The unprepared dumb shit I worked with

Most of us plan ahead for crisis situations in our lives, most of us that is except for the dumb shits I work with.

I use to work in a state where the state paid you if you became temporarily disabled due to pregnancy, non-work related injury or if you had to go into the hospital for surgery. It is called state disability. Not all states have it. The state I work in now does not have that coverage. If you become disabled and cannot work, you cannot collect unemployment because you have to be able to work to get it.

Now that you have a bit of background on the subject here is what one idiot I work with did.

I worked with Mr. K for about 2 years and during that time he ballooned to a hefty 350+ lbs. He became diabetic and developed other health problems. When his doctor had to run some tests he was not concerned about it as he should have. The tests showed he needed major surgery on his heart valves. Instead of him finding out how long he would need to recuperate (he thought he would be only out for 2 weeks) he just went with the flow of what the doctors said. Then it came time for his major surgery.

He was in the hospital for a week, yep major, major surgery. He was under restrictions after he got home. He was not to drive a car for 4 weeks and go on a liquid diet for a week. He lived alone and had no other income coming in. It then sunk in, he was told by the doctor that he could not return to work for 3 months.

Now panic stricken he was now selling his personal items to his Facebook "friends."

He survived his crisis but those 3 months were stress filled and his credit rating went down the tubes as well as almost losing his apartment. He did not do his homework before his operation to find out the actual length of time he would be out. The odd thing was that most of us at work had someone in their family or knew someone that had undergone the same procedure that he did. We all tried to tell him that he would be out for at least 2 months. He ignored us and thought he would be back in a few weeks at the most.

Be prepared and don't be a dumb shit.

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Upper management in a failing company

I will never understand the mentality of upper management or ownership in a small and shrinking company.

Take for example one of the places I worked at. They lost 3 contracts one year due to mistakes on PCBs or so they told us all in a meeting that amounted to the 3rd degree. They (upper management) never got into how many boards or what the mistakes were. They just didn't want to lose more customers so they came down hard on production. They wanted us not to talk or be distracted in anyway and if we made mistakes we were to be written up and if that happened 3 times, we were to be shown the door. I know of no one that has not made mistakes, They wanted robots and they were not going to get any. Over the next few months the better production members found better jobs.

What they failed to do was practice what they put on their website and have processes in place to prevent mistakes and to have teams and use teamwork to proactively improve the process. The customers thought that what they read on the website was how things were done but in reality it was nothing more than a sweat shop that gave