Autism and Employment (another PennSilverTaco thread)!

first line supervisor at a power plant.

 

Some people chalk up my attitude towards the detail shop as being a typical millennial, but it really wasn't...

I got paid per vehicle rather than per hour, and the lack of air-conditioning in the shop did not help in the slightest. Mandatory Saturday shifts for part-time workers like myself definitely contributed as well, and then the detailers were looked down upon by pretty much every other department. The parking situation was a total clusterfuck, as we had to share with the accounting/administrative department, the body shop, and the tow truck truck drivers. The tow truck drivers were monumental dickheads who felt like they were entitled to primo spots, and on one occasion one guy parked his Dodge Ram on an angle so he took up two spots. One of the benefits of a Toyota Tacoma is that they are incredibly nimble trucks, capable of going where much larger trucks cannot go; I parked the son of a bitch in. The head tow truck driver told me at least once not to park in "his yard", but I just ignored him and did it anyway. He wasn't the boss of me, and I think he knew that if he touched my truck he would be in a world of hurt legally and possibly physically.

 

Why did you hate it?

 

This has been my attitude for years...

 

Upper management had unrealistic expectations I was required to enforce

the folks I supervised were union so I had no direct impact on their performance reviews or pay

the work sucked, everything was always an emergency.

the company treated your asshole like an amusement park

 

My current job is a great job, but it's a bit boring right now because things are are slow. My coworkers, my pay, the benefits, and the overall environment are incredible though.

In terms of sheer excitement, barbacking at Puck was my favorite job ever. To date, working at Puck still holds the record for the longest consecutive period that I have been employed at one place. Specifically, it was November 2014 to January 2019, and the only reason I left was because Puck closed indefinitely due to circumstances beyond my control.

Working at Spirit Halloween in 2021, while it only lasted a little over a month because it was seasonal, was also an incredibly fun job; I got paid ten bucks an hour to assemble animatronic displays and help people pick out costumes. My biggest complaint was that masks were mandatory for all employees, regardless of vaccination status, unless they had a major medical issue. One of my supervisors got an exemption from his doctor due to asthma and did not have to wear a mask. Having to wear a mask on the floor only succeeded in fueling my blistering hatred towards wearing masks for extended periods of time. Thankfully, the mask mandate for Spirit Employees has been dropped, but the Montgomeryville store didn't happen this year; I worked at the Warrington store last year, but they took on a lot of associates from Montgomeryville and basically overhired. I tried to apply at the Warminster location, but they also overhired and I was unable to get the job...

​

 

I do not like unions for reasons to numerous to list, some of which cannot be discussed publicly on TW...

What was the pay like?

 

Pay was about average, but not worth it. I have a theory about a pay to bullshit scale, the point where those lines intersect is where I either demand a raise or look for another job.

 

The pay to bullshit scale is exactly why I left the detail shop after ten months!

 

I was in a union before in Shaw's Supermarket. Didn't like it, but in my case the union stewards were also department managers..they would go to bat for them and their colleagues, not the little guy.

 

Worst jobs? Small family owned businesses. If you're part of the family that's great, everyone else is second class.

Best job? Union. Worked in 2 union shops for a total of more than 32 years including time spent as a shift rep. You had a contract that spelled things out and far less issues with favoritism and making exceptions for people because they sucked up to the boss.

 

I hated when restaurants made me prepare the customers' drinks...

 

Which restaurants did that?

 

Fast food joints like McDonald's and Wendy's, and we are talking during COVID. You would think that in the interest of not spreading germs, they would keep third party handling of both food and beverages to a minimum!

 

@Cpl. Punishment

Walmart orders were the absolute worst, and it go to the point where I absolutely refused to accept ANY Walmart orders. For starts, the base pay wasn't particularly high, and DoorDash would stack Walmart orders so it looked like the payout was incredibly high, in order to trick unsuspecting Dashers into accepting them. It is not uncommon to get a Walmart order of $24+, and then you look closer and realize it's three or four orders ranging from less than $6 to maybe $8 at the most. Then, there was the guy in January 2021 who thought that I was a porch pirate stealing the Walmart order I was actually delivering...

The is one of the few times I've actually feared for my safety while Dashing. I backed my truck into the guy's driveway, and my guess would be that he missed my arriving, but happened to glance out the window as I was walking up his front walk. He came out of the front door and demanded, and I quote, "Who are you and what are you doing?!?!" I told this guy, who was probably in his 50s at the youngest, that I was with DoorDash. He looked at me skeptically and said he'd never heard of DoorDash (specifically, "Never heard of 'em")...

I said that I was a DoorDash driver, and that I'd just picked up his order from Walmart. He recognized some of the items in the bag as being items that he'd purchased, and he believed me, but some of the items were missing. He didn't seem to be too upset about that, and took the order without incident.

I've read stories from other Dashers online about how Walmart subcontracts out to DoorDash to take the load off some of their delivery drivers, but do not bother to tell the customer who called for home delivery that their order is going to be delivered by a DoorDash driver in their personal vehicle. When someone orders food through DoorDash, the app shows them a picture of me and tells them I'll be driving a silver Toyota Tacoma, even going so far as to list my license plate number.

On the same day the paranoid and technologically impaired man thought I was stealing his Walmart purchase, I delivered another Walmart order to the home of a married couple. The wife had apparently ordered some cleaning supplies without telling her husband, and this led to the husband coming outside and asking what I doing when he saw an unfamiliar silver Tacoma backing into his driveway. In this case, the customer knew a DoorDash driver would be delivering her WalMart purchase, but it really helps if the customer notifies everyone in the house that there is a delivery coming!

 

I first started doing DoorDash in July 2019 and did it fairly regularly up until February 2020, then COVID happened and I went on hiatus until January 2021. Most of my noteworthy encounters occurred after I came back from my pandemic-induced hiatus. I then had a minor fender bender in June 2021 that was my fault, and which I attribute to lack of sleep from pushing myself too hard. I went on hiatus again until early December, and then I stopped for good in March 2022 when gas prices got too damn high to turn a profit.

 

@ColoradoTJ
@Cpl. Punishment
@shakerhood
@TnShooter
@wilcam47

My truck would probably have at least 10K fewer miles than it presently has at the moment if it weren't for DoorDash. In 2021, DoorDash started logging the amount of miles Dashers drove while making delivery, and I put well over 7K miles on my truck in 2021 just doing DoorDash; I have been driving the shit out of my truck since the summer of 2019, but everything other than DoorDash has been almost exclusively highway miles.

My truck had lower-than-average miles for almost the first decade of ownership; I only put a little over 7,400 miles on my truck in the first year of ownership. My dad bought the truck on September 30th, 2009; Pennsylvania requires emissions testing for all gas-powered vehicles newer than 1974 in 25 out of 67 counties. When a vehicle passes or fails an emisisons test, it is logged on that vehicle's Carfax report along with the odometer reading at the time of the inspection. My truck's Carfax report is a pretty good timeline of how many miles I put it on a yearly basis. New vehicles are exempt from emissions testing in PA, and vehicles purchased new from a dealer in PA come with the emissions and safety stickers free of charge; I have included the date my dad bought the truck...

September 30th, 2009: 20 miles
October 7th, 2010: 7,414 miles

It is worth noting that I only had a learner's permit when my dad bought the truck; I took my driver's test in this very truck on May 19th, 2011. Even after getting my license, I didn't drive my truck a whole hell of a lot...

August 31st, 2011: 13,130 miles
October 26th, 2012: 21,934 miles
October 31st, 2013: 32,243 miles
September 10th, 2014: 40,150 miles

I got my first real job (barbacking at Puck) in November 2014 and graduated from college in May 2015. I also delivered pizzas for extra money during the summer of 2015, and ran errands for a friend who owned another restaurant, so this is when my truck's mileage started to really roll up; I would say that my truck's mileage caught up with it's age in late 2018...

October 20th, 2015: 53,812 miles
October 11th, 2016: 67,038 miles
October 17th, 2017: 77,719 miles
October 2nd, 2018: 88,351 miles

I hit 89K in mid-October while up in the Wilkes-Barre area helping my cousin move furniture out of her apartment and into her new house; I hit a solid 90K on Thanksgiving Eve that year while driving a drunk friend home, and then I hit 100K in mid-July 2019. 100K is generally considered "high", but for a Tacoma that been with the same owner for nearly a decade, it was low...

September 6th, 2019: 104,235 miles
August 17th, 2020: 116,279 miles

2021 still holds the record for being the year when I put more miles on my truck than any other year in the 13 years I've owned it, for a staggering 20K miles in one year! I hit 120K on November 3rd, 2020 just to give you an idea of how quickly I was racking up miles...

August 16th, 2021: 136,834

My truck had 138,651 miles when the frame perforation was discovered on September 24th, 2021. It had like just over 140K miles when the dealer replaced the frame a week before Thanksgiving.

September 28th, 2022: 157,280 miles

My truck passed the emissions test and safety inspection on September 12th, 2022. It overheated five days later. The 2022 emissions test hasn't made it onto my Carfax report yet, so the above mileage listing is from when my mechanic replaced the thermostat and heater bypass pipe. My mechanic switched to a new system in the week between inspecting my truck and replacing the aforementioned parts, and as a result he wasn't logging any service records to Carfax; PennDOT automatically reports emissions testing and safety inspection info to Carfax, but if it is done by a shop that doesn't report stuff to Carfax, it can take MONTHS for PennDOT to report it.

If I had driven the truck up to Massachusetts and back this past September, and driven it to the two car shows a couple weeks ago that I drove my mom's Nissan to, I would probably be closer to 160K now; I believe my odometer reading at the time I handed the truck off to the dealer on Monday morning was 158,201...

 

Walmart's website is so weird now. It's like they're trying to be another Amazon or something. I can't buy anything online from them any more.

 

In the summer of 2019 when I was still doing Uber Eats regularly, someone tried to pull this shit with me; I picked up an order at Friendly's and delivered it to a townhouse, and upon arrival the customer discovered that a significant portion of the order was missing. The customer expected me to drive all the way back to the restaurant and get the rest of the food; I was done for the day and only a mile from home, and I told him that it was the restaurant's fault and not mine, and to take it up with Uber. He seemed fine with this, but I didn't know how to cancel the order or file a complaint with Uber; I accidentally clicked the button that completed the order and the customer got charged for it. I discovered later that day that he's nuked me in the ratings department...

 

The damn review is still on my record, more than three years later. In my opinion, just another customer with a sense of entitlement, and this was before COVID happened!