browniehound I agree with a lot of what you just said, even though I'm just a cog in a hub... there were days where at almost any other job I would have called in but I got to work anyways because I did not want to saddle my co-workers with the extra volume because I like them and would feel guilty. I think a lot of the problem is a top down obsession with efficiency where it seems like upper management is trying to find the floor of the minimum number of people they need to do the job. This results in a lot of stressful days which actually hurts efficiency. If the OPs premise of "If you hate your job then why don't you quit it?" was legitimate, 80% of my hub would quit tomorrow so it's clearly a flawed premise. In addition to this a shipping company has to be prepared to adjust to unexpected and changing conditions and even the best volume forecasters in the world can not account for weather and unexpected surges, meaning that a skeleton crew that can only handle the ideal amount of volume is not enough. This peak's failures proved that.
Once you learn to just brush off the mental stress, it's definitely not a horrible job but there is a slow creep into an area where it could become one. One thing that constantly bothers me is that if X hub does not meet its numbers, then the automatic assumption is that the hub failed in someway, which is then passed down to people that look at spreadsheets of numbers that are simply not sophisticated enough to account for how different docking bays and such will result in different productivity. If someone who knows the algorithms better than me disagrees, I'd love to see them.
