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Sunday, March 30, 2014

And working conditions continue to deteriorate in the industry

I got an email the other day from co-author Raised by Wolverines, who has not posted in a coon's age. His email amounts to a post, warning temps away from an agency I can't, unfortunately, identify by name. Conditions there are interesting, to say the least:
They have the doors to all the rooms locked and closed all the time.
You need a key to get in and out of your review room. If you forget
your key any one day, it is apparently a serious offense. (Of course,
leaving the door open so they do not have to worry about people
leaving their keys at home is not considered a serious option )
Their new [project manager] is a total idiot who spends most of his time worrying
about how they are going to treat logos/gifs attached to documents.
We are on a review with a very narrow geographical limitation in one
state but the client has sites and work in a number of states. We
were using Google to determine if a particular site in a document was
within the geographical region. But then [the agency] decided to remove
internet access and said go to the two internet computers to find out.
(To which I said I do not get paid to get out of my chair, walk across
the room, sit down in front of another computer to find out relevant
info when I could do it at my desk.)
We were subjected to a lecture that we can improve our review rate by
staying in our chairs longer instead of taking breaks. To which I
responded by coding 1000 docs in 8 hours. And finally the assistant
[project manager] took five minutes to explain that some reviewers checked back in
batches that were not complete and we should feel free to sign them
out and only review the unreviewed documents. He simply could not
explain that and the riff raff working there got awfully confused.
Stay away. You have been warned.
I used to work at this agency quite a bit -- in fact, for three or four years, it was almost the only agency I worked for. In recent years, they have begun lowballing on pay. Sounds like they now are getting stupid all around. I guess with jobs becoming much more scarce, agencies are starting to think they can be as dickish as they want and people won't have a choice about where to go.  I hope that's not the case, but it sure looks like it.

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