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Wednesday, 22 March 2006
2049 - It feels just a little weird...
Once upon a time, at a previous employer, my job required that I talk to folks around the world. The first time it came up, I asked my boss, "How do I call Hong Kong?" To my great surprise, he replied, "Pick up the phone, dial 9,011, the country code and the number." No authorizations, no operators, no special codes, just call. Before I left that job, I'd become blase about telling the modem program to just dial a number in Turkey to make sure the access codes we were giving someone traveling would work. At first, though, it felt more than a little weird to just pick up the phone and call anywhere I needed to without having to worry about it.
I'm having the same kind of experience with Savail. My previous employer was quite parsimonious with travel: I always had to take the lowest fare, regardless of how inconvenient it turned out being; my hotels were always booked through Hotwire; and they didn't pay for meals on the road at all. ("You'd have to eat anyway.")
Savail is different. No, I don't travel first class, and no, I don't get to book the Presidential Suite, but I can take nonstop flights if they're not grossly more expensive, and I can stay in nice places, and I get reimbursed for meals.
It's the same kind of weird feeling. I expect I'll become blase about it again, but for the moment, I'm enjoying it.
current mood: ![[mood icon]](https://www.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/pleased.gif) pleased
current music: ZZ Top - Antenna Head
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Comments:
They didn't pay for meals?! That's insane.
You may have had to eat anyway, but the cost of a meal prepared from items bought in a grocery store is a fraction of the cost of buying food at a restaurant. The least they should do is reimburse you for receipts. And expecting somebody to eat fast food the whole time is not an option either. In my first "real" job, the boss was a cheapskate par excellence. He could worry for hours if it might not be cheaper for the company to have me bring a PeeCee to a customer using Public Transport (and taking over an hour for it, not to mention hauling a fucking big and heavy box) or just getting a taxi. He also took his sweet time thinking about how he could "save" money in not buying hardware, be it a RAM upgrade I'd have needed because NT4's more bloated than 3.51 or a 15-buck electric screwdriver that would've saved us quite some pain in assembling PCs.
Then I went to work a state-run insurance, and it got even worse - not using Public Transport was only possible when there was no other possibility, having to take inventory of all the 300-odd PCs in the house before buying a friggin' new harddisk for mine and so on.
Working for $ISP afterwards was kinda like a revelation in that regard. 'course, nowadays, I have another cheapskate for a boss. <sigh> *hugs*
I'm really happy to hear about the improvments, and glad you get to enjoy them!!! |
