Fine if you can prioritize and handle stress easily. - Recensione dipendente - Utility Locator presso On Target Utility Services

The worst part of this job is absolutely the amount of responsibility you have which is completely out of whack of your pay grade. They say this is because of the mandatory overtime you get during the summer where you can work anywhere from 55 hours a week to 70 hours a week but I don't consider that a perk or anything unless you absolutely LOVE working and not being home. Getting back to the responsibilities you have.. let me count the ways: 1. You're responsible for maintaining your vehicle. Makes sense.. But when you're getting oil changes every month because of how many miles you put on your car, it's difficult to find time to do this unless you want to do it on the weekend which I've had to. 2. Maintaining relationships with contractors. I have yet to run into a truly awful contractor but more often than not, they are awful about putting required information in the ticket. For example, many times I'm given a simple address on a highway.. like 423 US Route 3 with no other information on where it is.. I call the contractor and they say "Oh it's the McDonald's restaurant." .... Ok.. well how hard is it to put that in the ticket information? It's more of a pet peeve than anything. But when you're pressed for time, you just want to bang out as many tickets as you can without needing on site meetings and such. 3. Having to respond to emergencies all day from 5am to 5pm. Depending on your area, you could be clear across the state and get an emergency on the other side of it almost 2 hours away. Sometimes your supervisor is able to help out but other times you just have to suck it up, drop what you're doing and spend a good chunk of the day driving well out of your way for an emergency that, honestly isn't an emergency. I can recall a time where I saw a cone at in intersection for a catch basin where I saw the premarks and remembered thinking "Oh I bet I'll get the ticket for that job soon. Well.. two weeks went by and nothing... suddenly at 7am I got an emergency for that very intersection for that very catch basin and I was a good 90 minutes away with a full ticket load. I wasn't happy. ( 4. Having to be on call 24/7, 7 days a week once a month and on some holidays. Nothing worse than just getting to sleep and having the phone ring and you have to drive over 2 hours to an emergency pole replacement that will probably be done by the time you get there. My on call area is rather large and rural so it's rare that I get one to be honest.. I imagine it's a LOT different if you're a locator in a major metropolitan area where you probably get called out in the middle of the night all the time. The only upside to this is that it's guaranteed OT. Not sure it's worth it. 5. Having to respond to hit lines and doing damage investigations. These are the worst. Not only are you paranoid that you screwed up (and sometimes, it is your fault), you also have to spend a great deal of time investigating what happened. Doing videos and interviews.. drawing pictures of the scene... measuring distances all trying to get the wonky computer program to work. This takes a LOT of time which you literally don't have during the busy months. I cringe every time I see the Risk department calling my cell phone during a work day. 6. You're required to do a video of each and every job. This is tedious especially if you've just spent a couple hours in a long, complicated markout. You have to get multiple angles and narrate everything you did. At this point it's second nature but you can easily get complacent. The reason is liability. Contracts can and will lie about where your marks were in order of getting out of having to pay for their mistake. The problem is, there's little motivation to do it right when you don't think you're being fairly compensated for what you do.. especially if you've just worked a 14 hour day. 7. Just the job in general. As "Locate Technicians" We do important work. We make sure expensive lines are safe from excavators and hell, even prevent serious injury should a contractor be digging close to primary electric conduits. It's a big responsibility. At this point I'm used to the job and all it's responsibilities but for $12/hr... that's just laughable. To be fair, in just the summer alone I made as much as I did in a whole year at my last job but I also worked probably 3 times as much. You're also not compensated for the slow months in the winter. This week I'll probably work 15-20 hours. Prior to hiring they warned me about this and told me to "save" during the summer but it still sucks. Considering they pay so little during the summer, the least they could do is compensate for a full 40 hour week during the winter. Other Thoughts: It's not so much a "responsibility" but you do have to manage several different programs on your work computer in order to look up prints of underground cable, phone and power... and it all depends on what town you're in and which utility company services it so you could be looking up files and pictures to 6+ utilities in one day and you're expected to know how to look all those up and decipher what you're looking at. I basically had to teach myself these programs because I was hired during the busy season and wasn't given ample training because of it. Since i've learned how to look prints up though, it's made the job a lot easier. Before I had to waste time hooking up at peds and transformers to see where things went but now I can literally see a map of it if I have questions about it. My advice is to get acquainted with those programs ASAP. Because of how many tickets you have and the fear of being called away to a hit line or emergency, you're more or less required to take a lot of shortcuts which sucks because that means there's a greater chance of you missing something and just have to be called back for a hit line later. What do I mean by short cuts? Well if you're burning daylight and have a ton to do but you have a long markout, you might not even hook up and instead use power or radio mode to find a buried line... or you'll just assume that the cable and phone run in the same trench as the power and not bother hooking up in order to save time. You're set up to fail this way because it's absolutely impossible, on a half mile long markout in a buried neighborhood, to hook up at one utility, walk the half mile, walk back, hook up the next, walk the half mile, walk back, hook up at the next, walk the half mile, walk back.. so instead you fudge it and offset them and pray that they aren't in separate trenches. If we had more time, we could do it the right way but I guarantee most locators will guess on tickets because they simple don't have the time to do it right.