Sucked to be a teacher today

Had kind of a sucky day today. I won't describe it here, since I know students read this, but I will tell you a story from my house-painting days.

I used to work for a house-painting company, and in my last two years was an operations manager. This meant that I supervised the daily operations of eight different paint crews. It was part of my job to check in on them every day or two, enforce our high quality standards, and deal with customer issues. I was also responsible for keeping my crews working each week until they reached their quota of man-hours. Since this was in the midwest, we had a limited painting season, so our summer work quotas were aggressive. It wasn't uncommon to require more than 50 hours out of each crew, or to require them to work on Saturday and Sunday.

It wasn't uncommon to "fudge" hours if you were a crewleader. You controlled the timesheets, so you could easily make it look like the crew had reached their quota before the end of Friday. Then everyone got to have the weekend off. And while this was sometimes overlooked, this was against company policy.

So when I discovered one of my crewleaders was planning to take the weekend off without actually having all of his hours, I needed to confront him.

It got very messy.

He had made plans for the weekend, didn't want to work, didn't see any reason why he should have to, and flat-out told me no. I stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind me. I went home feeling nauseous, and broke down in my apartment. I was really torn between some deep-seated need to be liked by everyone and the knowledge that I had a job to do.

Well, he ended up working that weekend, but he fudged his hours the next week and lied to me about it. I called him in with my boss sitting there, and he continued with the lie. He said he had really worked those hours, so my boss picked up the phone and called the homeowner, asking if she remembered what time the paint crew left the job that day. Her answer did not confirm his story. He was fired on the spot.

That was a gut-wrenching day, and one that probably drove me away from any kind of "management" position for the next five years. As it turns out, you can't ever get away from the need to hold people accountable for their actions.

Today was another one of those days. And it sucked.

Posted: Wed - December 10, 2003 at 05:59 PM

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Sucked to be a teacher today

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