Since it is Monday

I figure the bad news will slide over easier.

The short story: Without divine intervention (winning the lottery, hint, hint) I will not be able to attend Boomershoot 2009.

The long story: My employer keeps me employed via contracts with municipalities. We can and do a job that few want to do, and we do it better than government employees and at a cost savings to the taxpayers living said municipalities.

This summer/fall, my employer secured three new, long term contracts with one large and two small municipalities. All of these contracts, coincidentally, begin in either March or April of 2009. Also, large munis like to put huge requirements for their contractors.

In our instance, the large muni wants us to use their computer system, which they won’t give us to train on until March. They also want us to upgrade our hardware. In this particular instance, the “sanitation engineers” I work with will be dropping the paper route sheets they’ve used for decades in favor of a electronic tablet like the ones the UPS guy uses.

Again, no system or training or hardware until March.

All of this means that my employer has “blacked out” 03/01/09 through 05/15/09 for vacations. We will be fully staffed, with no one, and this goes all the way up to senior on-site management, no one will be allowed a scheduled day off (or in my case, two weeks of them).

I have applied for the days off, been rejected and then appealed the rejection, and have finally received my final rejection in writing. This isn’t going to happen.

I am currently attempting to work out a temporary shift to a daytime schedule in the hopes that if I will drive like a bat out of hell to orofino, ID I can attend at least the Sat/Sun portion of the event (I’ve already been told, however, that this is highly unlikely as the crew I will be working with at night will more than double as of 04/01/09 because of the territorial gains under the new contract).

David will still be attending, of course, along with nearly a dozen other bloggers. So he will be our reporter on site. RNS Staff Photographer, Dave from Michigan, will also be there providing still pics and video. I hope that my being stuck here will able me to provide any help they may need to blog this in as close to real time as possible. If so then that will be a decent second upside to the situation. The first being that unless I get caught with a dead girl or a live boy, I’ll be employed for the next 14 years (the concurrent length of the contracts).

I also hope that David’s daily Boomershoot pics don’t drive me insane.

Two side notes of mention:

Firstly, I can only complain a little bit about this at work. One of the ladies in the office is either going to have to move her wedding date or have to wait five weeks for her honeymoon (most of which is already booked). While I do highly prize attending Boomershoot, my complaint seems a bit like small beans in comparison.

Secondly, I forgot to mention is when it was in the headlines. Remember the pic of the 22lb, 14 inch tall UAW contract that went across the rightosphere a few weeks back? Well, the contract notebook for the big muni I mentioned above is only three inches thick. That includes every contingency you could think of and quite a few that you couldn’t. Also, the labor contract that the Teamsters who work for my employer work under is a 4x6in booklet that is 1/4in thick.

Screw the UAW.