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Oct. 8th, 2011 08:48 amGot home last night from my first week in the field. I have mixed feelings about it.
I'm not all that impressed with my company right now, mostly for how they treat the field techs. As a field tech, you have to cover all your expenses in the field. All of them. And okay, I suppose that's fair enough since it's not like you can call up the company every time you have to buy a bag of ice. And apparently you can get a company credit card to help with the expenses (although it can take weeks, and the tech training me didn't even have one). But they're so unorganized that they didn't give me a lot of much needed information. Like that I need to purchase all my own tools and equipment, and that these expenses will be out of pocket until they reimburse me...3-5 weeks later. Would've been nice if they'd told me I'd need to put out ~$3000 in the first few weeks. But then, they have a hard enough time keeping people that this would probably scare them off. Of course, finding out from the tech your training with while in the field would probably inspire you to quit anyways, so it`s sort of a lose-lose situation. The lack of communication and proper training is really bothering me here. One of the top ten things on my requirements for a company that I work for is that they treat their employees with respect.
Luckily for me, I`m in the office for the next two weeks, so by the time I`m in the field again, I'll be fine. But man, if they'd sent me out next week, I literally couldn't afford to work. Which is absolutely ridiculous.
BUT despite this (and a few other things I'm not going into here), I really enjoyed the field work! It's so nice to get back into the field again. I mean, there were a lot of frustration involved with locating the monitoring wells that we were sampling groundwater from (one site had them buried beneath ~6 inches of hard, compacted gravel that we had to dig through - my arms are still sore), and the paper work is a nightmare, but I liked it anyways. I'm going to give the company a fair chance. I am only starting, after all, and frankly, knowing these things in the field will make me a better Project Manager (the position they're fast-tracking me for) later on.
I will say that 14 hour days are kind of hard (7:30 am - ~9:30 pm, sometimes later), but they didn't seem that bad, really. You're constantly moving, constantly working, and it's only when you stop to think about it that you get tired, but then you're off again, so it's all moot. The overtime is going to be AWESOME!
In the mean time, I'm going apartment hunting this afternoon! :D
I'm not all that impressed with my company right now, mostly for how they treat the field techs. As a field tech, you have to cover all your expenses in the field. All of them. And okay, I suppose that's fair enough since it's not like you can call up the company every time you have to buy a bag of ice. And apparently you can get a company credit card to help with the expenses (although it can take weeks, and the tech training me didn't even have one). But they're so unorganized that they didn't give me a lot of much needed information. Like that I need to purchase all my own tools and equipment, and that these expenses will be out of pocket until they reimburse me...3-5 weeks later. Would've been nice if they'd told me I'd need to put out ~$3000 in the first few weeks. But then, they have a hard enough time keeping people that this would probably scare them off. Of course, finding out from the tech your training with while in the field would probably inspire you to quit anyways, so it`s sort of a lose-lose situation. The lack of communication and proper training is really bothering me here. One of the top ten things on my requirements for a company that I work for is that they treat their employees with respect.
Luckily for me, I`m in the office for the next two weeks, so by the time I`m in the field again, I'll be fine. But man, if they'd sent me out next week, I literally couldn't afford to work. Which is absolutely ridiculous.
BUT despite this (and a few other things I'm not going into here), I really enjoyed the field work! It's so nice to get back into the field again. I mean, there were a lot of frustration involved with locating the monitoring wells that we were sampling groundwater from (one site had them buried beneath ~6 inches of hard, compacted gravel that we had to dig through - my arms are still sore), and the paper work is a nightmare, but I liked it anyways. I'm going to give the company a fair chance. I am only starting, after all, and frankly, knowing these things in the field will make me a better Project Manager (the position they're fast-tracking me for) later on.
I will say that 14 hour days are kind of hard (7:30 am - ~9:30 pm, sometimes later), but they didn't seem that bad, really. You're constantly moving, constantly working, and it's only when you stop to think about it that you get tired, but then you're off again, so it's all moot. The overtime is going to be AWESOME!
In the mean time, I'm going apartment hunting this afternoon! :D
