Welp,
my anxieties were confirmed: I didn't pass the end-of-training quality audit for the new job, and am once again quite entirely unemployed. Judging by my ranking (most accurate, and 3rd fastest among my training peers) it wasn't because of a lack of speed or quality, but the result of some bollocks fiscal policy on the part of my Temporary Employment agency, and what I'm going to call bad luck (since "sabotage" suggests it was intentional, and I'd prefer not to think about what that implies). I wasn't the only one either; the other college student in my team and outright best among us was also sent packing, and there may have been one more after us. That's 2 or 3 out of 7 of their new hires. Yep.
As far as what I'm at liberty to talk about, the job involved scanning documents for a digital database. For the audit, we were expected to scan three 300+ page documents in a row, without a single blur, smudge, crop, shadow, or other imperfection. On top of that, we were expected to scan an average of 2 pages every 5 seconds. If there was damage to a page, we had to greenscreen the damaged sections with a colored backdrop, so that useful text could still be extracted; greenscreening and scanning a pair of damaged pages takes (at my best) about 6-8 seconds, and we were expected to make up that lost time by doing future pages faster, which is doable when you're dealing with it only every so often.
However, for the last few days I'd been seeing some pretty thoroughly ruined texts; 6-10 pages at a time were shredded, each requiring extensive bracing and screening, and as such were exceptionally easy to warp or blur. My trainer said that they generally used damaged documents to challenge trainees and prepare them to deal with exceptional cases like that, but she admitted that they've gotten far too torn and wrecked from past training groups to still be using them. Nevertheless, she assured me I wouldn't be seeing that sort during my audit.
Naturally, when my audit came around, I was given a cart with 8 or more multi-volume documents from the 60s and earlier, with stained and brittle pages, and with binding either completely shredded and loose, or so tight I couldn't press it flat enough to make all the text visible. To top it off, they had a long history of past trainees dealing with them, which resulted in serious shredding, tearing, and general ruination throughout. All my texts weren't that bad; in fact, the better half of them were fine, and I breezed right through them. However, company policy was to scan them in the precise order you were given them (or again face immediate termination), and I needed to get 3 perfect scans in a row. Each time I hit a pocket of nice texts, one of the horrible old ones would pop up, frequently enough to ruin every good run I was on.
Long story short, by the time noon rolled around and my auditing window was over, I wasn't able to hit my target, and they terminated my contract.
On a related note, I recently learned that the agency I was contracting through earned a sizable "Finder's Fee" just for hiring a new worker on. I don't know who came up with the idea, but it's fantastic for the agency; not only can they deal with a high turnover rate with a huge pool of applicants, but they actually benefit from quickly firing a percentage of their new hires, and opening more applications. I noticed they had been constantly hiring for months on end, but never thought much of it until now. Might go some ways toward explaining some of my area's unemployment problems too.
Anyway, I spent the rest of my afternoon firing off more apps. I'm hoping the library opens up a slot soon, because I've been wanting to work there for a while. We shall see.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9718113 times)