robotech_master

So, a few days ago, I received an email inviting me to participate in a class-action lawsuit against my employer Anthem, on behalf of employees who had been required to be at work before clocking in or after clocking out, to be able to start taking calls on time or finish leftover work. Basically, they're accusing Anthem of wage theft, and not without cause.

I'm well acquainted with this cause, because for the first couple of years I worked there, up until about a year ago, I had to do that myself. We had to be at work 5 to 10 minutes ahead of time so that we had ample time to log into our computers and launch all the apps we needed, so that we could take calls at the stroke of the top of the hour. It was annoying to me, but given that Amazon's warehouse workers lost their lawsuit over having to get to work 25 minutes early so they could go through security to get in, it didn't seem like there was much hope it would change. Then, surprise! About a year ago, it did change after all. We got 10 minutes at the start of our shift after clocking in to log in, boot up all our apps, and start taking calls, and we have ever since. And I'm pleased with that, even though I work from home now. It might not be worth all that much, but it's the principle of the thing.

As aggravated as I was with the injustice of the thing before they finally switched practices, you'd think I'd want to hop right on that lawsuit. But I'm still on the fence, as there are a couple of things holding me back. For one thing, I'm not sure just how likely it is the suit can actually win. After all, if Amazon's workers could be denied 25 minutes of payment per day, what are our chances of getting 5 or 10? (Though apparently the Amazon lawsuit isn't entirely done yet, and the workers are having another go at it, so maybe they could still turn it around.) And the lawsuit page warns that people who join in the suit "may be required to pay a portion of Anthem’s costs" if Anthem wins. Even if Anthem loses (or settles), class action lawsuits don't generally have a good track record of garnering large payouts to class members. So I'm not sure it's worth potentially putting myself on the hook for legal fees in return for maybe ten or twenty bucks if I'm lucky. Class-action suits are more meant to punish the perpetrator for wrongdoing than enrich the members of the class, and they can undoubtedly punish Anthem just fine without my participation.

Also, even though the law forbids Anthem from retaliating against people for taking part in such a lawsuit, I'm not so sure that I want my name on the list of people who did that, given that it might well influence future decisions they make about me even if they don't directly retaliate against me. I do kind of like my job, and don't think I'd want to do anything to endanger it even indirectly. And since they already fixed the early login issue a year back, and I'm no longer being required to work several unpaid minutes a day, it's not like I even really need to participate. I've already got the better outcome I was hoping for.

So, really, I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. But I have until October 3 to make up my mind.

Well, turns out I was mistaken about what package was arriving yesterday. Wasn't the masks after all, but the eight boxes of Girl Scout cookies I had mail-ordered since it's not safe for girls to set up tables or go door to door right now. The masks won't be in 'til sometime next week, it looks like. On the downside, I still have to wait for the masks…but on the bright side, I've got Girl Scout cookies! One of the less-often-discussed perks of adulthood is that you can eat as many Girl Scout cookies as you want in one sitting, because there's nobody around to tell you that you can't.

And it seems good things come in threes. I made another fortunate discovery as I was about to go to bed last night—a forgotten bottle of loratadine (generic Claritin) allergy medication in my closet. This is good, because that's one that Anthem won't fill via mail-order any longer, so I'd have to go to a doctor's office to get it—and with the clinic I usually visit in the downtown office building closed, I'd need to contact the health provider and find out where else I could visit in person to pick some up, then expose myself to the world to go and do it.

Not terribly eager to ride a bus at the present time, but I don't have any alternative way of getting down town. Except for bicycling, I suppose. But then I'd either have to bicycle back or ride the bus back. Fortunately, thanks to this fortunate closet discovery, I can hold off on that a little longer. At least until my new masks have arrived.

And here I am again. I must confess, this "novel coronavirus" is quickly losing its novelty.

Still, work went pretty well. The downtown office complex is fully open again, so more people were on the phones—and four more people from my team were being dispatched to work-from-home effective immediately, so good to know that there will be more workforce on hand should the building need to be closed down again. I only hope none of them are already infected.

I'm probably using Grubhub more than I should, but I'm on a free trial of their $10/month program that provides free delivery as long as I order at least $12 in food. And it's nice not to have to go out, and some pretty decent restaurants are on it. If you want to help me defray my costs, and haven't tried GrubHub yourself yet, this referral link will get both you and me $5 off our next orders.

And incidentally, if you're looking for something fun to watch, CBS All Access just announced a 1-month-free promo. (It's pitched as a way to watch Picard for free, but you can watch Discovery and any other All Access show during the month.) Given that CBS had to know that a lot of people were just waiting for the show to be finished before signing up for one month to binge, they're undoubtedly foregoing a good chunk of revenue, which is nice when so many of us are stuck at home anyway due to the national virus crisis. But you do have to provide payment information to sign up, and remember to cancel before the month is up, as with any other free trial, so I guess there's that.

Our #StarTrekPicard season finale is Thursday, and starting today until 4/23, you can watch for free on @CBSAllAccess in the US with the code: GIFT. https://t.co/i2IfFQN3I8

It's felt good to bring Picard back. I can't wait to reunite with our cast and crew for Season 2. pic.twitter.com/lSmtMxgrN8

— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 24, 2020

Posted a couple more pieces to TeleRead: a story about how this is hitting comic shops last night, and a piece about distributor Ingram staying open despite the virus just now. So I guess this virus thing is moving me to write more in general after all. 

I'm still amazed at how fortunate I am, this one time in my life, to be working, from home, in a field that probably won't be harmed by the virus. At a time when so many of my friends are unemployed, or, worse, employed in "essential jobs" that involve public exposure, I'm safely sequestered at home with my cats, still earning a living. I really hope nothing happens to screw this up.

I am worried about the overall effects of the crisis, how it's going to affect people I know and care about. I wonder which one of my friends or family will be the first to come down with the virus, and whether any of them will die. My friends and I all mostly young enough that we'll probably pull through, but it's not a chance I want to take. And then there are the older generation. 

This is going to get much worse before it gets better. I desperately hope that at least some of the people responsible for the delays in imposing the universal restrictions we need get to enjoy the symptoms, at length.

Work just emailed me tonight that one of the workers in the office building where I used to work before being sent home has tested positive for the Coronavirus. Anyone known to have had direct contact with them has been notified, which apparently didn't include any of my co-workers. That's why they had the building shut down for the week for deep cleaning.

Of course, there's no way of knowing who else in that building might have had casual contact with them that was sufficient for transmission but not sufficient to warrant notification. Even someone who just shared an elevator could have been exposed. Hopefully they'll send as many of them home as possible now, so that they can self-quarantine and keep from infecting anyone else if they are. And I'm more thankful than ever that I'm out of that place and safely sequestered in my attic work-and-play space.

Something like that really brings it home to you. The world's changed outright, over just a couple of weeks. Who knows what it'll look like in a few more?

It started out like any other Monday. Then about half an hour into my shift, my manager asked me to come to a conference room. I went more than a little nervously, my "principal's office" instincts acting up…then you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when I found out what she wanted.

About a month ago, she'd put me in for some kind of "job progression" thing. I'm not entirely sure what it means, or if there are more responsibilities that come with it, but anyway, the upshot of it is, I'm getting an 11% raise. Without going into specifics, this is going to mean a salary bump in the low hundreds of dollars per month, the low thousands per year, for me. It's also going to mean the scads of overtime hours I'm currently working are going to become even more lucrative. I started working at the higher pay rate today, and will first see it reflected in the paycheck I'll get two weeks from Friday.

I'm still kind of stunned. It feels like I'm finally starting to win at adulting.

( It's been a hard financial slog for years, but now it feels like I'm finally starting to break even. )

I suppose that when you get right down to it, I feel…at least 80% wealthy. A lot of people wish they could be wealthy just for all the things they could buy—but for the last few years, I've wished for wealth just so I wouldn't have to worry about living from paycheck to paycheck and not overdrawing. And now, at least for now, I have that. I have the thing that was 80% of what I wished to be wealthy for. So, I guess I'm 80% wealthy.

And it's a rich man's world.

Training has been going better, the last week or so. We've been working with actual systems involved in doing the kind of work we're going to be doing on the phones (though they're the older, more complicated system that most representatives don't use anymore, because the new one still isn't available to us yet), which has given us the chance to get a better idea of how the whole process works together. But perhaps more helpfully to me, I finally got the chance to sit and observe an experienced Utilization Management representative on the phone for an hour or so, and get a better picture of the kinds of things I'll actually be doing.

I think that hour of listening probably did more to reduce my level of stress about the new job than anything else. The systems she used might be unfamiliar to me, but they weren't anywhere near as complicated as the ones we've been training on. And if I'm not entirely familiar with the processes she was going through, I recognized the same sort of practiced efficiency I worked my way up to in prior tech support or customer service jobs, once I had the chance to learn my way around the systems and processes. Everything seemed like something I could learn to do myself, given time. And once the classroom instruction is over, I'll get more of a chance to learn by doing when I apprentice to one of those experienced workers for a couple of weeks.

There will probably still be plenty of moments where I'm unsure of what to do and have to yell for help in the instant messenger chat room, but those will taper off and after a few weeks I'll be most of the way to being a pro. And that's quite relaxing.

Meanwhile, starting Sunday when I went to see a couple of Roger Moore Bond movies in theaters, and carrying on all this week, I've been bicycling home in the evening rather than taking the bus. It was 8 miles from the Bond movies, and it's 5 miles home from work. The exercise is good for me, and I think the exercising may be helping me sleep a little better. (Though I do still get up in the middle of the night, and at the moment have had to dose myself with benadryl to get back to sleep by morning. But that'll pass, I'm sure.) I can also claim workout credit for it at the fitness center, and once I earn 17 credits I get the use of a locker for a month—at which point I might even try biking in, since I'll be able to bring a towel and stuff so I can shower the sweat off before work. Sadly, I'm not really saving any money that way, as I bought a monthly bus pass. In fact, I'm losing a little money by only using it one-way each day. But the dividend in health, and in convenience of not having to fumble for change every day, is probably still worth it.

I'm also keeping track of my blood pressure on a daily basis thanks to the fitness center. It's a bit high, and I'll be medicating for that once I can see the doctor after my Anthem benefits kick in in July, but I'm sure the doctor will be happy to see how faithfully I've been keeping track of the readings.

Speaking of sleeping, I should go ahead and get to bed. I'm glad to be feeling better about this job. Fingers crossed that the rest of the training goes well and the initial awkwardness passes quickly.

The job training proceeds apace. We're learning a number of useful things, still out of context, but at least we're starting to get some vague ideas about how they'll come together. I got to work with one of the systems I'd used in one of my previous temp job sessions, and was happy to find I still remembered a number of useful details about how it worked that helped me even though I was using a different part of it than I had in the old job.

Investigated the benefits I'm going to get at the start of the month after I've been there 30 days—as of July 1. Some fairly decent health plans, and less expensive to me than the ACA plan I'm currently on. There's even a Flex account that I can put some money into and Anthem will, too. The problem is knowing how much to put in, especially since it's going to be pro-rated for the half a year since my coverage starts. I'm hoping to get a sleep study done, which might lead to a CPAP machine, which I'll be on the hook for up to the deductible, so putting some tax-free money aside might be useful—but I don't know how much the machine would be, or even if/when I can actually schedule the appointments and sleep study and stuff. It'll be a lot easier to do that sort of stuff once I'm on the 11 to 8 shift, since I'll have those three morning hours in which I can schedule them—but by that time I'll be well past the end of my open enrollment period when I can decide how much to put in. Sigh.

There's going to be a 401K, too. If I contribute 5% of my salary, I can max out Anthem's contribution matching at 4%. It's kind of late in my life to get started saving for retirement, but something is better than nothing no matter when you start I guess. And I think I put something into a 401K at one of my previous full-time employers-with-benefits—Mihlfeld or TeleTech—and I've been trying to get in touch with them to investigate that because I can apparently roll them over into Anthem's 401K if I did. But the Mihlfeld benefits person was out of the office today, and the TeleTech person is overseas and apparently nearly impossible to contact. Meh. Will keep trying.

Here's another fun benefit: for the first time in I don't know how long, I'll get a day off on Monday as a paid holiday, thanks to my full-time associate status. For those holidays that fall after my training is over, I can even choose to work the day at a greater-than-usual holiday pay rate, which will be a nice bonus.

At any rate, after this first week of training, I'm really looking forward to that 3-day weekend!

So, here I am. Day before I begin my new job at my old workplace. ( Jitters and stuff. )

Anyway, that's all from here. Starting tomorrow, "They call me the working man / I guess that's what I am."