Don't Be A Complete Tool

For once, I don't have a beef with anyone I work with.  No, this time my problem is with Mr. Awesomeness's boss.  It's about time I got around to this dickhead.

A little bit of background:

Mr. A has been working for this company for 9 ½ years.  He started out drafting for them and has slowly worked his way into every other job that the division he works for handles.  Eventually, this lead to a sales position.  This was a great thing because the salesmen make bonuses.  Bonuses rock.

And then the housing market fell apart.  This company is a subcontractor for the housing industry, so this was a huge stress.  Thankfully, Mr. A was not one of the 75% of the company's employees that were laid off.

Unfortunately, every time someone from Mr. A's division got laid off, his boss just dumped their job into his lap. He now performs the duties that 4 people used to handle.

And that bonus he was supposed to be getting: gone.  He's never seen more than a couple of dollars beyond his regular paycheck for all the sales he's pulled in.  His regular pay has been the same since 2006.  As in, the man hasn't gotten a raise in 4 years.  It's a good thing he negotiated a pretty good raise then.

In this job market, this might be somewhat tolerable -- I mean, he could be unemployed, so we can't really bitch too much -- but now we get to the point of the story: Mr. A is a salaried worker who works in the office 45-50 hours every week.  Then he comes home and works from home.  He has a mobile work phone that, seriously, does. not. stop. ringing.  The other morning, when we took a couple of hours to deal with our children at home, his phone rang more in 2 hours than mine does all day.

The reason we had to stay home with our kids is that they need speech therapy.  Our kids don't do good with the talking thing.  We found a clinic that's willing to send a therapist to our home every Wednesday for a 2 hour session and, with insurance, it's very cheap.  I'm excited to do this for my kids; it will really help our family.

When I asked MisManager about the prospect of taking the time off once a week for the next year (yep, yikes), she was accommodating.  I work the same number of office hours every week and it's only logical that I should be able to take some of them back.  Of course, sometimes there will be meetings and other staffing situations that I won't be able to miss, but they'll be few and far between (hopefully).

When Mr. A asked his boss if he can come in late on Wednesdays, the answer was, "Sure!........... but you'll have to request the time you need in advance and take it all out of your paid time off."  Mr. A works well beyond the 40 hours expected of him every week, but if he wants to take any of his hours back, he has to take it out of his vacation/sick time?  Wha?  He only gets 80 hours per year for sick, personal and vacation time.  This is not enough.

What it boils down to is that his boss is a coward.  The reason for not making the small schedule accommodation is that the other employees might want the same thing.  ANARCHY!!  You gutless sack of shit.  Most of your employees' work can be done from home or can be done in off hours, but you still want to hold everyone to this arbitrary 8:00-5:00, Monday-Friday schedule.  This isn't the 1950s.  Technology is your friend.

So now, I don't know what I'm going to do on the Wednesdays that I can't be there.  This is way too important for my kids for us to pass up this opportunity.  I guess we'll just take this as it comes, but it's still depressing.