I got promoted at work! [View all]

I work in the production side of a somewhat-decent-size newspaper company in Idaho. In the building I work in we make the printing plates for the paper (what I did when I first joined the company), print the papers one section at a time, and run them through a machine that assembles the sections and any advertising inserts into complete newspapers. We publish three daily papers, seven weeklies, advertising circulars for a smallish supermarket chain, and several other things that come up on an irregular basis like "sports previews" for all the high school sports teams in the area.

A little over a year ago, the man who runs the inserting department (we call it the mailroom) decided I was just the guy to fill in a massive hole in his crew and I went to a weird-ass hybrid schedule where I'd plate newspapers on Friday and Saturday and work for him Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and on the two days I made plates after I got that done. This led to a situation where I was working one more day than anyone else in the building, and I had five different reporting times. (Let's see...8 pm Monday, 6:30 pm Tuesday, Wednesday off, 10 pm Thursday, 4 pm Friday and 5 pm Saturday, and I get off shift when everything's done.)

Forward to today. Each mailroom shift has a supervisor that sets up the machines, handles personnel issues and makes sure the papers come out looking good. One of our supervisors quit so the decision was made to give the job to me. It comes with one less day of work once we get enough people that I don't have to be there Monday, but because it also comes with a $5 pay raise and several hours more duty time every day I come out monetarily ahead. And I get to use all that neat shit I learned in those Army leadership schools in the civilian world. (Whoda thunk it that Army training could actually get you promoted, but that's one of the grounds they used to give me the position.) Yeah, I'm pretty damned excited.