Miasmatic Review

Ingrates

What the hell is wrong with people these days? When I was growing up, my father told me that if you get paid to do a job, you do your best at it no matter what. I’m trying to install that sense of work ethic into my boys. It just doesn’t seem to be like that for most people. Well most people in my company.

Most of the people there want to know what the company is going to do for them if they do their job. Not if they go above or beyond, but just to do what they were hired for and expected to do. They want things like special certificates for meeting standards, or prizes, or food bought for them or in one person’s words “Paid vacations to someplace exotic” Yea, I kid you not, they wanted the company to buy them an all expense paid trip to Cancun just for meeting standards… to keep their job. They demand incentives and rewards for doing the minimally required for the job.

In other words, their getting a steady paycheck isn’t enough. Now to give you an idea, basic entry for our company is a data-entry position that starts at over $11.35 an hour. With that you get 18 days of Paid Time Off (PTO, which can be used as vacation or sick time), one floating Holiday. Health Insurance, dental, 401K with company match and once a year company bonus if certain goals are met. The insurance while maybe not the best, but still damn good, isn’t badly priced starting at $49 a month for family coverage. Sure our coverage used to be better and prices cheaper, but with the cost of health care it’s still damn good and a might bit better than most out there. As long as you perform to the standard and don’t violate any company policies you will get an annual raise. After five years you get 23 days of PTO, at ten you get 28 days. After five years you have almost 5 weeks of vacation, if you include your floating holiday.

Yet all of that isn’t enough. They continuously want more, Heck these are the same benefits I get. The only difference is that I have to pay more for them because I’m at a higher level of pay. Which is hilarious because everyone in that company thinks that management at my level makes some insanely large amount of money, which isn’t true. In fact I have employees that make more money than I do. The ones that don’t have the potential to make more because they can get overtime, I’m salary. Yet, they don’t feel the company is compensating them enough, they want more.

And when they do get more, they don’t appreciate it. Due to business needs we’ve had a lot of overtime the last three months. We’ve had a lot of people that were coming in on weekends and staying late trying to help us keep up with our customers. The management decided that we were going to do something nice to show appreciation for the employees by cooking breakfast and serving it to them last Saturday. I ran around for two days pricing and buying stuff for breakfast. We served them at their desks Pancakes, Sausages and Orange Juice. Saturday morning I cooked 18 pounds of sausages. I also helped with cooking pancakes. Three weeks in advance we sent out a notice to the employees asking them to fill out an “order form” so we knew how much to buy.

Right off the bat we started getting complaints. “What, no toppings? Can’t you guys get whipped cream and fruit to go on it?” “No Bacon? Can we have bacon instead?” “Can we have French toast instead?” “I’d rather have waffles.” “Can I get eggs instead?” Okay, I can understand some of that, but seriously it’s free food. We were doing it because we wanted to do something nice to say “Thank You.” We choose what we did because it was going to be the fastest, easiest and less messy meal we could make for almost 200 people.

While we were getting ready to cook a person from another department who’s management did their gratitude breakfast the weekend before was complaining that they didn’t come in on that Saturday so he didn’t get anything. The individual then made the comment, “The supervisors should come in every Saturday and cook them breakfast. That’s why they make the big bucks” The individual was rubbing their thumb and first two fingers together in my peers face when they said it. When my peer asked if they were kidding, the response was, “No”. Fortunately I didn’t witness it because I think that would have made me come unhinged.

Then while we were cooking people were complaining on everything from portion size. Three 4-5 inch pancakes, 2 sausage links and a bottle of Sunny Delight. I know it’s not the biggest breakfast but we had a budget and we couldn’t go over. We ended up doing so and I fronted some money out of my own pocket to cover the difference. Some complained about the taste, there wasn’t enough syrup, not enough butter, too greasy, their sausage wasn’t burnt (yes, I’m not kidding. Someone came in and complained that their sausage wasn’t burnt.), they didn’t get their breakfast as soon as they arrived, etc, etc, etc.

There was a ton more today at work of people complaining. I just started to tune it out so I wouldn’t go off on any of the ingrates. Then to make it worse I was in a meeting today where they were talking about the feedback the employees had given on recognition and it was brought up again that multiple employees feel that the management should spend at least $5.00 each week to buy items for their staff. I think that was the last straw for me.

I don’t think I’m going to go out of my way to do anything like this again. I’m done, why should I try to do something nice only to get complained at. It’s not worth it.