Well, I’ve got a new job. To anyone that took a guess in the “Happy Thoughts” thread, I have to say you were completely wrong …although the clues (lots of experience as technical writer, experience in accounting, finance & trading, and being a comp sci graduate) were red herrings (although true).

My new job is as a “Process Operator” – I’m working in a factory preparing bits for vacuum brazing. This involves two basic operations – snipping off bits of silver wire & stuffing them into gaps on things, and squirting various metal pastes into joints on other doodads.

So, no rep points there … although I might spread some around for the more preposterous job titles suggested.


Only time will tell whether this move isn’t a case of out of the frying pan & into the fire, but a least it’ll be something different. My old job was data input – and bog knows that was tedious enough, but coupled with the late nights I was really beginning to lose my ollies. It was only meant to be a fill in until I got something better, but in the current climate getting any other job at all has been problematic … I’d never intended to be doing it for nearly a year.

The biggest hassle though was the beancounting indulged in by the management. I’m not saying that having performance targets, and ways to measure how close you’re getting to them are necessarily a bad thing, but when they don’t take account of the variations in the work you have to do and are counted on a day by day basis, not only are they meaningless, but they’re a huge pain in the arse.


I don’t want to whinge on about it too much, but this beancounting has been p155ing me off for months. The basic problem was that despite the fact that some of the documents required just 1 or 2 operations to process (taking 30 seconds or so), but that some required several dozen, taking more like 15 minutes, and yet in the “mind” of the management, they were all the same & should take 2 minutes each.

If you got an average spread of these documents you’d be fine … but the problem came when I got either all “easy “ ones & did a couple of hundred in a shift (meaning I got bitched at for “not doing enough” the rest of the time), or got all “hard” ones & did 50 (meaning I’d get moaned at for not doing enough).

I might as well having been talking to a brick wall when I tried to explain that the nature of the work was completely random and that analysing the figures over a period of less than a month was complete BS.


To use an automotive analogy, it was something like a mechanic changing a set of 4 spark plugs in 20 minutes … then being told by his/her know-nothing bozo of a boss that he/she could be able to change a camshaft in 5 minutes, because it’s only one component, not four.


Anyway, I’m really glad to be out, and the fact I’ll get my evenings back & earn slightly more money are big plusses too. It does mean that my day will shift round dramatically, being 5.30am to 10pm rather than the previous to 10am to 2am, so I’ll miss out on the entertaining late night IM sessions with other PR members & staff

Well, glad to hear things are improving, however marginally, for you. Is this job also a "tide-over" position? I would think this would be as tedious as data entry.

OH wow, that sounds like quite the "FUN" job well as long as you dun't have to do anything except sit on your ass then it doesn't get much better than that! god that job sounds better than my little volunteer job that i have here, i just sit on my ass and answer phones and take messages and run out back for calls!

interesting job, never the less!

So you are now a Snooper. You know, one who snips and goops.

If he sticks this job out he can be a Snooper Trooper.

Your poor man..I thought ou were in an office job of osme description last time you said things about your working. I tell you what you might found yourself falling asleeep at the workbench if all your gonna do is stick bits of vacuum cleaner together man, no motivation that I can see in that position. What made you change jobs? Gotta have an insight into this. Oh yeh the bean counting... targets are a twat to reach - depending on the difficulty as always.

Hey stick it (no pun intended) for a few weeks see how it goes...otherwise up shop and go...you'll see a job u will actually like doing eventualy - I guess you have to moove around osmtimes to find them tho.

worst case scenario, come over here to the states.


Then panhandle downtown in Chicago.

The worst students at Georgia Tech are in the Management College. All the jocks and failures from the engineering disciplines wind up there.

They seem to take the axiom "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" to mean "Since I'm measuring something, I'm managing and that means I'm doing my job. {I should get a bonus!}"

-MF