ChiefsPlanet - Zombie Thread Has Anyone Ever Heard of this Company

Quote:

Originally Posted by seamonster (Post 18026804)

This just about matches my experience. In my 20's I got tired of doing my bum ass co-workers jobs while getting paid entry level so I (carelessly) took a head hunters' job that matched my skillset (Unix\Dev work)...Facility was in a bad part of town, with no parking. I had to pay for my own parking and used some lot for literal circus\clown people training on tight ropes; guy I was replacing was a morbidly obese lunatic with chronic flatulence; work place was toxic and an animal hoarder would roll in drenched in dog hair and set off allergic chain reactions; manager would sneak around and ambush victims while they were working -- stealth-like -- and fire them russian execution style (no warning); no health insurance (who needs it?) months before I got diagnosed with stage II cancer; the traffic was like LA's 101; I had to make frequent work-related purchases and meet a courier under a bridge and exchange paperwork for parts in a paper bag (traffic thought I was involved in dope deals, including metro police); Maybe two years after I tended my resignation (I was only there for 2 months) a psychotic armed with a shotgun went through the offices like he was in a video game and shot some of these people. To this day I think of how BRUTAL it must have been to clock into that hellish pit and have that be your last moment (RIP)....That wake up call straightened my life out and the experience showed me what hell's like in the white-collar world when you respond to unsolicited emails.

I find work environments to be interesting. Many times we start our careers in a particular type of work environment, and we don't get exposed to big differences where others spend their whole careers.

I started my career at a desk job, but it was in an enormous engineering "bullpen". I worked in a 20-person cublcle, rows of desks two astride like you'd see in the 1950s, and my cubicle was one of 20 or 30 on my floor. It was a big sea of people with zero privacy.

Then at some point I walked through the assembly line area, and I saw a guy I'd gone to school with. He was sitting at a desk in the middle of the assembly line, with rivet guns pounding ten feet away from him. Same degree, different department, different environment.

I'll travel and see people working in pre-fab metal buildings in industrial areas where they basically have a picnic table for lunch and breaks, and not much else in the way of comfort.

I've had clients who had trouble communicating with employees because the employees work out of trucks in remote areas, so their trucks are their office.

In my company, I gave pretty much every employee a private office. It may not have been swanky, but it was peaceful and they could decorate it however they wanted. I had one employee who quit tell me that it was like working in a library, and she felt like she couldn't eat carrots because they crunched loudly. It apparently bothered her, but I loved the peace and quiet.