Cracks in the Ice

The work at Dowty Canada, or Dowty Aerospace Toronto was always interesting, always driven by what seemed like insane schedules and the pressure was always on.

In the almost two years since I had started I was elevated to the dizzy heights of "senior" stress analyst and my yearly pittance had rocketed up from $34,000 to around $38,000 augmented by overtime but eroded by that horrible taxation thing.

Four people in the office had a distinct effect on me that year, the first, Jim Collins who had been a "Job Shopper" in the past and in the office, within whispering distance, three current Job Shoppers, Tony Burgess, Pete Clarke and Dave Rutherford.

And a couple that were working for me, names withheld to protect the lazy.

A Job Shopper, for the uninformed, was a contractor, someone who worked for an agency as a sole proprietor or was unique as their own corporation (for tax and liability purposes) - basically, someone who was (usually) capable and did what they were told in the office.

A jobshopper, at the time, would earn above $40 an hour, work an average of fifty (or more) hours per week (overtime at time and a half) which equated to a yearly salary closing in on the $100,000 point.

And, they had numerous tax benefits, so they kept a lot of it.

So, here I was, an overworked, underpaid, salaried employee on numerous tight schedules, giving orders to a couple of guys who could not do their jobs on an hourly basis without asking fundamental questions.

The three guys I mentioned worked in the design office, Pete and Dave would barrage me with a strange form of heckling, ridiculing the hoops I was jumping through to get work out of the office, adding to the mental anguish minute by minute (and loving the sport) and adding a large portion of "not helping" and pointing out the shortfalls of the two guys I had "under my wing"

It was funny, sort of.

And it was making me think, I talked at length about it to Jim Collins and this other guy, Tony Burgess.

I'll talk more about them in the next post.