Still Gainfully Employed

I guess that is better than being another welfare leach. Things with work deteriorated rapidly yesterday evening. I thought we had things worked out based on an email that I sent out and from the response I got, but apparently this was not the case.

I spoke to my boss in the early evening on the way to the Music On Main Street festival going on this month in Bozeman. Apparently people were now upset with me because of the dates I had scheduled to travel or be home on my down week.

If you read the previous post, I mention how most of us travel quite extensively. What I failed to mention is that we often travel on personal days (i.e. Saturday, Sunday or a holiday) so that we can be on-site to teach or do a gig. While I certainly understand the need to travel on personal days so that we can be at said gig, I do not agree that it should be company policy to eat our personal days when it isn’t necessary.

As an example, if I was a contractor, worked hourly, worked for the government, served in the armed forces or worked for just about any other company I would be paid to travel. I travel for work, not because it gives me a warm fuzzy to sit in airplanes and dick around with airports.

As I told my boss and our COO, if anyone came to me and offered me a job and said “by the way, it’s company policy that you have to travel on your days off which will effectively eat up at least another 30 ~ 45 days of your personal time a year without compensation” I’d tell them to fucking forget it.

So this became a big issue on which I pretty much told the company it isn’t going to work for me and that perhaps we need to reevaluate the nature of our relationship. I’m not threatening to quit, but I am not going to put up with the company nickel-and-diming our personal time away. I already work salary and sometimes put in very long days and weeks. Ask anyone that knows me and they will tell you that.
Then the account manager over the area is all upset that I’ll be gone again. I tell you this happens EVERY SINGLE TIME I go home. It’s ridiculous and I am fed up with it.

So I almost quit this morning….but I have to remember that it’s not a good idea to quit without another job lined up.

So now I am scheduled to go back to TX permanently. This should alleviate some of the issues. We’ll see.

I’ll miss Montana. I’ll miss the friends I have made here. I’ll miss snowboarding every weekend and the beautiful scenery that this place has to offer. But I won’t miss the headache of dealing with people getting upset because I want them to treat us (employees) decently and uphold their agreements.