ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Always late...

I have never been a morning person.

Some people are morning people, some are not.
Some people can be changed, some cannot. I am definitely in the latter category. For those people like me, it is best not to fight the clock, but to work with it.


I am a night owl, and have been a night owl for as long as I can remember. It does not matter how early I get up, or how many cups of coffee I drink, I simply do not function well early in the morning.

It's just a fact of my life, and it's not something that can be changed, it's just the way my internal clock is wired. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way.

Alarm clocks may get me out of bed, and on the road, but they can not make me coherent, or improve my thought processes. The earlier I have to wake up, the longer it takes before I am coherent. I may barely make it to work at 8, but you probably will not be able to get a coherent answer until 9. If you want me at work at 7, I might make it, but you still will not get an coherent answer until 9. Before that time, you should consider me a zombie, and if you pour too much coffee into me, a tense, wired, irritable zombie. I may be able to function on autopilot, but that is about it.


While you may sometimes find me awake at 5 or 6am, it usually means that I have been up all night working on something, and have not yet been to bed. You should not count on me remaining productive for the rest of the day without sleep.


Around here, they start the high schools at something like 7 or 7:30, which I consider absurdly early. When I was in high school, we used to start at 8, which I also considered much too early. My first class of the day was always a loss, as I was never coherent that early in the morning.

The problem is this type of behavior does not stop at being a few minutes late, it grows a little bit over time and it establishes a precedent. It also erodes your leadership abilities, which is a subtle thing that can cost you a lot more than one good electrician.

I have had to let some really good guys go for this very reason. Generally when there is lots of work and any help, let alone good help is hard to find, I tolerate some of it but when things slow down they are the first to get the axe.

Just recently I had a good apprentice on one of my jobs that was doing this to me, after a few weeks I notice 3 other guys on that same job were doing it and moral was apathetic. Good apprentices are hard to find, but losing 10-15 minutes a day for 4 guys and hard feelings among the crew cost money and I did not like where this trend was going, so I fired him. Nobody has been late and moral improved on that job since then.

Good employees like to know what the rules are and know they are enforced fairly and evenly and in an odd sense it’s really good for moral.

No-show No-call is an automatic termination if unless they are in the hospital, or jail.

The bonus solution was interesting; I may look into something like it. Incentives can be a better motivator than, consequences, but I also like the idea of sending them home for the day if they show up late, which really hurts a man in the wallet

One of my competitors has a very strict policy that they have to sign off on the day they are hired. If you are late more than 3 times or miss any more than 2 days in any 30-day period, the time keeping software will automatically generate a termination slip. He goes through a lot of electricians.

------------------------
Techie,

Why don’t you find a job working 3rd shift somewhere, they love night owls like you for this kind of work?


[This message has been edited by ITO (edited 12-01-2006).]

Can't wake up? Not a 'morning person?' Can't adjust to a different schedule?

And folks wonder why military vets are sought-after employees!

I have a brother-in-law who claims he's not a "morning person". Always late. If he's supposed to be at work at 6AM he might be there at 6:20. If he's supposed to be there at 7:30 he'll be there around 7:50. He had job where the start time was anywhere from 9-11 AM and he was chronically 10-20 minutes late. Since he wasn't a "morning person" he tried a second shift job that started at 2:30PM. uess what? Still 10-20 minutes late until he was fired. So he decided he wasn't an "afternoon person" either and got a 3rd shift job that started at 10:30PM. He was on time for a whole 2 months before he fell back in to being 10-20 minutes late EVERY DAY. His problem isn't that he's not a "morning person", an "afternoon person" or a "3rd shift person". His problem is he's not a "work person". People, like my brother-in-law, who don't think being late is a big deal are either stupid or extremely self-centered. At his factory job he was part of an assembly line that couldn't start until he was there. Everyone else got their hourly rate but they had to struggle to hit their piece rate because of waiting on him. He cost the rest of them hundreds of dollars a week in lost piece rate bonuses plus they had to all work harder to accomplish their daily production. At his afternoon job as a security guard at another factory the dayshift guard he was supposed to relieve coudn't leave until he got there and that made him late to pick up his kids at school. His 3rd shift job was another factory production job where everyone had to stand around and wait on him or bust their hump covering his job until he got there. Lost productive time costs money and someone has to pay for it somewhere somehow.

I can understand why being late is a problem. One of my jobs is scooping ice cream, and we never know what business will be like for the day, so I make it a habit to try and be early (5 or 10 minutes, occasionally more) so that there is never a shortage of help if we get hit really hard. Applying this to the starting issue, I second the idea of peer pressure. Have the people working with him explain to him how hard it is to keep up on work when he's not helping.

"Can't wake up? Not a 'morning person?' Can't adjust to a different schedule?"


This banter makes me rather sick.

Are these people for real?

I have no problems getting to work on-time, it's the ride from the job back to the shop without pay that REALLY bothers me.

Paying for windshield time bothers me.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said that in this thread.

It's way off-topic for the "Always Late" thread.

Reno, As a former Air Force vet, I agree with that statement. But, I must add the following:

I too am very much a night person. So much so that during my first tour of active duty, I was fortunate enough to work for a branch chief who understood and took care of his personnel. He saw within my first month of duty that I was not suitable for day shift (0700-1600) and transferred me over to swing shift (1600-2400).

End result? My productivity went way up, I earned several high ratings on my performance evals and everyone was happy. Oh, BTW, I was a bomb loader.


I agree with Joe. A person's work performance and productivity is of far greater importance to me than whether or not they get to a job site slightly late. (15 minutes or less.)

Generally speaking though, in my line of work being punctual is not usually a problem. The examples in Fred's post are valid ones and in that case I would agree with him.

I currently contract with a gentlemean who used to ride me about being to the job precisely at 8am. I told him in no uncertain terms that as a contractor, unless he's willing to stipulate in writing a requirement to be at the site at a given time, and any penalties for being tardy, then he hasn't any cause to complain. (Besides, HE was rarely on time either.) As long as the job is done to specifications, meeting the deadlines and performing up to standards, then I would work hours as I saw fit, but I did ensure that we agreed on a general timeframe.

Guess what? Once he adapted to this, we not only get along great but our jobs go quite smoothly and we meet our deadlines.

I was going to continue to directly answer some of the other comments made here, but instead I will summarize my input this way:

Look, one thing I hope we can agree on is that people are different, jobs and working situations are different, and the ultimate goal is to ensure that the job gets done right, on time and within budgeted costs, right?

The true marks of a great leader and well-run business are pretty much the same: adapt to the changes, in the "times", new ideas, and people management. Then you will be truly successful.

In short, there is no one size fits all answer to this dilemma. But I would tend to overlook even "chronic" tardiness of 15 mins. or less, if that person's job performance was otherwise exemplary.

I admire veterans but don't trust them with power supplies. I asked one to change out the filter caps. He got the first three in OK but C4 always seemed to blow up the supply. But seriously, I just never liked the bosses that watched the clock in the morning, yet didn't expect me to watch it in the afternoon. It never made sense to me to show up half an hour early most days to allow for the occasional time I might get stuck in traffic. I always thought that grown ups should be able to work things out to everyone's advantage. My TV Chief Engineer job was a nightmare because I had to deal with an inbound and outbound rush hour, twice a day. I worked it out with management that I would come in after morning rush and leave after the evening rush, saving me 2 hours of grief each day. We had Wednesday morning management meetings so I would go in really early for transmitter maintenance, then go to the nearby office/studio for the meeting. I convinced them to hire an intern as my assistant. I just asked him to give me an honest 8 hours. We worked out a schedule that met his college needs, allowed me the time to train him on broadcast maintenance, and gave maximum airshift coverage. Everyone benefited.

I can certainly see where promtness counts with shift or team work or to make appointments. In a job where you're transmitting 20/7 and possibly doing maintenance in the off hours, a structured 40 hours might not cut it. In another job dealing with telephone tech support, we staggered our hours to cover TV stations on both coasts. Now I remember talking to customers in Hawaii and Guam and wishing that they would ask me to hand deliver their tetrodes. Even with our overlap, I'm sure our friends on the other side of the planet would've appreciated more.

So I guess everyone needs to determine just how important that :00 or :30 is in the overall scheme of things. Going home early definately shouldn't make up for coming in late. If I have an artist creating a masterpiece panel from 7:15 to 3:45, I would count my blessings. If my guy shows up at 7:30 to bend pipe for my guy that needs it at 7:00, we gotta talk!
Joe