At my last job I used to have to wait in the front area to be buzzed in by somebody already inside if I didn’t have my key fob on me. In the waiting area there is a book to read. The book was written by John D Beckett, the man whose name is on all the companies under the R.W. Beckett umbrella. It is called “Loving Monday: A guide to succeeding in business without selling your soul”.
I didn’t read the book while I was employed at the company, what with all the work piled on me at the time. But I made a plan when I saw it to eventually give it a read. That day has finally come.
Reading the Preface, there are two sentences that stuck out to me that I would like to quote:
Truth. It’s getting harder and harder to find.
But when we do find it, truth is like light from a beacon piercing the fog-laden night–warning us, as the ship’s captain is warned, of treacherous shoals, steering us toward safe harbor.
I started working for the company as a temporary worker with a temp service. It was the first company that I had stayed the 3 months most temp services have you work before the company agrees to hire you directly. At first, I considered Beckett Gas a temporary stop-gap while I looked for an IT job. But the longer I stayed with the company the more recognition I was getting. When I had an opportunity to move up from the production floor as an operator into machine setup, I took it, even though it wasn’t my area of expertise. I learned fast and was learning things that would be useful later in life, things I didn’t learn from my mom and dad. I became so proficient in my area of setup that I started branching out into areas that other setup colleagues ran. Eventually, I was able to sub-in for any setup employee and work on any production cell in the company. Fridays were overtime days for us and we worked every single one. After we got burned out we started working a single setup person on Fridays and rotated out so the other two could have a decent weekend.
Starting to see a dead end, I started looking for an IT position again. I put feelers out in the company to see if there was any need for additional IT support. I ended up being moved again from setup into the office to create videos for the company. They were mostly informational and instructional videos that are watched by the employees. I did not make videos before, but I was able to pick it up quickly because of my extensive background in technology. I did this while also working with the electrical engineer who does PLC programming and machine wiring. I was able to help him with things without needing to be hand-held. He also happened to be the person maintenance would escalate to if they couldn’t work their way through a problem on their own. I picked up what he was doing fast enough to be incredibly useful. My background in programming gave me everything I needed to look at ladder logic and understand what it does. My skills with software debugging also applied to other practical areas including diagnosing issues with a physical machine. I’ve always been good with following instructions, diagrams and blueprints so wiring machines was a task I enjoyed.
Eventually opportunities for making use of my experience with programming presented themselves. Enough of them piled up that they moved me up again and created a new position within the company for my role. For the first time in my life, I was doing what I enjoyed, what I was good at, and I loved it. I filled my life with this. I lost time because of how fast it was going by. The pay was lower than average in the job market and they told me that was specifically because I didn’t have a college degree. I was truly disappointed, but I held out hope that as I proved myself out they would continue to recognize that and I would eventually be where I wanted to be. I consistently went above and beyond, making myself available to anyone in the company who I had worked with previously and that included the other shift.
There seemed to be a group of people in the company that didn’t maintain the values that I and many others in the company held, the exact ones hovering over the name Beckett Thermal Solutions (formerly, Beckett Gas). Consideration that I had for others was never repaid to me by a select few. I noticed that they also seemed to be the same people not paying consideration to others who were deserving of it. I remember telling my supervisor that I don’t like to make excuses, I tell you how it is. Upper management did not care to hear any of the truths, they thought they already knew everything, which to me is very sad. They like to think they are the ones with experience, that’s why they manage you, and for them, for the most part that was true. But with software engineering, they did not have any experience. At first, much consideration was given to me. But it was whittled away bit-by-bit by people in the company making assumptions. I had a long string of supervisors that just handed me off to someone else because they didn’t know how to manage me. None of them knew what I did, unfortunately. There were a select few in the company who knew the gravity of what I was doing.
There seemed to be some kind of rift between the North Ridgeville and Strongsville locations. My supervisor wasn’t willing to do the legwork required to keep on top of everything I was doing (for example, talking to all the individuals I had worked with in North Ridgeville). The only person keeping track of all my work was me, and it was all inside my head. And scattered between other individuals in the company. I did not take a lot of notes. No one including my supervisor ever asked me for an honest assessment of where I was, what all I had done and what yet I could still do. The same CEO that required a private and personal conversation before officially hiring me in was absent during my dismissal. The only other words he ever spoke to me were in the mail room at North Ridgeville shortly after I had been put into an official programming role. He asked me how things were going, and in my head I thought, I probably could sit down with you and discuss some things, but he was just getting coffee and seemed to be in a rush so no conversation happened.
Some time after I was fired, I got a communication from my supervisor offering me a one-time contracting opportunity to help get another company rolling on all my projects. He offered me $75 an hour and said he will pay me 10 hours minimum even if they don’t use it all. I briefly spoke with someone from the company he was hiring. That consisted of me showing him where my projects reside on the hard drive of my work laptop. We were connected to it remotely, and I drove it around a little bit and explained a few things. I also had a brief conversation with my old supervisor from the North Ridgeville facility, but he determined there wasn’t anything big that needed done immediately. I waited a long time after that before reminding everybody of what the terms were. I was promptly paid.
I received no further communication from them for a long time. The need didn’t arise until I moved in with my grandpa. He also worked at the company in an HR role, and I feel he was pushed out of the company because he was helping me. Now I’m on a journey to really investigate how upper management were applying their values pre-covid and post-covid, and see if it’s possible to get things closer to where they were when I was brought into engineering from my software developer role. If not, at least a reasonable explanation as close to the truth as possible.
As I write the last paragraph of this post, I have read one part of the four part book. I intend to continue reading it. I’m hoping it will help me further understand why I was treated the way I was at the company.