Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

[Emerikol]

I'm with Bruces on this one, partner. Just sharing a life experience thought here: I moved out to Phoenix with a national water treatment company. I was heavily invested in the position I had with this company, drank the Kool-Aid, whole nine yards. I was a salaried guy, working 70-80 hours a week, all hours of the day, night, and weekends. Making the move was a complete disaster. The teams out here were terrible, I have no idea how they were still holding onto customers, and the general attitude from the sales guys was "I sold it, my job is done. You get to figure out how to deliver on my promises to the customer..." (Nevermind that what they sales people sold usually violated half a dozen of our procedures, rules, or safety tenants. That's a whole other ball of wax) Fast forward a year and a couple months, and I'm at a customer site doing an install. The director of the department I'm working in walks by, stops, and stands there for a few minutes watching me run conduit for wiring, pipe for sample water flow, and the brackets to hang the analyzer panel. After a few minutes of this, he walks up to me and shakes my hand. He hands me a business card and says something along the lines of "This is the cleanest install I've ever had a contractor come in and do. I didn't have very high expectations of what I was getting, and I wanted to thank you for proving me wrong. If things don't work out with -insert company name here-, give me a call and I'll bring you on board." I kept in touch with that guy (who turned out to be a really cool cat, by the way), and a few months later I jumped ship from the company I was with, and went to work with the new place. I cannot even express in my usual garrulous fashion how much of a good idea it was. I have a set schedule now (which I will admit, does have some drawbacks), I'm hourly and that means I get paid for overtime, I'm making roughly the same money as base pay as I was at company x, and here's the best part, at 2:30, unless the building is on fire, I usually get to pack up my gear and go home. What's the morale of the story you ask? Sometimes the squeeze isn't worth the juice, and the grass really is greener on the other side. Hope it all works out however leaves you in the best possible position, Cheesy.