DH's Job Making Unreasonable Demands

[LessMissAbs]

DH's boss sent him a text message yesterday afternoon (Sunday) asking him to go to South Korea leaving at midday today for the week before Christmas, back next weekend.

It isn't even his job. Its one of the two service engineers, but neither of them "want to go". DH is the design engineer.

As well as inconveniencing DH hugely, this means when I fly back myself (currently working abroad) next Saturday, there will be no-one to meet me at the airport, and I will have to get to our inlaws 200 miles away on public transport.

Fed up with being inconvenienced by DH's job.

Yes I do. If you read the rest of my post you'll see that I pointed out that if it wasn't enough for him wrt travel that was a different matter. Which it is.

Plenty of people travel with work on short notice, or put up with other shitty parts of their job for a hell of a lot less than 50k. If they (or OPs DH) don't think it's enough the only person that can make a change is that person talking to their employer, not pretending that the employer is taking the piss when they aren't necessarily.

I used to work abroad a lot. I never got paid extra for days out of the country. I'm not sure what planet you are living on?!

Why on earth don't you go home and then travel to the inlaws with your husband when he gets back? YABU and a bit childish.

Tewi Most engineering companies are not particularly well run IME. They have other things in their mind!

Yep. IMHO this one has taken on lots of sales staff, lots of managers and lost, through leaving due to paying uncompetitive salaries, two engineers. Hence DH already has to cover their jobs as they have not been replaced. It is incredibly management and sales top heavy, and the management are unable to step into the engineer's roles in an emergency.

50k is good for a permanent contract unless he is a manager of some kind. He would get more as a contracter

Agreed. However, most of his friends from uni went to work as engineers in the oil industry and are paid considerably more. Even if they don't go offshore. If they do go offshore, they are paid a generous uplift in salary for that period on top of already good salaries (I am talking purely about graduate engineers). I even have friends who don't have degrees in engineering, working as engineers, who are paid more than DH despite having less experience.

I must be one of the few wives wishing he would get a job in the oil industry instead possibly including working offshore, because it would give him better conditions than this!

24hrs is not enough notice though, and he needs to start learning to say No or employers will assume he is fine with how things are run

Agreed. He has done it too often, in similar circumstances, in the past.

Of the two service engineers, whose job it is to travel to client's sites and fix problems, and who get paid to do so, one has children and the other does not. The one who doesn't have children has refused to go because he has a doctor's appointment. The one with children has said he isn't going because its extremely inconvenient for him.

My bet is they don't want to go because its the week before Christmas. And I bet his flights get delayed and he will be lucky to get back for Christmas! They also book him onto the cheapest flights possible, so it will be partly Ryanair or Easyjet, with most likely 3 connections.

TeWi It looks like you don't. :(

I don't actually know if he has left today or not. He isn't allowed to text, phone or send personal emails during working hours, so he can't reply to me unless he gets a lunch break.

I don't know why he doesn't get a new job! It kind of suits him to be in that geographical location just now until we make firmer plans for the future about where we are going to live.

I could go back to our house rather than the inlaws but it is very rural and means a long taxi journey from the airport, while the inlaws is partly on the way back from the airport. ie going home means doubling back in the wrong direction. But its doable. I might go back. The inlaws will nag me if I go back without him, well at least his father will, as he has told me it my "duty as a wife to look after my husband" LOL!

I would actually have booked my flight to another airport and on another day nearer the inlaws if I'd known this would happen!

Yes, of course first world problem, he is incredibly lucky to have a job etc but he is a highly skilled and hard working engineer, I suspect his company is on the verge of going down the pan and he is quite stressed about it and wants to do the decent thing and not let people down.

YANBU

IME a lot of companies are rubbish at the whole travel thing.

Expenses policies which are designed by someone who has never had to stay away from home for longer than a night. They just dont work when you are away for days on end. I have had hotel laundry costs thrown back because they werent covered by expenses policy. God knows what they thought I was supposed to do with my clothes - probably take them down to the Moskva and beat them on rocks.

Having to pay for my own water in Kenya. Apparently I was supposed to drink tap water!

Having a nice little card which told me who to call in the event of being kidnapped in Sao Paulo! Nice to know the risk was recognised but surely the sensible thing would be having the meeting somewhere else!

I could go on but then I would really start to rant!

I find your comments hilarious meta.

My husband is a design engineer just like OPs and so are half of our friends, I know a lot about that particular fields pay structure and expectations. I also know that most of them aren't doing it for £££ primarily, and an exciting project is way more likely to motivate than a bit extra for travel.

Right from graduate level it's also well (and fairly) paid and steady work compared to many fields (certainly nothing to complain about) with good progression if you want to persue that, and I think it's sad that you aren't able to see that.

Abs, I think he should jump ship.

Also go home - Who wants to sit around and get nagged?! I'd go bananas!

TeWi I also find your comments hilarious. But then I understand averages (and maths in general) and I can also read - I never said that £50K wasn't a good salary for the sort of engineer that the OP's husband is (which we don't actually know, not really, all we know is he has the skills to work in the oil industry but doesn't right now) - I said it wasn't a 'Good Salary' on an absolute scale. And it clearly isn't.

YY Worry.

Our HR people have the cheek to consider travel and expenses a 'perk'. You know, when you see nothing but airports and the inside of hotel rooms that could be anywhere and you lose all your time at home.

Most people who have to travel for work see it as an imposition rather than a perk.

Also, I don't see why family circumstances make a difference to who should do the travelling. The assumption that people without DCs are happy and able to go off and do all the shitty jobs that others CBA doing makes me .

tbh its a bit of a mystery to me as to what he actually does, and he doesn't have direct oil and gas experience so that might be an issue, but I don't consider that he is well paid enough to be on permanent call to go anywhere in the world at less than 24 hours notice to fix things when they break. His salary structure doesn't reflect that either and the fact that there are two employees whose job it is to do that to me indicates its not his job.

That said, I don't think he minds going if he is valued and of course being properly compensated for the disruption would make him feel valued. It happened last year too, at the same time, but it was only a trip to Germany.

It was actually less than 24 hours notice - about 21 hours actually, on a Sunday, by text message. I wonder if he has gone or not.

My comments re subsidising his work are because I'm going to have to make alternative plans due to his job, at the weekend, when I could reasonably have relied upon the support of my DH socially as it is not within his contracted working hours. Yes, I will be able to claim it back from my work (although not if I book a different flight) but I do not see why it should be necessary due to his employer's lack of organisation.

It is annoying but presumably if DH said no, one of the others would be asked again.

Again, LesMiss - if something has broken, that's a crisis rather than a lack of organisation, isn't it?

Sorry, I thought I read design. Either way if he isn't interested in oil the money won't tempt him away, but there will be other jobs in his field (there always are) and lots of job hunters who can find him one if he cba to look himself.

I'm not going to get bother with debating average wages, the % of folks in Britain who earn more than 50k is absolutely tiny.

That depends on the state that the finished product was released in theDoctrineOfSanta*

Tbh the more I think about it, the more he probably is the right person to go. No kids, wife out of town anyways. What if the colleagies that would go have families at home this week, kids doing their christmas shows which the dads may want to see

Excuse me? It's statements like these that hold back the progress of equality for all in the workplace.

Those of us without DCs at home have lives. Everybody has the right to a domestic family life and work/life balance.

LessMiss I agree with Doctrine, if the others can say No hopefully he can too, using the exact same words eg "Sorry, no, it's an extremely inconvenient time for me". At the very least I would have done as a PP suggested and said only by business class, direct. What people who don't travel for work don't realise is that this does start to take over your life, you never get any time at home, you exhaust yourself in a week and then all you are fit for when you get home is to recover. I'm lucky in that my work trips are generally short, and to easy places (Europe or the US). Also I don't get jetlag, but some of my colleagues suffer awfully.

WorrySigh you made me laugh. I still remember being in a hotel in London and claiming £25 for dinner (room service : chicken caesar salad, fruit salad) in a hotel room and the expenses person rang me up and asked, "How many were there?" Yes, you got me, it was an all-you-can-eat buffet for 12 with free wine. In Central London. For £25. As another wise poster said, work travel is not a perk.

I said it wasn't a 'Good Salary' on an absolute scale. And it clearly isn't

No you didn't. You said:

Chive No, it isn't

then went on to qualify what you'd said. If it doesn't compare well with the rest of the industry that's up to the OP's OH to address but the fact is it's a damn fine sum in comparison with the average wage in this country.

Well, he's gone. Cheap airlines, no business class. The problem is, the more he does this sort of stuff, the more they will ask him, and the more deskilled and specific he will become. I just wish he would pull his finger out and get a better job, because its so obvious he isn't valued in this one and it isn't going anywhere.

And yes, of course he gets a higher than average salary. He is higher qualified than the average person, and has more marketable skills. That still doesn't mean its a good idea for him to do stuff he isn't paid to do or go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.

I don't actually know if he has left today or not. He isn't allowed to text, phone or send personal emails during working hours, so he can't reply to me unless he gets a lunch break.

Really.

He is forbidden from sending his wife an email to tell her if he will be in the country for a week......

Ooooooookkkkkay

Oh ffs GlasgowSteven are you deliberately anally retentive?

He isn't allowed to text or send personal emails at work. This is the case in some jobs. I assume you are aware of this?

In this specific instant, I think we can safely assume that in the morning hours he simply stuck to this/did not know the precise details/had followed his normal habit of having his phone switched off at work.

Yes, oooooookkkkkkkay. Not everyone is in a relationship where they send 3000 text messages each day saying "luv you lots xxxx".

And my own lunchbreak is over, and I need to get back to work too.

Thanks for all the more interesting input, I have issues with the engineering field and I don't even bloomin' work in it!

That would hardly be the case ..luv u loads xxxxx. But even a case of walking to the bathroom or kitchen to make a coffee and text you then/email you from his smartphone then...

If he is allowed to contact family during working day for no reason at all then he needs to find a new employer.....,

Lessmissabs it does seem to be all about you.

Does your DH dislike his job? Does he have an issue with short term travel (FWIW I used to find it exciting), does stepping up for other roles give him an advantage that would be useful if redundancy was to happen?

The engineering companies I have worked for, do not assume that there are 'little wives' at home, but they do assume most people will have supportive relationships.