Since little else happened today, I’ll opine on that. I used to bank my time off and head overseas for a month minimum. The company finally banned banking when I got six months off (with pay) in one stretch back in 1991. I viewed it as positive management; the company saw it as manipulation of policy despite the fact they wrote the rule book.Give yourself a test to see who you side with on this issue, the company (them) or the union (me). When I was hired, I agreed to rotating shift work. The point is, so did everyone else who was hired (or they didn’t get hired). Do you see the potential conflict? To the company, that meant they could pick and choose who would do shift work. To me that meant once I did a shift, I should not have to do another until all the equal-pay-for-equal-work bozos around the place had their turn. For clarity, I never agreed to be one of just seventeen people doing all the shift work in a company of 15,000.
That brings us back to time off. During the previous ten years, I had banked nearly a thousand hours while I was attending evening college. In 1987, the company did a survey (probably illegal) and found some employees were working second full time jobs. The one in our department was cocktail waitressing until 2:00 AM and falling asleep at her desk. Instead of punishing her, they put our department on shift work. My college marks dropped 15%, I had to miss important lectures, and it took me two extra years to finish my degree. Yet I had done nothing wrong.
Thus, I had a policy of my own. I didn’t mind evening shift, but midnight sucks. Every time the company scheduled me a graveyard shift (which they called “nights”), I would take the next six weeks off and disappear to Asia or South America. This required them to massively reschedule the remaining employees, and God forbid, sometimes the company favorites and prima donnas had to work a shift. They didn’t like it any more than I did. This standoff continued for five more years until I took a buyout.
Cowboy Mike was in the shop today, he is still planning on the Blues duo. I am in the middle of pricing out new music equipment, including that Acer netbook model “Aspire”. It does not appear to have split screen capability. What’s a netbook? It is like a miniature laptop (85% form factor) intended to be used only on the Internet, drawing all its programming from the cloud. The Acer is a crossover, in that it has an XP operating system meaning it can be used as a standalone computer, as in Karaoke.
Arnel has one but he seems to prefer full sized computers on stage. Not me, a prime part of my plan is to minimize stage gear. Trivia for today. Remember how so many couples during the 1970s thought they could double their lifestyles with the second income of the wife working full time? It seems after taxes, childcare costs, operating a second vehicle and inflation, the actual extra take home pay was in the area of $1 per hour. This, of course, did not stop them from plunging into twice the debt. The only thing that brought that to a halt was 2007.
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