Showing posts with label Employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Employment. Show all posts

Friday, October 24, 2008

I work hard for my money

I got up this morning at 6:45 am. I rolled into work to do a 6 hour charter. The charter was to drive a bunch of student to the Target on Main Street for some corporate thing. They were supposed to be ready at 7:30. They didn't board the bus until 8:10. I then drove them to target and went back to base. I didn't have to pick them up again until 12:30 in the afternoon. That left me with a good amount of time.

I drove home and got some books and papers so I could study. I also grabbed some breakfast while I was home. I came back and started reading Call of the Wild at the table in the break room. Then I sat on the couch. Then I laid down on the couch. Then I was asleep. Eventually I started snoring and one of my co-workers woke me up. We started talking about how inefficient the bus system is. Of course, as we were talking both of us were getting paid to sit around the break room. Anyways he told me that I should present my ideas to management. So I spent the next 40 minutes outlining one of my ideas that I believe would save the department $10,000 a year and reduce fleet miles by 2,500 miles a year. I told this to my supervisor, and he said I should look into it further. Though I don't know if I want to spend my spare time doing free consulting.

Anyways, it was about time to go get the kids from Target. I decided to stop on the way for a McChicken and Double Cheeseburger. Then I sat in the Target parking lot for 20 minutes waiting for them to come out. When I thought about it I couldn't believe that they would pay to charter a bus to take them to Target. The price to charter a bus is $60 per hour, with a minimum of $180 dollars. So their 6 hour charter for the 25 of them cost $360. They could have taken cab's down there for less money. $360 to take 25 people 2 miles away and back. Wow.

So I dropped them back off at Campus and then I went to go finish of another driver's charter. It was a bunch of High School kids going to some thing at the B-School. I sat in my bus for about half an hour and then drove them back to Huron High School. Then I drove back to base and went home.

I worked over 7 hours today and spent approximately 40 minutes driving people around.

No one explicitly enjoys working, but most people have to in order to make money. So if you must work you should make as much as you can for the least amount of effort and least amount of risk. The only problem is that effort generally affects pay rate. So most high paying jobs require a considerable amount of effort (generally in time and mental strain). But what's weird is that most low paying jobs also require a great deal of effort like being a janitor or coal miner (generally physical). So the best jobs then are the ones that pay well for very little actual work like the students who work at the information desk's or in the fishbowl. It makes me wonder why some people work really hard at jobs that pay so little money, when really anyone can drive a bus, or become a receptionist or something.

So take three jobs students generally have; Cafeteria Worker, Tutor, Drug Dealer, and my job, Bus Driver. On a scale of one to five (five being the highest) here is how I would rate them in effort, risk and payment. Assuming no one gets any satisfaction from their job of course.
































JobEffortRiskPayment
Cafeteria Worker422
Tutor304
Drug Dealer155
Bus Driver213



In terms of an effort to payment rate, I would guess the best job on campus would be dealing drugs. But the only problem is that it is a high risk job. Injury's and arrests would deter me from doing it. The amount of effort that is involved driving a bus to the amount of payment is pretty good. Of course I risk getting a ticket (which is rare in a bus) or getting into an accident. I'm not certain that I have the best job on campus but I feel like compared to many other jobs mine is significantly less taxing and the pay is very decent.

I will say that being a Minority Peer Advisor in a residence hall is probably the best job on campus in terms of effort to pay. Apparently the time commitment is only 15-20 hours a week and for that you get free room and board and a cash stipend of about $3,000.

P.S. I coded the table in HTML myself. Booya! But I can't figure out the gap between the text and the table.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Brian Works at Night

I worked the graveyard shift tonight from 7pm to 3am. I really like working late nights for several reasons; there is almost no traffic, there are almost no passengers, most traffic lights go to blinking red after midnight, there is no rush to get home to do stuff and there are usually drunk people you can fuck with.

For example, around 1:20 I was sitting at CC Little drinking Diet Coke and playing scratch off lotto tickets when these three drunk girls tried to sneak two traffic cones on my bus. The were less than stealthy, but sat in the back to hide their loot. I got up and strolled to the back and asked "Are you ladies in possession of any stolen university property." They nervously stare at each other, while I stare at the traffic cones. The one that hadn't crapped her pants yet started apologizing, but I broke in with a "Well, it looks like I'm going to have to call this one in to DPS." The last girls craps her pants. I turn to go to the radio as the third girl whose voice is trembling in fear of being arrested her first night at Michigan says "Well put them back I promise. Please don't call the cops." By then I couldn't help but turn around and laugh and tell them that I really didn't care if they stole traffic cones. I got you good, fucker.

Later I was being creepy with some drunk freshmen girls and even got invited back to their Bursley dorm room. One of them ran her fingers through my hair. It was pretty cool. To bad that the night was highlighted by a different event one that will have bus 3028 live in infamy.