Complaint Review: Conco Systems

I am writing this report for one reason, to tell the story of my awful experience working a job for Conco Systems, and to prevent average people from anywhere to go through what I did, without prior knowledge of what they're getting themselves into.

Well let me start from the very beginning, about a month ago I was unemployed, looking for a job in the Pittsburgh area. I went on a job board site to see what was available at the time and I saw a job that said the following:

"Service Technician/Close-out traveling crew, 10.00/hr, 80-90 hours a week, 2-3 weeks on, 1 week off, earnings $60,000 a year....etc..."

So I thought, wow, sounds like an interesting way and a good way to make a good amount of money. So I called the number on the ad, which led me to a person from a staffing agency.

A few days later I went into the staffing agency (which was very good and honest to me) filled out a lot of paper work then was sent to another facility to do a drug test (because I was going to be working in some government facilities).

The people at the staffing agency were very good to me, and told me everything they knew about the job (none of them had actually been in the field working there before though) and what I'd be doing and all those kinds of things. They told me I'd probably be meeting with Conco in the next few days on Tuesday, so they'd give me a call on Monday and let me know the details.

Well Monday came and no one called me, then I got a call on Tuesday and they said my orientation got pushed back to Thursday. Then I got a call on Thursday and was told my orientation got pushed back to the following Tuesday. So I went to my orientation on Tuesday, and the human resources guy at Conco sat me down with two other guys and told us what the job basically entailed. We were told that it wasn't all mashed potatoes and gravy and that we'd get flown to different places across the country to shoot these tube cleaners through these tubes to clean them at different plants. He never told us what kind of people we would be working with or what would happen if we got sick in the middle of one of the jobs (I could have easily asked, but none of these questions came to mind at the time because it did not seem as though these would be issues).

So after this short orientation, the human resources guy was all happy-go-lucky and telling us that we'd probably be flying out Sunday to do some jobs, and told us that we shouldn't let ourselves get too rattled on the first job and call it quits afterwords, but that we should at least try two jobs to see how our second experience goes.

I wait around for a few days then finally get a call on Friday telling me I'll be flying out on Wednesday. I go in Wednesday, ready to go, then get stopped at the door and told I'll be flying out Thursday to a completely different location (I was told that the job was on call and last minute changes like this happen all the time). By the time I flew out on Thursday three weeks had passed from when i first filled out paperwork to work at this place, so after I was basically hired I had to wait 3 weeks to actually start the job (thats another thing about this job, make sure you really want to do it cause its a long process to get you to your first job).

So I get flown out West to my first job with three other employees that made my crew; A supervisor, a guy with a medium amount of experience named Joe, and a person flown in from Houston who has had experience in the industry. When everything's said and done, we get checked into our hotel at about 2:30 A.M.. The person from Houston ends up being my roommate while the supervisor and the other guy named Joe (who was a very arrogant, conceited person) room with each other (I find out later in the trip that supervisor and this Joe character are actually good friends and the supervisor got Joe this particular job).

Friday night we head out to the plant, our shift is from midnight to noon, we work a 12 hour night shift than try to find whatever sleep we can during the daytime. The first shift is pretty rough cause they give you literally no training or clue as to what its actually like to work in the tube cleaning business. Everyone was running around setting different things up, it was hard to hear anyone cause the environment in the plant was very loud, so I found it difficult to catch onto what was happening or what I was supposed to do. Eventually though, what the job consists of is that two people sit in what they call a water box, a very small box that water generally runs through (if your claustrophobic at all you'd go nuts) with differentiating conditions based on what job you work, however on this particular job the plant was in operation during the day so the water was drained out of these boxes right at midnight for us, so we could work in them. What you do in the water box is you sit there in grimy, mucky, wet, extremely hot and steamy at times closed limited space conditions and shoot tube cleaners through thousands of small tubes with a pressurized water tube gun. You load them up, shoot them, clean them out from the other end, clean out all the dirt that comes out, then reload them and repeat the same process til all the tubes have been shot (you may shoot them once, twice, or three times with various cleaners depending on what type of job you're doing).

The physical labor in this job isn't very strenuous, its more about the dirty conditions, and the shift you work (if your body is able to adjust to the night shift or not, unfortunately mine never did).

So we get to the third night, I had only gotten a few hours of sleep on this job because my body wasn't adjusting properly and I was starting to get sick. But that Joe guy comes up to me and starts yelling at me about not putting a parking tag on the truck we came in or something (I'm not sure what he was talking about because none of this was explained to me).

While he's yelling at me, he goes on and physically threatens me, he tells me that if I do the things that I'm doing right now, the next job I work, the supervisor will go "Full Metal Jacket On Me" (referring to the scene in the film where the fat kid is beaten by the rest of the people with pillow cases filled with bars of soap). I was actually very irritated and angry by this physical threat, because I had done nothing wrong. Joe's arrogance was so high that it exceeded his work ethic by a large margin, my roommate from Houston, Texas had actually completely outworked Joe, however Joe was given more respect and more options of what he was allowed to do because he was friends with the supervisor (all though the kid from Houston was a much better worker and a much better person).

As the that day ended short, I came back to the hotel with my crew and I started vomiting in the bathroom, and had diarrhea pretty bad from working this job, not being able to adjust to the conditions and the night shift. It was pretty clear to me that I got sick from working this job, so later on that night (after a full day of puking, diarrhea, headaches, and digestive problems), around six, I went to my supervisor's room and told that I was sick and wasn't going to be able to come to work that night, he said it was ok and told me to rest up.

So I went back to my room, went to sleep and awoke at 11:45 to a loud knock on my door. I opened it to find Joe on the other end, he said, "Hey, you comin to work," I said, "No I told the supervisor, I'm sick," (I wondered why he was even here right now standing in front of me, hadn't the supervisor told him that I was sick?), then he went on to say, "Come on, you can just run the pump," and I was like, "No, you don't understand, I'm really actually sick." Joe, then stormed off saying, "Well you might as well go home then." I didn't want to sit there and argue with him so I went back to bed and fell asleep. Right now, now that I think about it, I think Joe was trying to do this to impress his supervisor and the manager on site...It was something Joe figured he'd do to make himself look good....to make something up like, "Hey, I went there to get him and he wasn't sick at all, he was just laying there...."

At 7 a.m. in the morning I lay in bed sicker than a dog and get a phone call from my roommate from Houston, he tells me that Joe and the supervisor called Conco back in Pittsburgh and told them I wasn't working and was faking sick and was just lying in bed (wow, what a falsehood from two great Conco employees trying to look good in front of the West manager).

After hearing this I decided to call Conco and tell them about my situation, and try to straighten out the facts. I told them that I was sick and they concurred and said that the supervisor had called and confirmed that, then he asked me if I could work tonight and I told him I wasn't sure (because by this point it had gotten so bad it was coming out of both ends on and off), then I went on to ask him what my options and I told him specifically that I wasn't quitting this job and that I wanted to see a doctor, he said he'd call me back in a few moments and tell me what I could do, however he never did. Instead I got a call from my staffing agency telling me that Conco was flying me home in the middle of the job, i was completely startled and she was surprised to learn that Conco hadn't informed me of any of this.

So I called Conco back to see what was going on, and the kid on the line that I had talked to earlier told me they were flying me home and I had to talk to my supervisor. I talked to my supervisor and he told me I was flying out in a few hours, which left me no time to see a doctor. He said also that I would be flying out to California for a job on Saturday (which was a lie). So without anyone asking me what I wanted to do they put me on a plane and flew me back to Pittsburgh like I was a piece of meat.

I got in to Pittsburgh in the middle of the night and saw a doctor at a walk in clinic the next day. I got proper documentation and the doctor confirmed that I was legitimately ill, and that I shouldn't be working, but resting up. I left the clinic and was about to call Conco when I got a call from my staffing agency telling me that Conco had fired me.

No warning, nothing, a very unprofessional job handled by very unprofessional people. I was sicker than a dog, puking my guts out for this company, going to the bathroom every hour, trying to help finish a project, and they completely threw me to the side and ignored me like I wasn't even there.

I was physically threatened by a conco employee, lied to several times by many people within the company, and treated like complete garbage by this unprofessional company Conco that only cares about making money and could careless about anyone else. The human resources manager does a horrible job of pulling in people off the street to do a dirty, grimy job on a haywire time schedule, working with horrible people (that he doesn't tell you about) that lie directly you to your face and treat you like your a piece of trash.

I won't kid you, the money is good, but when you add everything else into the equation it just isn't worth it, its not worth your time and its not worth risking your health, if you're going to die, die doing something you love, don't die doing a job you hate for someone making millions of dollars who could care less about you.

Pete
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
U.S.A.