Here's a bitch fest waiting to be released upon the internets.
So I took a contracting job in Cambridge, MA. An hour drive on a good day from where I live. I decided to take it, anyway.
The premise is, $15/hour, 5 consecutive days. Friday-Tuesday.
I get there, find out there are thirteen contractors for this 5-days stint, plus 4 longer-term people that have been there a while.
We also find out the times we are supposed to get there; 8:30AM. I get there about 8, a much larger portion arrive just about 8:30. We wait, we sit. I sat nothing to a couple of guys sitting there waiting with me. Finally we get brought into the building (sitting in an access-controlled lobby), and get told 'Oh, I wasn't expecting you guys until 12 or 1" and he brings us down to their 'base of operations'.
We then sit around from ~9AM to 4:30PM. Doing nothing. I mean, nothing constructive to the project. We shoot the shit. Talk anime, games, music, raves, shitty co-workers, horrible business practices, etc, etc. We leave whenever we feel like it; take a walk, get a coffee, eat lunch.......We find out before the PM ninjas his way into oblivion, that we are also not working the weekend. That's ~16 hours minimum. Gone.
Now 4:30 rolls around and we 'have a meeting' and it was one of the least productive, informative, or even fucking necessary meetings I've ever been in. After the meeting is 'done', being something that should have taken no more than 10 minutes, turned into 45 (I dunno how it happened), we are told we need to go around the building (and this is not a nicely laid out buidling, map-wise) and stick some paper to the users' doors. At 5PM on a Friday. REALLY!? Because we didn't have all fucking day to do anything like this, right!?...........
I eventually left at 6:15 and put down 6:30; it was approved anyway.
Monday rolls around, and we are supposed to be there at 6:45AM for a 7AM start. Fucking retarded. No one comes in until about 8 anyway. We have to wait for the people to come in on their own, then find out if they had been through the checklist they should have had e-mailed and printed out. Because users listen to every little thing IT says to do. Of course.
I get into a bit of a hissy with one of the guys, whom I had a decent rapport with on Friday. He apparently NARCs on me to the recruiter over a simple difference of opinion on how to troubleshoot an error. I no longer work today.
Recruiter asks me about it, I tell him, he asks who it was (I know he knows, he just wants to hear it from me), I tell him, he speaks like this has happened before with this specific contractor, and says he's "a bit of a bitch". His words, not mine. Also, entertaining and slightly vindicating.
That's my bitch session for today.......