that will pay the bills won't it? May I add that me nor my work buddy didn't have one bit out of principle, it was like a smack in the face.

So this contract came to an end on Friday and a new big wig came. We were told that another project was going to be lined up and would we be interested in coming back. To that I'm not sure about yet. Lets just say some of the other temps were very lazy, they missed so much with their work that it made it hard for us to keep on top of our own targets. At times it was stressfull, they would miss taking off post its on paper and staples, we would complain but nothing would get done and if we missed it while we scanned we would be the ones accountable!

Big wig said while he was in the room to our then boss of the project it was amazing how they got the job done with the idiot temps which was a little insulting. We even had to complain to our temping boss about the idiots they employed for this contract and how they should be embarrassed as a company to have employed them. Yes, that didn't go down very well, lol! but it was true and it had to be said.

Me and my work mate overseed alot of crap that went on, when they got another scanner in that wasn't watching what he was doing and doing it all wrong we pointed it out, same with the Quality Control person and a few others, they all got fired as what we said was true. We appeared to be being the whistleblowers in a lot of areas in the end we thought forget it, if they can't be bothered to oversee their own contract and make sure people understood what they are doing then forget it!

So now I don't have another contract lined up, not sure if the temping company is pissed with me or is waiting to see if this company wants me again. To be honest I'm just going to enjoy the week off for now, get the condo cleaned up again and relax.

Is there ever going to be a time I just keep my head down and shut up....................... but my guess is no!

Posted: 03:53, Monday 8 November 2010

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So sorry.........

I have been so really busy and have so much to update you guys on. This is just a quick entry to let you all know that I will be updating this blog and believe me I have sooooo much to update you all on!

I have the whole sorry saga of the the spa to tell you all about, I have my new temping experience to inform you all on.

My god there is just so much to tell and I may have to update myself on where I left you guys.

I got some bit of juicy gossip when I bumped into my old work mate in Safeway. If you remember way back when one of my first employments where I was being bullied by an idiot supervisor. He said I had a figure like a boy and some other insulting crap that came out of his good for nothing mouth. Well he finally got fired!!! He He He. It was a long time coming but at least it happened.

My new temping assignment has come to an end and i'll be updating everything on Monday so peeps, watch this space.

I'm back!!!!!

Posted: 11:46, Friday 5 November 2010

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