Recently our company (formerly known as DialAmerica) did get bought out and we did have a couple changes. Well the changes so far have been incentive based which is fine, it ultimately results in more money for sticking to your schedule than before with less loopholes.

Well one of the things that drew people into the company is being able to take your break time whenever you want as long as you had the time saved up, which was basically 3 minutes of break for every hour worked. You could use it all at the start, end, whenever, and whenever you had to take a quick bathroom trip.

Now, another change because of the way the incentives are, is that our former night shift supervisor is now on afternoon-evening, and the afternoon-evening guy is on night shift which is basically 3pm to 11pm.

Now I’ll be honest… I don’t like this guy. We’ll call him Jake for the sake of simplicity, but Jake is one of those guys to me that just gives me a bad feeling in my gut, where you don’t like them necessarily but they haven’t even done anything to make you not like them.

Now sometimes I know that gut feeling can be wrong too, and I have had that happen with my mom and her new husband where I don’t like him, but he makes her happy and he hasn’t really done much to make me not like him. But anyways, Jake is a guy who gives me that feeling. I remember meeting him first a couple years ago he seemed nice, wasn’t a supervisor then. Still didn’t like him but I talked to him some at work in between calls.

Now… as a supervisor I really don’t like him. His methods are very unorthodox from what is normally done. Normally the supervisors have to listen to calls live since they can’t pull the recordings like they used to. But Jake, he’ll come up behind you and just hover behind you and it’s very uncomfortable, but he also has a notepad and pen. I’m not saying he is or would write people’s info on a call, but we can’t see it either. Even if the other supervisors also write down notes on a notepad they usually have it on their desk or in their desk, never in front of the people who can’t have anything of the sort anyways for that exact reason.

On top of that, last week I wanted to change my schedule. I was on his team, since the supervisors have teams based on how much time you spend working while that supervisor is present in general, which meant that I had to go to him for my schedule change. First time I came to him too late into the week to change it for the following week, and he didn’t even offer to change for the week after or anything. I figured that was ok though, I’ll just wait until the start of the next week. I sent him an email because idk when he’d be busy or not hovering over people trying to listen to one side of a call instead of both sides, and he never got back to me until the last 5 minutes of the shift after I got on a call, so he didn’t even get it changed.

The next day I had to go to the old night shift supervisor and ask her to do it and she did it after I explained what happened.

Now I brought up the break time because one thing that no supervisor has had an issue with is using a little bit of your break time at the end of your shift to help ensure you leave on time and not get hung up on a call at the last minute and stuck working extra overtime. Now the calls can be anywhere from 5-10 minutes to an extra hour or more. Not fun when you get one of the latter on the last minute, even if it’s overtime. It’s not scheduled though so the other supervisors would prefer we not do it, even if Lifelock their self has a problem with some people.

The issue though is that just tonight we got an email from Jake saying that HR sent him an email saying we could no longer use any of our break time in the last hour of our shift. Here’s my issues with this:

1. He provided no proof of such despite previous emails showing they can attach another email for context, meaning it’s simply his word it came from HR, and in my experience his word as a supervisor isn’t that good.

2. He loves overtime, which is fair. I see it as a double edged sword that, if I can help it, I’d prefer to avoid one swing in preference of the other, that being working normal hours and making normal money over working more and making more money at the cost of more stress. However as a supervisor he gets overtime as long as someone else does, and considering I don’t even stay past 9 anymore it’s not worth it for that. I mean the last hour before they close another center opens up and takes the calls meaning you’re lucky to even get 1 call after the other center opens up, making it a sort of group punishment that’s only punishing people that it’s sort of inconsequential to as far as overtime goes.

3. None of the other managers had an issue about this, the old one even encouraging it if enough people were available at the other center before closing, but as long as enough people were available you could take your break whenever as long as you had the time. All of a sudden he has a problem with it.

4. Even if it was an actual complaint, if they had to notify us via email something like this would go to our manager of this location, who wasn’t there at the time of that email being sent, not some lower level supervisor. Even then, since it could be considered an actual policy change to, they would’ve done a document change and upstaged the policy document to reflect as such as they already have with the incentives, which was pretty much the only policy change since the company changed.

5. He’s threatening to write us up for simply choosing to take our break time in that last bit, and if you get too many write ups you’re fired which basically means you can become fired for simply taking your legally required break time that the company has given to you already for working that week.

6. If you have to go to the bathroom and it’s an emergency, but it’s that last hour of your shift, then ts. Can’t clock out or you get wrote up, potentially fired.

I know it’s a fairly minor thing to complain about but how strict do you have to be to make someone stay over their shift just because you don’t like them using your break time in that last couple of minutes because they probably had prior obligations and now they’re on a 1 hour call because you don’t like people using their break time as freely as they do.

I mean the whole draw of this place is a flexible schedule they’re willing to work with you on, and I feel like this could be considered an afront to that. I know I can be pigheaded at times, especially over someone who gives me those negative gut feelings like Jake here, even left a fast food job over that, but I do feel like this is just really petty.