Another Week, Another Team Meeting

All we talked about today in team was the meaning and application of the word "flex."  Now, most of the people on our team use that word to mean that if they work overtime one day, they shave some time off another day in the same pay period to even it up.  There is no such thing as overtime for us, so it's pretty important to do that in order to prevent seething resentment, releasing piranhas into the water cooler and walking off the job suddenly on a random Wednesday, never to return.  The dark overlords know we do it, they completely support us in doing it, and nobody that I've ever heard about has a problem with it.  In fact, it would be impossible to do our jobs any other way; we have to meet people at home around their work and school schedules, soccer games, camping trips, dance classes, and so forth.  And we have to manage unexpected crises which can strand us in the office half the night when we were planning to be asleep in bed, documenting a police contact or something fun like that.  There's really no way to get all our work done unless we constantly shift our hours around, especially when you consider the rules that everything we do has to be documented and signed within 24 hours of our doing anything. 

But the higher ups don't see flex time exactly the way we do.  They recently had our supervisors conduct a survey to determine who on our team would like to "flex" their hours in a totally different way. They decided to do the survey because one of those supervisors asked to change her hours around so she can have 3-day weekends in exchange for longer workdays.  So this is what they mean by "flexing" your hours:  you exchange five 8-hour days per week for four 10-hour days.  Not once in a while: forever.  If you're allowed to "flex," you "flex" every week, exactly the same way, by prearrangement.

So if they allow us to "flex" our hours by their definition, it becomes a lot less, um, flexible.  Most of us refused the option, some rudely.  We don't want to "flex" our hours because it will keep us from flexing our hours.

Another triumph of bureaucracy!