Hello hello from your resident chemit who keeps complaining about my sample workload. Now normally, a lot of samples mean good for teh business. As much as that’s true, I just want to rant a little bit because I have no other platform in which I’m comfortable doing things like this on, and I have plenty of grievances to get off my chest. So I hope you don’t mind and you just let me rant for a while. I mean, of all the labs I’ve been to, sure this one is the most convenient and the lab grandmas all tend to spoil me and they have made me the lab princess… buut this rant is mostly for the lab grandmas that I really can’t manage to get along with
First and foremost, I work with damn boomers.
The age range of the senior employees are literally on a senior level and the generation gap (and the generation trauma we carry) are extremely different. Like the age range here is at like 40-65 they’re all old enought to be my parents and grandparents and the ones in retiring age don’t want to retire yet. And they’re the ones who think they’re gods for running this place for years when they can’t even keep up with policy changes and laws that aim to protect their workers from potential hazards in the lab (and mind you, there are a shitton of that)
They’re so dismissive.
So because of the generation gap, what didn’t kill them at work and what we aim to correct for everyone’s safety is easily dismissed. Like we tell them some acid dispensers are broken or they’re leaking but they say “Oh that’s fine, I used to get acid spills all the time” AND A SAFETY CONCERN IS NOT SOMETHING YOU SHOULD DISMISS LIKE THIS, ESPECIALLY IF YOU AIM TO KEEP THE EMPLOYEE. I mean, we have been filing hazard reports, we have been teaching the new employees, as well as the old employees about safety yet here we are getting dismissed like we do this for personal interest. There’s also some protocol cancerns that me and my lab partner wanted to correct because they’re outdated, but these boomers won’t even give two cents because “That’s how it’s always been” And I fcking hate that kind of mentality. Like, it’s never too late to rectify something that’s been done wrong for ages. What was the point of all those trainings and seminars you attend and make us attend if you don’t plan to apply anything to the lab setting??????? Those presentations were peer reviewed and have been used on an international and local setting so why can’t we adapt it when the benefits are for the long term???????
They believe in overtime supremacy but they move at a pace that’s just bare minimum
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m willing to do overtime when it’s called for. In most cases, I’m usually the one most willing to do overtime because I don’t like leaving my workload unfinished. The overtime pay is not worth it though. I only get like 30% of my hourly wage per hour that I spend in this lab. And sometimes they ask me to do a 12 hour shift. I did this last April when the samples just kept rolling in and on the long term… I kept getting sick because 12 hours exceeds the safe hours in which I can get exposed to acid, not just me but all 3 of us that function mainly in the extraction room and acid room. To solution this need to go for 12-hour 12 hour shifts, I proposed that we all still function at 8 hours but we have different shifts throughout the day. I even volunteered to take the earliest shift which was a 6am - 3pm, followed by the trainee at 8am - 5pm then my original lab partner at 9am - 6pm then our senior who took on the 10am - 7pm shift. For the first month, it was okay because I don’t really skip work so the 6-3 is always filled, the lab output increased twofold, but even then, they still wanted us to extend our hours to the point of calling in at work on a Saturday. I hate giving my weekends to work. All 3 of us do except when we have plans on a workday of the following week, then we can offset a saturday to that day, that isn’t a problem, usually. My lab partner does that all the time because her family runs a business too and she has to take care of pappers sometimes.
So when days like that happen, usually some of the senior employees either don’t help at all, or if they do help, they seriously do the bare minimum like weighing and diluting the samples. And take note that they always tell us we work so slow but when you see them weighing, a batch (50 samples) takes them 2 hours to weigh and an hour to dilute, whereas the 3 of us were timed to weigh a batch in 30-45 minutes and to dilute in 20-30 minutes so we can process more, and I fcking hate that they’re so arrogant about how “Oh I could finish 5 samples in a day, blah blah blah” I’m sure you could because you loved overtime so much that you basically lived in the lab. But we handle 400-500 samples in just 8 hours, we don’t want to do overtime and I can’t understand why they’re pushing us to do more when they know that if we push ourselves harder, we might all get sick again on the same week (like what happened mid march when all 3 of us got sick at the same time and the lab fell into complete chaos)
The generational trauma is just absurd!
I know all workplaces have some sort of generational trauma left behind by their previous seniors and here we can feel it through the forced overtime even when there’s not that many samples endorsed in the lab yet. But here, they get so antsy or irritable when there’s no sample. Much more so when we in the processing section have no samples and they see us just lounging around and talking. Like, we don’t even get to do this on most days because of how much samples we get from the sample preparation department, heck we even do our own activity huddles because these boomers apparently can’t communicate and can’t understand what priorities are.The 3 of us are trying to form a coordinated team and these boomers prefer working alone with the overtime and all, and then they brag about productivity and complain about being so tired after an analysis but they still have so much to do and since they can’t rest, apparently we can’t either. We have learned to ignore them but sometimes they just get really irritable and they try to take us to the instrument lab. They do that but they don’t teach us, they just tell us to read the manuals but no training whatsoever and I hate it. On the rare days that they do train us though, we basically have to do self learning still because they cannot teach at all. Like they’ll explain in a way that only they can understand. They don’t know how to teach at a beginner friendly pace, and since we’re all young, they assume that we’re all experts at softwares and computers and they’ll just say stuff like “Oh, but you can figure this out even without me, you’re so good with computers.” Yes, that may be the case, but we don’t know what software is linked to the machines and we don’t know what changes would affect the quality of the anlysis. I really have no idea how they even got through all those years with such minimal training. And I can understand why not a lot of people my age last long in this company. It’s just bonkers and outdated. If it wasn’t such a convenient place to work at, the 3 of us functioning in processing probably would have resigned within a month or so. I mean, I train someone almost every month and all of them ended up resigning. The only ones that stayed were this kid I’ve been training and my lab partner who has now become a really close friend of mine. but the April batches of newbies, the May batches… they only lasted a week then they gave up. They probbaly would have gone AWOL too if they didn’t start their training with us because they only thought of resigning when we endorsed them to the other sections.
Minimal appraisals and bonuses.
So I remember the lab grandpas telling me that the company used to be pretty generous with bonuses. Like… maybe until 2017? 2018? They received regular performance bonuses for hitting the quota monthy, but that all changed when there was a turnover of our businessline to the indians and they kept trying to increase the quota every month by a million or two in revenue, so it became harder and harder to get those bonuses and I think that is so unfair because they make our business line feel liek we aren’t performing enough and this in itself sends the lab grandmas to a frenzy so they’re constantly trying to get more samples but then, they don’t even help when the samples actually get here. Rare was it that they would go out of their offices to help with the processing and rare is it that they would run the processed samples through the instruments. It’s good that we have an auto-sampler because we don’t have to feed the equipment the samples one by one, we can just set up around 150-200 samples then leave it to run for around 4-5 hours, then when we have free time or the analysis time is done, we just reload the sample trays with more samples, but they can’t even seem to do that and it makes me so fcking mad. They should honestly retire if they’re just gonna bitch about staring at a computer screen all day and attending meeting in a comfortable chair then ask us to file an update report, which they will just relay to the higher up, but honestly, they don’t even read it at all, they just email the exact same file to the bosses and it’s annoying. They say it’s because we don’t have the time to attend these meetings, but in all honesty, we don’t have time becuse you don’t help out at all, or if you do, you’re gonna bitch about it and say you’ve done so much already after just weighing a batch.
OKAY I AM MAD WHILE I WROTE THIS RANT BUT I’VE SOMEWHAT CALMED DOWN NOW.
Anyways, look at my cute lab grandpas during the company sportsfest UwU they made me the muse for the day because I was such a cute lab baby
