This past Friday I had a request from one of our clients for interview availability for two candidates. Dutifully, I got availability from both for Monday and Tuesday, and of course never heard back from the client. We all left for the weekend, I sent emails to both candidates saying that since we didn’t hear back to consider Monday off, and we’d aim to schedule something for Tuesday when Monday came around. And of course the client emails my account manager at 10:30 PM on Friday wanting to set up interviews for early Monday.
To be frank, it’s this level of incompetence that is destroying the US landscape. The assumption that people don’t have lives and are on call 24/7 has got to fucking stop. Back in the sixties and seventies if you couldn’t get your job done in 40 hours, or for some reason insisted on working 70 hour weeks, people wondered what the fuck was wrong with you. You were considered either inefficient, because it shouldn’t take 70 hours to do the job, or you were considered weird as fuck for not having enough of a life such that you could work 70 hours a damn week. In Germany this is still the norm. However, here in the US, ever since the silicon valley boom where the 40 hour work week was supplanted by the 70 hour work week thanks to a bunch of borderline Asperger’s types having nothing else they wanted to do but fuck around with circuit boards, that’s now considered ‘the norm’ in the US.
And, of course, this will reopen my employer’s repeated ‘requests’ I put work email on my private phone. Because, of course, they want you to be available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, but won’t provide you the tools or infrastructure to make that possible of course. Oh no, use your own stuff which you pay for to do that, of course. And since the ATS system we use is a relic from the 90s with no web access, it wouldn’t even really matter if I had access to email because at most I’d have past emails from the candidates, but no access to alternate contact info, unless of course I doubled up and created my own damn database from scratch in Excel to store information – twice – which is already in the work database but not accessible because it’s an antique piece of shit.
In world were people have no boundaries and more and more people are these lifeless fucks with no families or friends to spend time with, so they insist on making work their life instead of letting work support their life, it’s getting harder and harder to be a normal damn person.
