Quote:
Originally Posted by Xerxys
And james, I kinda follow ... but my work will not be done UNLESS I am paid, by the fuckin' hour. I work a menial manual labor job. I can find another if you don't pay me. Otherwise I am wasting my time.
What you described is compensation. The trip, the free rental cars, the traveling, that's compensation any way you look at it (not to mention fucking glamorous!! Jealous!).
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I hear you. And I can distinguish between muscle jobs and career jobs. (And muscle jobs need not necessarily be manual labour jobs.)
If you're working a professional job, then you have to expect to put in more hours. I worked 20 years in the consulting Engineering industry. Everything is timesheet based. You win a project, you start working on it, you start billing time. The one HUGE problem that I used to have where I used to work was the billing of hours. The policy was that if I worked 60 hours a week on a project, I was to show 60 hours on my timesheet. The MASSIVE corporation I used to work for would then issue an invoice to the client for 60 hours BUT, they would only pay me for 40 hours. (The way that it worked was that we would bill at 2.6 times hourly salary. So if they paid me $50.00 an hour, the client was billed $50 x 2.6 = $130 per hour.) The scam came in when they would bill the client 60 hours x $130 per hour, but they would ONLY pay me for 40 hours.
Then it gets EVEN BETTER.
Say at the end of the job, you've billed 600 hours. 400 they've actually paid you for and 200 they've kept the entire amount received from the client.
Now say the budget was 500 hours.
The Bean Counters come to you and tell you that you are 100 hours over budget and "what are you going to do about it" (I'm fucking serious here.) And you say, well, you're still up by 100 hours because you've only paid me for 400 hours, so I'm 100 hours UNDER budget.
They look at you like you're on crack.
The answer is that you need to go back to your client and somehow get 100 more hours out of them because there were "scope changes" (which usually there was.)
That my friend is bullshit.
So what I used to do was work say 60 hours a week on a project, but only bill 40. That way, buy the end of the job, I'd be 100 hours (using the same example above) UNDER budget. I then had 100 hours to play with and I would either not bill the client, or take a couple of days off and bill the job. I just got sick and tired of dealing with fucking accountants and their twisted world of what adds up and what doesn't.
As to travelling for work being a perk, trust me, it isn't. It's fucking terrible and I HATE it. I've seen the inside of more Comfort Inns and Travel Lodges than I care to remember. Renting a car is just renting a car, A to B. A "shitbox" as I call them. Sure, sometimes you're in Downtown Montreal and you stay at the Le Germain (fantastic Hotel) or your rent a Lincoln Navigator for a laugh, but you're still not where you want to be. You're not home, and even when you're done working, you're still working. There's no romance in it.
I used to travel like mad from 99 to 2005. I used to travel for 1 day to get where I needed to be, work 10 days straight - typically 6 a.m. to 6 or 7 p.m., and typically moving locations every 1 or 2 days, then travel home. 12 straight days. I'd be home for 10 days, then the cycle would repeat. That went on for 6 or 7 months of the year. It wears on you. It's exhausting, you live out of a suit case. It destroys relationships.
I'd come home and the lawn would be 2 feet high, or dead, the mailbox was jammed with post to take care of, all those things that people scatch off their list on a day to day basis are now a mountain of things that need to be addressed. It would take 2 to 3 days just to get back on track. Meanwhile, I'm back in the office because there are the other jobs that I was working on that needed desperate attention with little or no time off. In those cases I had to bill the client full pop because he needed to bill and there was no time to take any time off anyway. Then, 10 days after I got home, I was on a plane again. More motels and more shit food. (It was always great when you were in a town with a decent restaurant. When you're on the road in Quebec allot (as I was and still am) you learn, "when in doubt, order the club sandwich, or the pizza. Two things that are hard to screw up. Never ever order the Pasta, never go to a Chinese Restaurant (cause there are no Chinese people in Quebec), and never order a hamburger (cause it will be a sawdust burger).