The More I Learn.

Week 1 has come to a close. I've got two more days with a teammate on my shift and then I've pretty much got the run of the place to myself. There's still a few people in the other buildings, Helpdesk, Security, miscellaneous System Admins in to work on their machines, etc... but I can go the whole night without seeing another person. There seems to be a much lower workload at night, mainly doing installs and upgrades that have been scheduled well in advance, and since it's not normal working hours the few calls I get seem to have a little less urgency attatched to them. This doesn't mean I'm going to slack though, if it's work related then it automatically gets flagged as urgent in my brain and everything else becomes a secondary concern. It's that combination of extreme work ethic and extreme laziness that makes me an efficiency expert. I get the job done right and in as little time as possible so that I can get back to doing my own thing and remain undisturbed as long as possible. Now if only I could apply that to my personal life instead of just my professional one.

I came across an interesting moral dilemma last night. A little background to start it out. I work in a 24*7 environment. For those of you that are unfamiliar with this, that means that someone is there ALL the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365.242199 days a year. Most companies that do this generally have four shifts of people working 12 hours at a time on some sort of schedule where one week you work four days and the next you work three. Now it just so happens that the contracting agency that I'm working for has a different end of week than the company I work at. It's going to work out that I'll have FIVE days on one paycheck and two on the next. So instead of the more normal 40+8 and 36 hour paychecks, I'm going to have a 40+20 and a 24. Or in other words I'll be working 84 hours every two weeks, and originally I thought I'd be getting paid for 88 (anything over forty hours gets paid at one and a half times the normal rate) but it turns out I'll be getting paid for 94 hours every two weeks instead. So the dilemma is this: Do I call my contracting agency and possibly give them a heads up that their current system is going to increase my pay by about 7%, or just wait until they get my timecards and a nasty shock to boot?