WFO Speedracer
A lifetime ban is like a lifetime warranty !
- Location
- Alabama
I was where you are at back in 1999, I was promised the world but when I got there my world got a lot smaller as did my paycheck, I was hired to do only watercraft and ATVs that worked ok for a while then they decided to pay me on commission, I should have seen the writing on the wall, the next shoe dropped and they started putting motorcycle work orders in my stack, when I said hold up this is not what I was hired to do they said you are working here now, you work on what I tell you to work on.So I quit my job working in a marina a couple of days ago. They freaked on me saying I complain about everything but totally avoiding acknowledgment of why. My pay regularly gets screwed around with and is never the same pay. I have been lower on my bank account and barely getting by with them and yet with an identically paying job previously I was building up a really good bank account. Something's wrong there. If they need to paint a boat and start before 1 I lose half a day's pay because nobody is allowed to be in the shop while painting is going on. If there's too much snow on the roads for one person's liking I lose a day's pay because nobody will come in and legally I'm not allowed to work in a shop environment alone. I worked over 50 hours a week in the beginning, they told me it would be banked and used to cover the shut down time during the holidays. Well, after the spring rush season I asked how many banked hours I had, they said none. They paid me out for all those hours...at the tune of an 80% loss to taxes after the first half day of over time pay. I was livid! My pay was only up by a few hundred dollars after a month of 50+ hours a week. This has happened multiple times now.
As the winterizing season rolled in I spent more time on a lot of different boats realizing just how totally poor grade their clientele really is. So many times many of these sailboat owners would load their boats with every sort of crap they could dump into the boats, they were basically a hoarders mess. We had to move loads of piled from floor to ceiling junk just to access one part of one system only to move it again to access another just to move it back to access the first portion. I twisted my ankle trying to walk around this crap on Tuesday as I was handed yet another crappy job. One boat came in in such horrible shape inside that we needed respirators to do the most basic winterizing functions. Once the seal would break from sweating the smell got through and would make you want to gag puke. One boat had about a 1/4 of an inch of dog hair all over the floor and it just so happened that I had to work at the floor level to do some of the work...keeping in mind I'm allergic to most pet hair...great. They refuse to tell customers that they need to clean their boats and remove all lose items out if they request us to work on them. Instead they tell us that this is how sailors are and they pay us to move this stuff around. I said who pays me when I trash my back from falling over their dumpsite?! No acknowledgement just the same bs...but I complain about everything.
They look the other way when their primary mechanic would drink on the job. He will start ripping apart a boat, not show anyone what he is doing or how, then let it sit for a few weeks before telling someone there's a job you can do so we always go in blind with no knowledge of what to do or how to do it. Last Friday he was totally wasted by 10am from what I was told and stayed all day drinking, THEN DROVE HOME!! Their response was when he starts drinking though he doesn't write down the time he invests into a customer's boat so it's like he's off the clock. OK...what about the constant complaining from the admin about needing as many billable hours as possible....but he's allowed to screw the company out of those hours because he's allowed to get bombed on the job as long as he doesn't record his time on the job after he starts pounding the booze?? Am I wrong here or is there a serious problem with this place??
The parts manager would very frequently order the wrong parts even after being given the proper part numbers to order. If some parts were on back-order, instead of searching as many sources as possible he would just stay with that one supplier and leave it on back order. Instead of trying to source out parts he will waste his time arguing with the half brother boss over nonsense like who did what the night before which is totally unrelated to the company. If not that, he will watch the yard cameras and mess around with other owner's son by denying him access at the storage yard gate then claiming "oh it must be a software problem". He spends way too much time making phone calls to the guys instead of letting them do their job and getting the final report back to him.
The company allowed the one owner's son to make a dilapidated shanty town shed in the new storage yard to work out of on the marina grounds for the purposes of auto wrecking. He also sent grinding sparks all over a freshly painted boat, let one of his cronies threaten to physically assault one of the home owners on the property and is constantly stealing tools from the shop but they never stop him so the shops never have the tools we need when we need them. There are two shops, one is the water accessible marina and the other is the storage/repair facility. Neither shop is equally equipped so we are constantly running back and forth between shops trying to find the right tools and supplies but the lost time for this hunting for things, they expect us to put onto the customer's bill. It's not the customer's fault the company is so incompetent that they can't be properly equipped or make a full stop to the tool thief and evict him out of there for good.
It's a lot of a rant I know but I can't be alone in saying this company is a pure sh*t show and not worth staying with. I'm actually very surprised they've been able to stay in business the last 2 years since the new management took over. What do you guys think of this? Would you stick around and continue to subject yourselves to really trashy working conditions like this?
They frequently fail to replenish the stock on the drinking water fountain bottles because the tap water is not potable. So far we have gone for 4 days without drinking water and the last time was about 5 weeks. We have all been complaining about these things but he singled me out and threw a fit. So, after putting up with all of this constant nonsense I finally hit my limit and just walked out.
My response was classic, I asked him what were you doing before I got here, he was silent then I said you were looking for a technician and my suggestion is you start looking again because I won't be here that long. Turns out I was right, they called us all in for a shop meeting about a month later , you had to show up 1 hour early and you did not get paid for it, I sat through the shop meeting and listened to all the BS they were never going to do then I clocked in and went to work, about 5 minutes later the service manager says the owner needs to see you in the office, I asked what for, I have about 30 minutes left on the wreck job and I will be finished.
No this can't wait, don't worry this won't take long and I said damn right it won't, the owner asked me what my problem was, I told him and at that point he said get your f,ing tools and get out of here, I said no problem but I will pick up cans on the side of the road or flip burgers at Mc Donalds before I work here again. On the way out I told the service manager see you were right it didn't take long.