On the whole the past week has been a good one for me.
Work continues to be fun. We spent the week scrubbing the classroom walls and cleaning glass (this is what cleaners do when the kids are on holidays) and we finished early but did not want more work so we sat in the classroom chatting and larking about, only jumping to our feet and pretending to clean when we heard the supervisor came walking down the hall.
As of May 26th I am now officially an employee of Ecovert. The good side is that after six months I’ll be entitled to sick pay, holiday pay and be able to use their pension plan if I want. The bad side is that the pay is lower (a whole 50p a week lower!) and they pay monthly rather than weekly like the agency did.
I hate being paid monthly.
I’m hoping the agency will let me stay on their books in the hope of finding me a morning cleaning job as well.
Ecovert take things really seriously. They brought in some woman from HR to give us an hour’s worth of training about what the company is and what they expect from us. That took an entire hour when all they had to say was “we pay you, you work!”
Then they brought in some guy called Steve to give us 30 minutes of training about health and safety. Basically don’t block fire exits with forklifts and never balance another forklift on top of another forklift. I don’t know why we need to know about this as we are cleaners, not forklift drivers.
Then the next day we got another hour of training from another guy about how to use the equipment. The guy actually got a broom and showed us how to correctly sweep a floor and then got a cloth and showed us how to correctly wipe a table!
I should not complain too much really because all that training took two and a half hours and we were paid for that. But it was bloody pointless and meant none of us could finish our sections on time.
I tried to talk to someone at T-Mobile. I have two mobile broadband packages with them and a mobile phone contract, they normally take the money for that from my bank account around the 20th of every month but this new job I will be paid on the last working day of the month.
So I wanted them to push my direct debit back to the end of the month or even the start of the month. The woman I spoke to basically laughed in my face and said they were going to take the money around the 20th as normal.
I told her there will be no money in there, she was still chuckling at me as she said she was sorry but there was nothing she could do. If they try and take the money there will be no money so my bank will happily charge me £45 for each time they attempt to take the money.
I think I have no option but to cancel the Direct Debit and maybe look at another mobile provider. The prices have tumbled on mobile broadband sicne I took out my plan anyway, I was paying well over the odds.
