Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Friday, Dec. 16, 2005 - 7:04 p.m.

Reason #5322 Why I Hate My Job:
The production accountant actually came up to me today and told me to not put more than 40 hours on a single time card, because if I do, they have to pay me overtime for it. (This after he told me last week I don't get overtime for working over 8 hours a day.) In fact, he says, don't write my hours down at all. Just mark that I worked, and he'll see that I get paid for 8 hours. Which I'm sure provoked a perfectly priceless facial response from me, because I know my mouth fell open, and my actual thought process was "You'd better be fucking kidding me, Mr. Man." What I actually said was, "I'm hourly, dude, I don't have a day rate; am I just supposed to eat those hours?" while at the same time, Sybil shouted over the cube wall that I'm hourly, and thus have to write down my hours. And I'm all, dude, you'd better pay me something for those hours, because I do not do this job out of the goodness of my heart and an overblown sense of charity, so his solution is to tell me to just put 8 hours each day, or no more than 40 total on a single card, and that if I go over that, i have to do a second time card for the same week with the extra hours on that one, so that I don't make overtime, despite my being an hourly employee and that being, oh, let me see, how shall I put this...AGAINST THE LAW.

And why the payroll company is entitled to ignore that extra 3 hours or so a week and pretend it does't get added to the other 40 hours for the same week is beyond me, but then, in a world where the accepted norm is to only pay people like me for an 8 hour day even while demanding we work 12 or more hours with no meal break, I'm not actually that surprised. This is why the WGA is suing the studios, and they should. What pisses me off is that there's no loggers and transcribers union, which there totally should be, because we get utterly dumped on routinely.

Which brings me to Reason #3 Why I Hate My Job:
The lead director/producer walked up to me today and started whining a little about his job - bearing in mind that he makes a barebones *mimimum* of $3500/week (and probably a helluva lot more, as he's like the #3 guy in the company, but that makes his monthly salary a minimum of $14,000 month)(yes, you read that right), and how it's really busy right now, which he doesn't like. (we have two - count them, two - series going. that is not a lot.) So I say well, at least he does not also have to transcribe, to which he replies what the hell am I talking about, I have the easiest job in the whole company - I "get paid to daydream all day".

Oh, yes. He did.

And nevermind the soul-sucking, mind-numbing tedium of the job I do, or the fact that I do it amazingly well and with near flawless accuracy, despite the shocking inability of some people simply to master their mother tongue; I know I work a job that every fucking dumbass over me thinks is easier than eating dirt and that a chimp with the appropriate typing skills could do, but this is the first time any of them have had the fucking balls to say it to my face. It is a testament to my brilliant fucking acting skills and self-control that not only did I not get out of my chair and beat him to death right there, but I smiled and acted like it didn't bother me a bit that this overpaid and whiny fucking ASS just completely denigrated my contribution to his fucking overhyped salary, especially after the last two weeks of mumbling, incoherent HELL I have been through, only to have been told not to write all my hours down on my time card, because they're not going to pay me the fucking overtime I earned way down here at the bottom of the fucking production food chain.

I did almost burst into uncontrollable gales of laughter an hour later, though, right after Sybil had just shouted at someone, flung open the door, and stomped out, and the new production coordinator - a perfectly nice, savvy, experienced, composed, and capable young woman - knelt down at my desk to get the cabinet key and whispered as she did so, "I don't like it here. It's so dysfunctional. How do you stand it?" Because that middle thing?

That is the understatement of the year.

Peace out,
Katie

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