Punching In…Not As Easy As You Would Think!!

Through the years, I have lived with many ways of doing the very simple task of punching in to work.  It may seem like that, but over time the process has been mucked up by the technology behind the scenes.

Way back in the Woolworth days, it was a mechanical time clock.  You took your card, dropped it in the slot and the card would punch with the time and day of the week on it.  The card was good for 2 weeks—it was turned to the backside for the second week.  Thus one card was used for one pay period as we were paid every 2 weeks.  The only problem was when somebody punched the wrong card or for some stupid reason punched the wrong side.  In a future post, I will explain how time is calculated, a more hilarious approach the different companies took.

About 6 years into my employment with Woolworth, they finally updated their technology to use small magnetic cards kept in a rack similar to where the punch time cards were kept.  The problem with these cards is that it was much more difficult to tell if someone used your card by mistake.  It was also harder to keep track of whether you punched in or out with these cards.  If ever there was a time to keep track of hours, this was it. 

I don’t really remember the system HQ used, but I believe it was similar to Woolworth’s system.  It is hard to remember what I did for just 7 weeks!

Staples, on the other hand, was a nightmare right from the beginning (SURPRISE!!!).  During the first couple years, the clock was located in the breakroom and was a push-button interface unit  After the first couple of years, the store remodeled and the time clock was moved to outside the offices in the front of the store. 

So, here is my beef up to this point.  At both Woolworth and HQ, you punched in and then hit the sales floor.  No problem if you happen to run into that customer who needs help for 20 minutes finding something that doesn’t exist.  When Staples moved the time clock to the front of the store, it became a race to make the time clock and not be late while at the same time avoiding helping any customers to be slowed down.  But wishfully it wasn’t always that easy. At one point I was held up over 15 minutes by a customer, then I was chewed out by a manager for being late.  If they knew that I was with a customer (look down the aisle dumbass), then they would never have said a word to me.  Sadly it took me an entire pay period to get my time adjusted because the manager that chewed me out would not alter my time even though I was helping a customer. 

Punching in with the Staples time clock was not overly difficult as long as you remember if you are punching in, punching out, or taking a break.  At around the 5th year with the company, our punch-in code was changed from our social security number to a randomly assigned 7 digit number.  At around my 10th year, the other shoe dropped and the time clock was changed to a web-based time clock.

The biggest difference between this clock and the original one was that not only did you have to input your employee number, but you had to enter a user-defined password into the sign-in (punch-in) screen.  There was 2 obvious problems with this system.  It was extremely slow and sometimes would time-out (no log-in for you) if too many people from various locations were trying to sign-in at the same time.  I sometimes saw a wait of up to 3 minutes to log-in because of all the system traffic.  What made this system worse is that the log-in system was back-ended into Staples.com (a high traffic site anyway at the time).  To make matters worse was that about every 6 months, the log-in password had to be changed.  Adding insult to injury, no repeats of previous passwords could be reused and it was difficult to keep thinking up new passwords.  But here is the real rub, according to the company’s privacy policy (ha ha), the company does NOT store employees’ passwords.  If this was true, why could I NOT reuse my old passwords again?  I will be discussing Staples’ double talk privacy policies in a later post. 

What really ticked off the managers most about the new punch-in system had more to do with me than with the system.  From the first day of this new system, I decided to keep track of my punches by getting a printout of the time punch screen.  Certainly the managers didn’t like the idea that I was keeping track of my punches for a reason I will discuss later.  Maybe, this was just the beginning of the hatred toward me.  I eventually talked about 3 other employees to do same thing as they realized how much it helped in keeping track of their hours.

Next Up:  Punching Out – Run, Louis, Run (Or Take Your Sweet Old Time It Don’t Matter Anymore!)