Part time work

Life One-Handed

You may have noticed; despite it’s having half the title of my blog. I don’t really write much about living life one-handed. I know, ironic much. It’s because I started to have weaknesses in my late teens so I had started to adapt.

Mum gave me every hot drink to carry to the lounge room and as I’d spill the drink in my left hand, I’d carry one drink at a time. She was very grumpy and impatient as she would carry two cups at the same time.

“Drop your left shoulder!”

Alas, I started adapting. But mostly when she wasn’t watching, I’d carry one at a time. By the time I was 16-17, I was a full-time student, part-time worker at a supermarket, an unpaid babysitter and was building a portfolio to go to college.

I had NO SOCIAL LIFE!

My first job at a supermarket saw me on the left-handed checkout, I wasn’t super-fast. With the right-handed checkouts I was so fast, forty items a minute, that I often had to call the front-end controller, the Prima packs in the trolley and then reconcile it so that on the receipt because the register couldn’t keep up. The trolley looked like a bomb had hit it, but that’s another story for another day.

Ok, times I’d be growled at for not packing the trolley neatly enough. I argued, you can have fast or neat, you can’t have both! Pick one! The end!

I’m also going to seriously kill the carer who insists on doing up the buttons on my men’s pyjama tops because at 1am when I’m naked and trying to quickly get into my pj’s, I cannot work out why it’s not as easy as it should be. It’s because one of my very caring but not so thoughtful, lovely assistants has done the buttons up on my tops.

Acromyms 1

ACRONYMS! Part 1

In the early naughty (2000’s) I got a job with an NGO. I started as a client, I was a considerably consistent client and then I was a very consistent staff member for 3 years, despite every 3 months being made to apply for my job again. And consistently being passed over so they could give someone else a much needed position, knowing another position would soon be available for me, so I could have some permanency.

On one occasion I was passed over for a job I was already doing and then I was left to be in the office to train that person. Anyway, I’ll let you guess what kind of job/industry it was with this clue.

The industry was rife with ACRONYM’S!

They had then for EVERYTHING!TAF

First, clients were REF (referred) to us.

Here’s some others –

ETS: Expected to start!

P: Placed!

DNS: Did not start!

PR: Participants Report!

Now, this might give you some ideas what industry I was in. If not here’s a few more – when the clients were finished with us. These were other codes such as:-

END: Contract ended

EX/PTW: Exited/Part time work

EX/FTW: Exited/Full time work

EX/RTW: Exited/Return to work

My very favourite exit code was “WUK”

It was a rare one but when it came someone would ask in the office. It was the kind of environment where there was little privacy. But you learnt by osmosis!

WUK: Stands for “Whereabouts Unknown!”

When I started in this job I was an Administrative Assistant, I never understood what it meant to be in “Admin” but basically means you do whatever needs doing.

Later, when the organisation/company (they ran like a company) restructured. I managed to keep a job and was kindly given the title of T.P.O. (Training Placement Officer) which was a job I had long been doing on the Admin salary. But they made me Part Time! Making it very challenging to do a full time job!

I was only paid to do 19 hours a week. I often stayed after the other girls left at 5pm, I would finally do my job, as I was training 2 Admin girls and a TPC (Training Placement Co-ordinator).

On Wednesday, I would arrive at work and announce to the girls, “Get your questions ready and line up at my desk!”

I’ve done the maths and I should be out of here by lunch!”

The papers would ruffle and there was panic in the air. And my boss would come out at midday and ask me to stay.

I would still be there at 4pm.

Apparently if I’d been doing full time hours for 2 weeks, company policy was that full time hours should have been made permanent.

One day I was walking through the Bourke Street Mall in the city of Melbourne. I had received a call from a new recruit back in the office. I kept walking so I could concentrate on training the Admin Assistant now to use a very graph-heavy government database system, it was very “it’s the thing, above the thing and the thing!”

In the end due to a HR issue I was restructured out of my job. Two incompetent women in office claimed I was bullying them. It was actually the other way round.

After I was gone, they soon followed Effectively, I got the shaft!

Unlike others I had no real presence in the industry as I’d always been in the office working.

I eventually found some work with a TAFE, doing the same job and while they all ran around like headless chooks, they had me “culling exited files.” I was under-utilised because they didn’t trust my ability to do a job.

Rather under-utilized. Sadly that job too ended. This was a job I had in my early 30’s for about 4 years. And because it was very stressful, my medical condition started to show, some odd symptoms and I was diagnosed in the same week, I was let go from the 2^nd employer.

That was a really shitty week.

So if you didn’t work out the industry from all those ACRONYMS. I’ll give you one last one to help.

W4D: Work for the dole

CWC: Community Work Co-Ordinator

And around the office we had many nicknames for it “Work for the coffee scroll” being one of them.

I used to think I was good at my job. I was nice to the people who needed it and I laid down the law and was the “hard-ass” to those that needed it! I was the only one in the office who knew how.

There is one big thing this job prepared me for and that was the understanding of ACRONYMS!

Please be prepared for Part 2 to this.