I’m not happy with the phrasing I chose for the title but I couldn’t come with anything better.
It’s me again, the guy hired to move beds in a hospital, a unit where nurses keep giving me duties out of my job description, nurses who consider me their servant.
Moving people and beds is a chill job I like and I have no problem doing it, doing it according to the job description they presented me during the interview. I want my pauses, I want to go home on time, I want my overtime paid.
From day one the nurses there started treating me like I’m their servant, ordering me to do their job like finding charts, calming patients, toileting them, pausing infusions…
I informed management who basically ignored me, because I’m expected to be a team player. During the interview they never said I’d be doing so much stuff out of my job description daily, it’s like they consciously lied to me because they’re desperate for anyone with a pulse and hoped I wouldn’t stir the pot because they know I need the money. They expect me to work as a nursing assistant when there are no patients to move and to do my job when a patient needs to be moved.
I’m not doing 2 jobs being paid just for 1.
There’s more: Turns out to them, if I’m eating something while waiting for my next assignment I’m automatically on my pause, but I’m expected to jump each time they have a patient to move. Management actually confirmed this and apparently, nurses there work like that.
Call it malicious compliance, work to rule, half ass it, but starting tomorrow I’m using every trick you can give me to work as slow as I can, to hide as much as I can, because these fuckers don’t deserve anything better.
Half assing has to be covert, because as long as I don’t have another job lined up they have the upper hand.
If I wanted to overwork for no extra money, don’t have a full 30 minute pause, having to constantly shuffle people, to have 3 conversations simultaneously, to have people lie to my face, be a hero and a team player I’d have applied as a nurse.
I am not sure what a pause is, so maybe I don’t understand the standards in your industry, so, grain of salt here.
If you hired a contractor to work on your house, and one guy just stood around waiting to do his part, and declined to help his peers to make the process more efficient, but you had to pay his regular rate, I bet you would be annoyed.
The ‘other duties as assigned’ expectation has been consistent during my entire career, at every job I have ever had. I have never held a job where, if I was not busy, and someone else was, and I possessed the ability to help, where I was not supposed to pitch in. That is just what you do to support the peers you work with, which should be the goal. Your organization is there to provide a thing (no matter what the org is) and everyone hired is meant to support achieving the goal.
I can empathize with the desire to malicious compliance, but… I would make sure ‘other duties as assigned’ are genuinely not a part of the expectations, because if they are, this is a pretty lickity split route to not having this job anymore. No manager wants to have to either chase someone down and argue about being generally helpful, or place additional work on your peers because you want to do less.
Pause means Break
You mean a contractor with a crew and one crew member sits around, right?
if I hired a contractor I wouldn’t sing the contract with the crew, but with the chief contractor, whatever that position is called. It is not my job to police my contractor’ employees. Any issues I’d have regarding construction I’d solve with said chief contractor, not with any guy who stood around.
I know nothing about construction but I know everyone needs a pause or to rethink and coordinate how to do something, which means workers are not constantly toiling so me jumping to conclusions and being annoyed because all I see is an employee standing around would be very stupid.
This is a false analogy.
You are right. I mean a crew. You are also right, sometimes every job needs the people responsible for the work to stop and think.
This is not what the op was describing. They were describing a desire to actively avoid work that contributed to the whole, not because they had to have that time they would lose to do their job right, but because it was “extra” work. The point was “extra” isn’t always “extra”; you are being paid to be at work for x hours, you should be working. Sometimes working = thinking, but that wasn’t the story.
If I hired a crew, and Joe was sitting around with his thumb up his butt, and ducked out of the extra work his leads gave him, I suspect I would never have to say anything, because Joe probably wouldn’t have his job long enough for me to talk to the foreman.
The point was to encourage op to look at what they were doing from a different perspective that puts them in the position of having to see resources being wasted, and how it is impactful to the end result. It is good to consider things from multiple angles, so your choices are informed.