I've had a lot of time to reflect on things with all of this unexpected spare time I now have which as led me to come to some realizations about working from home: Though it is convenient to be able to work from home and not require a second car, the scheduling is quite difficult to deal with. When I first started working for HGS (or Rogers as per my position), the scheduling was fine. I was able to schedule myself for 12-hour days earning myself much overtime and giving myself more time to spend with Carley and Isabelle because I'd have three whole days off! Every once in a while things would change a bit with how much hours were offered, but for the most part it was pretty consistent; then things changed.
It was around December when things went sour for a bit with myself and Carley. Between December, January, and February I used up all of my sick days by being depressed and not wanting to go to work. You'd be surprised how much an event like that could make a person not want to work even when working is as easy as walking downstairs and sitting at a computer where you never meet a person face-to-face. Luckily I was able to get through that and there was still plenty of hours to work at the right times that I pulled through. Being able to schedule yourself for 12-hour days at that point is quite nice for dealing with a situation like that where you need as many days off as possible.
After that event everything was good again and continued on quite well up until Carley got her job. Now I was (and still am) quite proud that she managed to find a job working at a care home and found what it is that she wants to do with herself moving forward into the future career-wise. The hard part with that is transitioning into having two full-time working parties in a relationship; this wouldn't be so bad if there were no child involved, but we do have a lovely little girl to take care of as well. So our little Isabelle needed to be enrolled in full-time daycare and we had to coordinate ourselves to having Carley working evenings (right up until 11:00 PM) and getting Isabelle to daycare as early as possible the next day (6:45 AM) so that I could then work during the time she'd be at daycare and then be done in time to pick her up. Now that would be perfect if not for two problems...
1) I'd have to schedule myself to start at 6:30 AM to be "done" by 3:00 PM. Now when I say DONE, what I mean is, I'd be done *IF* I didn't get a phone call that would last beyond that time. Of course if you get a phone call, you can't just hang up on a person and that call could potentially go overtime by an hour or more if it was a customer with a lot of questions or possibly an angry customer who wanted escalate to a manager. Hence, I had to be "done" by 3:00 PM to ensure I would have enough time to go get Isabelle before daycare is closed.
2) The part where I had to schedule myself for 6:30 AM. Carley is sleeping because of how late she was working and then able to get to bed after finally getting home late at night, and daycare doesn't open until 6:45 AM. Now we did manage to transition into being able to deal with this with Carley able to get up to take Isabelle then come back and go back to sleep (naturally there would be a bit of an adjustment period when not being used to working shifts like this).
There was a bit of another problem as well which sort of started to come up, but we didn't quite get around to that before I was let go. Carley was hired to work evenings at her care home, but wasn't being given consistent days to work, her schedule came out late, and she was starting to get a couple random day shifts; not too much of a problem... except where I'm working 7 days a week early in the morning to fit in all my required hours and there's no daycare on weekends. See the problem with that? Not able to just leave Isabelle locked in her room for a few hours while she's awake, huh?
So they let me go because I missed enough days and was late enough times that they felt it necessary to do... followed by immediately posting jobs to hire more employees. Now... I understand what happened and that it's obviously not great to be late so often and miss so much work, but the combination of knowing that I put out good scores in my work each month (amazing scores even), but then they're fire me due to absence and then immediately want to hire more people... hurts a little. I'm alright with it, and I've certainly learned my lesson from it; we need to work together to make sure everything is covered between us and care for our child.
So they let me go because I missed enough days and was late enough times that they felt it necessary to do... followed by immediately posting jobs to hire more employees. Now... I understand what happened and that it's obviously not great to be late so often and miss so much work, but the combination of knowing that I put out good scores in my work each month (amazing scores even), but then they're fire me due to absence and then immediately want to hire more people... hurts a little. I'm alright with it, and I've certainly learned my lesson from it; we need to work together to make sure everything is covered between us and care for our child.
So... now we're here. I have no job right now. Little update on Carley is that she's now working a new job as a housekeeper at a hotel which is a bit less pay and a bit less hours, but it's CONSISTENT hours. You really don't realize how important it is to have such consistent hours as a parent until you start having two working persons, requiring daycare, and having to coordinate with each other to get everything to work properly.
Wish me luck everybody as I figure out what to do with myself and how to get there. There's much job-hunting going on and I'm looking to keep myself busy while keeping the house in order during the time that I have.
~ Kyle Welykholowa
