Part 2: Work woes and how frustrating that is...

The rest of the work situation is this. My contract expired last Tuesday, May 31. The new contract has been awarded, this having happened at least a month ago now, Jim assures me, and that I'm not going anywhere. Why is this a bad thing? I've not heard ANYthing from my new employers!

I was supposed to start working for them June 1 and they have to send me an acceptance letter, I have to sign on the dotted line, and they have to go through all the new employee stuff that I'm supposed to do BEFORE starting work for them. So even though Jim says not to worry, I don't even know for sure if I DO have a job right now or not! And it gets better, or worse depending on how you look at it. Our other field person, who's in Oklahoma, hasn't heard a peep out of our new employers either. But guess who has? EVERYone in Little Rock, our main office. They've all gotten all their paperwork, including employee handbook, benefits package info, etc. I don't know for sure if they've gotten their acceptance letters yet since I haven't talked to anyone yet, but from something I did hear a few days ago,they have gotten theirs, though that is not confirmed yet. Supposedly our offer letters were being FedExed to us last week but we've not gotten them yet, well two of us haven't anyhow.

And WHY was this not done on time? Because our contract person was on vacation in Puerto Rico! I'd love to go on vacation too, especially there, but heck I had to cancel my annual beach trip with my parents because I can't afford it! And it's worse now because I don't even know if I'm getting paid for the last week of work I've put in or not! Excuse me, but if the contract was signed like a month ago now, and I'm SURE she had her vacation planned long before she actually went, common sense SHOULD apply. She SHOULD have gotten everything ready to go for our contracts so someone else at the office could mail everything to us. So our rep tells us when she gets back from vacation that our letters are going out FedEx the next day. Then the same day she comes back and says her boss went home sick so it would be at least another day before they were mailed. And I didn't even find this out from her! I had to hear it from someone in Little Rock.

What infuriates me even more is that last week I sent our rep an long e-mail full of questions she has not answered for me that I asked a couple months ago. The EXACT same day I e-mailed her, someone from LR did, at almost the exact same time even. MY message was ignored, and the one from LR was answered immediately, and there was quite a long dialogue of several e-mails on that one. I know this because LR forwarded it to the rest of us. So why does LR deserve better then us field people do? It is unacceptable to me that they are getting special treatment, or even normal treatment, and us field people are ignored. As our Oklahoma field guy put it this morning when he called me to find out if I'd heard anything... "NOW I am officially royally pissed off!"

I called Jim to tell him what happened, or didn't happen, as is probably the better expression. He can't do anything legally since he's not a part of the contract itself, even though he is paying for it. He's furious we've not heard anything yet and he was going to call our new company this morning also, even though he can't do anything. The contract issues themselves are between myself and the company alone, he's not allowed to get involved or he can get in BIG trouble.

I've had a few people say, "well what are you worried about? You know you have a job still." But they don't understand that Jim's affirmations we still have a job don't mean anything. We HAVE to have the documentation from the company itself and sign the dotted line before we can be certain. That's how contracting works. We can be replaced at a moment's notice if it suits the employer. Just because I've been doing this job for two years, and 5+ years somewhere else before moving here, doesn't mean they can't replace me just because they want to.