The worst kind of employees

I'm becoming convinced that (in general) the worst employees you can hire are ones that don't really need the job. I'll explain...

We have a part time technician. Her husband is some corporate hotshot who gets an annual bonus that is roughly half of my salary. Basically, she doesn't need to work. She does it just to get out of the house and to give herself a little extra spending money. For the most part, she does her job well, although she tends to be a bit of a chatter box, which can sometimes lead to her telling stories instead of working.

Really, the only problem I have with her is that she calls out whenever she feels like it. If she gets up, and it's too cold, she'll call out. If her one of her kids has a sniffle, she'll call out. If she just wants to go shopping instead of come to work, she'll call out.

Maybe in some jobs, this isn't such a huge problem. In a tiny pharmacy, it can ruin your day. We're busy. We need employees. We don't have any built in redundancy. We can't simply just grab a cashier from the front end to replace her. If she doesn't show up, we're down a tech, and unfortunately, she's one of our only techs.

I was about to write that I'm convinced the best employees to hire are the ones who are desperate to work, but even that doesnt' seem true. Yesterday, I listened to one of our clerks complain about all day about how our manager didn't schedule her for enough hours next week and how she really really needs all the hours she can get.

Well, we were incredibly slow yesterday, and we spent half the day sitting around with nothing to do. She was bored, so near the end of the day, she kept asking me if she can leave early.

OK... let me sum that one up... She desperately needs hours. However, she doesn't want to work her full shift. Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this???? I kept telling her to just enjoy how slow it is because we barely ever get days like that. I told her that she's getting paid to basically sit around and do nothing, and I reminded her about how she continually complained about not having enough hours.

None of this mattered. Eventually I got sick of her whining, and I let her go home early. We were so slow that I didn't need her, but that's not really the point.

On a somewhat related note....

There's been a trend in my pharmacy that has to stop. Our company mandates that any employee that works 8 hours must punch out for a half hour lunch break. That means a person working 8 hours must be scheduled for 8.5 hours to accomodate that break. What's going on recently is that our technicians and clerks aren't punching out for their half hour lunch breaks, and instead are simply punching out and going home a half hour early. They still get paid for the 8 hours they worked, and they get to leave early.

This is pure bullshit. When we schedule someone 9-5:30, we expect the person to stay until 5:30. If they leave a half hour early, then we're short a person for that last half hour of their shift... which often ends up being one of the busier times of the day. Moreover, it's not like the person worked non-stop for 8 hours and didn't take a break. We're not crazy busy the entire day (at least not anymore), so it leaves plenty of time for someone to walk out, get a coffee, get a muffin, get a sandwich, etc. Basically, they end up getting paid for their lunch breaks.

This has to stop.