On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, J. van Baardwijk wrote:
> At 22:03 28-1-01 -0600, Dan Minette wrote:
>
> >>Arrange for the necessary glasses, cups and plates and afterwards >wash
> >>them and put them back where you got them.
> >
> >Paper cups and plates, thrown in the garbage.
>
> How environmentally incorrect!
Yeah. What I remember at one place was, you take out the plates, use
them, maybe rinse them and maybe don't, pile them in and around the sink,
and when the 2 non-techie women working there get fed up with it enough,
they take the time to wash them (but also discuss stuff, maybe some of it
work-related, while they do it) and put them away. Kind of an opportunity
for a female-bonding moment.
And the aluminum recycling was kind of iffy, at best, there, as well. But
nothing that could be used in a network ever got thrown out, even if it
was a busted piece of crap.
> >You actually have people to make you coffee? Europe is so different from
> >the US. Here, if you don't make your own coffee, you are considered stuck
> >up...unless your a VP or higher.
>
> Around here, few companies still have people who make coffee for everyone.
> It's mostly coffee vending machines here. IMHO, replacing the "coffee lady"
> with those machines was a huge mistake.
I'd wonder about the quality of the coffee, doing that. I've worked at 2
small places and one huge one. At the first small place, if you finished
off the pot, you made the next one, and since I didn't know what I was
doing as far as making coffee went, I didn't bother. (And I had free
access to someone's private little fridge of Coca-cola, so if I really
needed the caffeine, I could get it from there.) At the large place,
there was a cafeteria, and it was someone's job to make sure there was a
sufficient supply of hot coffee there, and you had to pay for each cup you
drank. Maybe the managers in my area had their own little coffeemaker, I
wouldn't have had access to it. The second small place didn't have a
coffeemaker period, until a certain someone came along and decided this
was a definite lack; a coffeemaker was found (bummed off of someone who
didn't need it, IIRC), and coffeemaking was the responsibility of the 2 or
3 people who actually wanted to drink the stuff.
But the quality of the coffee can't be that much worse than what I did the
last time I tried to make it. My sister took 3 sips, then poured out the
pot and brewed a fresh one. (Like I know how much to use in the machine?)
> >But, when it comes down to it, none of the people I talked about were the
> >minimum wage folks. Administrative assistants make about 2x to 3x minimum
> >wage.
>
> Are they so highly paid, or is minimum wage so low in the US? In my
> country, 1.5 x minimum wage is considered high pay for that kind of work.
> I've done that work for some 10 years, but I never got paid that kind of
> money for it.
I think that maybe minimum wage in the US is relatively low compared to
Europe. Not that I made as much as 2X minimum wage at any point in the
3-job career mentioned above, but at 2 of the jobs, I was working to
benefit other family members as much as to enrich myself (my father-in-law
owned stock in both small companies I worked at), and the other paid
better than the others, at least initially. (But the structure was more
binding than I liked.)
Julia
