compliance

I don't mind doing my work lunches prep on the weekends. It pays off with more couch time after work all week. Before I get started on it though I get kind of annoyed about having to do it. I feel like there should be a way for me to clock in when I'm doing it. Same with the hours I spend during the week getting ready to go to work, and also the commuting. I feel like I should get paid for all the things I do surrounding having a job, and not just the time I spend there doing the things. Sometimes I dream about work. I should get paid for it.

There was a moment today while making my lunches when I tossed something into the recycling bin. When it landed in the bin it hit another thing that flew out onto the kitchen floor. After it happened I found myself continuing with the prepping while at the same time pondering how when that happened there was about a tenth of a second when I was in a rage strong enough that I could have kicked the recycling bin across the kitchen making an even bigger mess to deal with. Just to make myself feel better. Fuck you recycling bin, fucker. But it was only like a tenth of a second. I was pondering how there was like an instant chemical reaction in my brain that stifled, cancelled, the rage. Then I was thinking about typing things about it, and now I am, or I did.

I was making work lunch, so I was thinking about stupid work, fucking work. Fucking job. Stupid fucking job. And then I thought about malicious compliance. I thought about typing things about malicious compliance. When you do exactly what your boss says to do even though you know that it is the absolute worst way to do something. I've encountered the temptation many times in my years of employment. Usually I ignore the temptation, and I do things the best way that they can be done, and only do the things the way the boss says if the boss is watching.

Right now I'm in kind of an odd situation at work. The boss has shoved me into a very hostile and toxic relationship with him. I find I spend a lot of time being maliciously compliant to the point of feeling insubordinate. Which is kind of funny to think about. If I do things exactly like the boss says; it is so fucking stupid that it sometimes feels like insubordination. I still get shit done, but inefficiently. It goes against my natural state of 110% effort. It has dropped off to about 85 to 90%. If he calls me out on it, I will be like, hey, you're the one who told me to do it this way, you fuckin'idiot. Get your head out of your ass for a moment. Take a look around. You might learn something. Of course I won't call him names or say those things. I just typed that to make myself feel better. Did it work? No.

Thinking of malicious compliance reminds me of a funny story from a previous job.

I was hired as a reach truck driver in place that sells restaurant equipment. The one reach truck they had was ancient, and not really maintained.

The owners of the place were a couple of brothers who were about my age, or a little younger. They had been handed the reigns of the company when their father developed Alzheimer's. I always felt like the transition must have happened fast. Like the boys were not really prepared to take on the business.

Maybe their father declined too fast, and wasn't able to get to what it meant to have employees, and to manage a warehouse. They seemed to know the business, the finances and sales side of it all. When it came to the day to day operations, and having employees they were completely incompetent.

I did what I could to keep that old reach truck running. They had a charger for the battery in it, but nothing else. Some reach truck batteries are equipped with a hose assembly on the cells that can be connected to a garden hose to keep the water topped up.

With a hose assembly it is something that ideally should be done maybe every fifty hours of operation. Just going by my current job. I get my battery topped up every couple of weeks, and I'm on it 8 hours a day. I neglect it for a couple of weeks even though I know ideally it would be better to do it every week. I personally hate the hose setup, but it would have been better than the nothing that place had.

In a perfect world I would pull the battery right out of the machine after every charge cycle. I would uncap the cells and check and top off the water. That place even had no way to properly remove the battery. It was usually a big ordeal that involved the counterbalance forklift.

We would put the forks up near the side of the reach truck about half the battery width away and then shove the battery out up against the forks. It was a really stupid and dangerous way to do it, and also the battery would be on a weird angle that made it impossible to get the water at the proper level. We would fill one side and then switch and shove it out the other side. The smaller sized battery that machine had weighed about 1250 lbs. It was stupid.

I hated doing it, so I would neglect it until the battery stopped holding a charge. Meaning that the water was at a ridiculously low level. I had never seen a battery in that condition before. It had been so neglected and it was so old that the top of the cells were warped from years and years of charging and cooling, and it would have been super heating too from having the water run so low all the time. I can only imagine what it must have looked like on the inside of the cells.

There was one rainy day that I had to get some water into it, or it was going to just stop working. Like when I got there it was charged to 100%, and after I used it for ten minutes and it was already down to 45 or something. I went to the leadhand guy and told him.

Oddly the one thing that they did right there with that old battery was that they would go out and buy several jugs of distilled water to put in it. That day was weird though. When I told the guy that we needed some jugs of distilled water, he said that I should catch some rain water coming off the roof from the downspout outside. I honestly laughed out loud when he told me that. I thought he was kidding.

I thought he was kidding until he walked away for a minute and then came back with a water pitcher. The ones they use in restaurants. He handed it to me. I stood there holding it contemplating what was happening. Trying to get my head around the reality of it. He's serious? He is indeed serious. He wants me to put rain water from the roof in a battery. Uh. A lot of things were going on in my brain. Protesting. Contemplating. Resisting. Wanting to verify, to ask if anyone has done that before, or, why the FUCK would anyone do THAT? Then it occurred to me that the machine really needed a new battery in it. That one was likely ten years beyond the point of when it should have been replaced anyway.

So... I did the thing of shoving the battery half way out of the machine up against the forks of the other machine, took the caps off of the cells, and I went outside with the pitcher and filled it up with rain water coming from the roof. omfg

There was dirt, bits of leaves, seedy bird shit and feathers, and who the fuck knows what else swirling around in it. By that point I was laughing my ass off about it. It was just all so over the top ridiculous. But hey, the leadhand knows best, right? Maybe he would have changed his mind if I had showed that to him? I don't know. Fuck, who knows? This is fun. Hehe! I made a lot of trips back and forth from the spout to the battery. I filled every cell right up as much as they could take. I honestly had no idea what was going to happen when it was on the charger that night. But I do know that about a month later it had a refurbished battery in it.