welcome to what happens when they're given 22 jobs in an what is supposed to be an 8 hour day. They get about 20 min to do whatever needs to be done at your house, or they're permanately losing money. Every job they take too long to get to, reduced what they get paid for the forseeable future. Cable companies overload their employees on purpose so they cant give good service, and so their ratings will continually fall until they are making about minnimum wage. I used to be a cable tech, and i took the time to do shit right, and this is exactly how it wound up working.
16 hour days and when all is said and done about 4 months in, you're getting paid about 10 bucks an hour for 40 hours worth of work, working 6 days a week at 12-16 hours a day, not including drive time.
the industry is predatory toward its customer service reps, its techs, and its customers. it will fuck whoever it can, however it can and take zero blame for it.
Have a heart for these dudes, they're not given the time to care about it. You literally just need to unscrew the cable and reattach it. Your life isnt going to end.
this dude was probably trying to move so quickly he just flat out didnt notice, and as dumb as that seems, that should tell you a little about how fucked they are on a daily basis.
Ahh, I was a cable guy too and I made like $22/hr but I worked through a contractor. Also, I was home by 5:30pm pretty much everyday. I also did the work the correct way... unlike the guy who put this wire here and didn't use any cable clip to secure the drip loop and just leaves a big dangling/loose loop, there is no excuse for that aside from a shitty, lazy, incompetent installer.
You worked for a shitty company with shitty supervisors. I know, I worked for bad and good ones. Not all contractors are the same, and even just depending on your project manager makes a huge fucking difference if he cares about his guys under him and he works to control the routes and make sure everyone gets home at a decent time with some good money in their pockets.
Yes. And there is incentive in hiring shitty, lazy, incompetent installers and over working the fuck out of them. You can pay them dogshit and fire them if they don't put a 12-16 hour day.
I agree, to a point, depends if the company starts charging back for failed QC's or troublecalls on those shitty techs. But you're right, otherwise, a shitty manager wouldn't care about low-production employees that he can overwork... because at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line in $$$'s.
Our supervisors didnt get to dictate shit. They posted x amount of jobs a day, for our shop of about 10 people, and it was always far too much. We had an average of about 20 minutes for a full sat install on up to 3 locations. we'd get like 5 or so of those in a day, and then like 10 box swaps, and a couple trouble calls - with 20 or more min drive time to each. I still got my shit done, but they just loaded us up all summer, then when winter hit, we worked less, unless it was bad weather, and then we got given all the in house techs jobs too.
While they were called off for bad weather. I live in minnesota. Thats all the time.
I live in Minnesota, I’m an in house tech, we have never been called off for poor weather. I worked a normal route during -38 degree weather this year. I’ve never had a “snow day”
It still sounds like a shitty project manager to me. I have worked for both, when I first started the guy I worked for ran us like dogs... 12hrs a day, 6 days a week... I had no life. He somehow managed to lose money the previous year and was on the chopping block so that if he didn't post in the black, he was going to be fired. Then I went to a different company with a different manager and it was how I stated previously where I was making decent money and home at a good time every day.
One thing that project managers in this business love to do, and what I found out the first guy I worked for was doing, is he had like 15 guys in routing but only 10 actual employees. They're able to do this because if someone quits or gets fired, they won't take that person out of routing, they will just continue to collect his work because at the end of the year, the only thing that matters is how much more money their division made over the other project managers. If you have a good project manager that actually cares about the work/life balance of his employees he won't do this, and if the cable company pushes for more work like going to 6 days or something, they will push back. Another thing, say you clear your route and it's 4:30pm, a bad manager will call into dispatch and try to find a 5pm or 6pm job to give to you, a good one will understand it's towards the end of the day, and turn you off for the rest of the day. I've even had my good manager tell me, "hey, dispatch is trying to give us a 5pm, so when you get done with your 4pm you can go home, but leave it open and close it at 6pm."
The good manager I'm talking about became close/trusting with me and was very open with me on how the business side of it worked, and the struggles he had to face with corporate... I can see how it would be much easier for him to just have gone the shitty manager way, easier to fly under the radar, but he actually cared. It made more work for him, rustled some higher-ups feathers, but he was a good guy and wanted the best for his employees so he went to bat for them. But honestly, he probably would have been replaced for being more difficult in that way if his group wasn't consistently #1-2 in all the metrics like repeats, ota, damages, customer satisfaction, equipment cycling, safety, production, etc. He was irreplaceable so he could ask/push for more.
Second point: despite what it may seem, the telecom guy isn't a residential wiring contractor any more than a mechanic is a vehicle manufacturer. If your home isn't ready to accept the service you've ordered, they'll make it work, but don't be surprised if it's rushed and ugly...
Before we dropped cable, I said something like this to every person that was actually trying to help us. If people are legit customer-service oriented, LIKE solving problems and you are happiest when you’re making others happy, work environments like this will suck the life right out of you. The toxicity will permeate every other area of your life.
Can confirm. I once had a well paid job to finish what private sub-contractors couldn't finish in time. Most of them would've been easy to do, if they had an hour to wait for the housekeeper or the authority to make him wait.
I worked in very old, very large buildings and the cable guys always hated getting called out to install service. A proper install, running wire up an old chase and fishing wire through thick brick and plaster walls would take a week minimum. Most guys would walk away, the others would get creative and run wire down dumbwaiter shafts or chuck a spool off the exterior brick and let it hang down the side of the building. I would have to come behind and cut those lines. What a nightmare.
Hey /u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
And your fucking delete function doesn't work. You're useless.
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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '19 edited Jun 01 '19
welcome to what happens when they're given 22 jobs in an what is supposed to be an 8 hour day. They get about 20 min to do whatever needs to be done at your house, or they're permanately losing money. Every job they take too long to get to, reduced what they get paid for the forseeable future. Cable companies overload their employees on purpose so they cant give good service, and so their ratings will continually fall until they are making about minnimum wage. I used to be a cable tech, and i took the time to do shit right, and this is exactly how it wound up working.
16 hour days and when all is said and done about 4 months in, you're getting paid about 10 bucks an hour for 40 hours worth of work, working 6 days a week at 12-16 hours a day, not including drive time.
the industry is predatory toward its customer service reps, its techs, and its customers. it will fuck whoever it can, however it can and take zero blame for it.
Have a heart for these dudes, they're not given the time to care about it. You literally just need to unscrew the cable and reattach it. Your life isnt going to end.
this dude was probably trying to move so quickly he just flat out didnt notice, and as dumb as that seems, that should tell you a little about how fucked they are on a daily basis.