Okay Blog Thread, get ready:
As any of you in gabbly know, I'm Pants-Work a lot. Now, I'm lucky to have a job with the economy the way it is, but seriously, I'm getting fucked. I work every single day of the week, and in my time off, I'm generally so exhausted that I haven't been able to do anything productive. This is problematic for me because I haven't been able to make it to Kung Fu, not just because of the exhaustion, but because I'm scheduled to work 2pm to 11pm on the days that I have Kung Fu. In addition to this, I work night audit one night a week. Night audit, for those of you that don't know, is making sure the bottom line of the hotel stays balanced. It's something that has to be done every night, thus the name. The night audit shift is from 11pm to 7am. I have made mistakes the last 3 weeks because I've been working 50 hour weeks, and Friday is the most important day for Kung Fu, because it's when I learn to be an instructor. Now, at many hotels, they have a program that does night audit for you pretty much, you just have to hit a couple buttons and make sure everything goes okay. Not at our hotel! We have to go in and manually enter all of the information because the owners are too cheap to buy this program for us. This is why there are so many mistakes made. Its a ridiculous amount of excel spreadsheets (about eight), and its about 4 hours of staring at small numbers on a page.
Lets move on to why Friday night audit sucks... I have been scheduled the past 2 weeks to work Saturday afternoon after I do the night audit. So, I get off of work at about 7 or 8 am on Saturday morning after working Friday night. And I'm expected to be back to work at 1pm Saturday afternoon. Woah, that's cool, I guess, if I could go home and fall asleep right away, except there's just one problem with that. I generally fall asleep about 2 hours after I get home. Because I'm trying to take care of unfinished shit. So, now I'm expected to be back a mere 3 hours after falling asleep. Well that doesn't leave me much time to sleep at all. I usually just come in around 2:30 or 3:00pm though and work until I'm done because those shifts are me working as a bellman, when they drop my pay by 3 dollars to compensate for the "tips" that I don't get.
Furthermore, there are 3 daytime front desk people, including me. 3 of the front desk people are pretty much fed up with the job, and have mentally checked out and stopped caring. We are all looking for other jobs, but in this market, its pretty hard to find a job. One girl got engaged, she is probably going to get pregnant and have her husband take care of her, this is cool for her, because he wants to do that. The other guy supposedly has a job lined up with Dish Network making 3 dollars more an hour than he does now. That's cool! I hope that works out for him. Myself, I'll be applying at the new hotel downtown that has 1000 rooms, because my old manager went there to work and he says it's so much better than the current hotel I work at. Now, they have supposedly been hiring a couple front desk associates so that we have some leeway with our schedules. I fear at this, because right now I am a front desk associate (this is what I was hired for), a bellman (this I volunteered to help with because the other bellman left and our remaining one bellman needed help with stuff), and a night auditor (I wanted to get the experience doing it so I could also do it at other hotels). What I fear will happen when more front desk associates come in is that I will begin to get scheduled for more bellman hours (at $7.00/hour), but I will be expected to do front desk associate work, because I know how. I was hired on originally to be a front desk associate, I just wanted to help out our remaining one bellman and make a little extra money. I figure at this point I will either tell my manager to give me the front desk hours, or that I have found another job and it was nice working there.
That is a couple months off though I think, if it happens at all. But what I have been dealing with lately is the hotel being a bit busier. This is no problem for me because I started when we were at 90% or more occupancy for weeks on end. I do know that when you're that high in occupancy, you start to run out of room types. But lo and behold, our good ol manager (nicknamed B-Bag, kind of like D-bag, but his name starts with a B), is promising people rooms and then he can't deliver, because we're busy.
Twice in one day did I have to try and take care of that problem. Luckily, one of the guys was totally cool about it as I fixed it by giving him an extra room at no charge.
And just last night, a lady calls down, and she is in tears because we put a hold on the funds from her debit account. All of the funds. Because B-bag McFuckerston forced her to use her debit card to get checked in. This lady called me crying because her husband yelled at her for 30 minutes over the phone about how she had spent all their money. I felt bad for this lady, yet there was nothing I could do because her credit union was closed for the day. Her husband and son had no money to use back home because we put a hold on all the funds (this is something our system automatically does, you can reverse it but it takes some time and a lot of talking to the bank/credit union). Now, there is a way to avoid putting a hold on all the funds, I know how to do it, but it has to be done when they check in. I do it for people a lot. B-Bag doesn't know the system and so he makes errors all the fucking time. I'm tired of having to deal with fixing his errors. I'm tired of him calling me when I'm a little late (there's still the other shift there, because there are 30 minutes of overlapping shifts) and using his "I'm better than you" voice to tell me that I need to stop being late. He doesn't work every single day of the week. He works 5 days. He has the weekends off. He comes in at 9 or 10 am and leaves about 6 or 7pm. Most of his work is done sitting in his office, not out dealing with guests. Nobody that works at the front desk likes him. He was hired under the cover of a lie and he lies to his employees. He hasn't worked his way up from bellman (like the previous manager, one of my good friends), so he doesn't know what it's like to try and work 8 hours alone with no lunch break.
My back hurts from standing all the time, I wake up exhausted and even when I slept for 12+ hours I was still tired. My only solace is that I'm getting a lot of money and that's something I'm okay with. But I wonder if it's worth all the mental and physical anguish it's causing me. I'm starting to feel like I'm bottling up anger inside and I don't want to have it explode and cause me to do something I'll later regret. I think I need a new job, or at least a day off.