A Career in Technical Writing: Beach Time

Bullet Points

• Beach time and bench time refer to paid or unpaid time off between consulting contracts
• When you are a contractor, it is best to take initiative and find other options no matter how much you trust your recruiter
• Never trust a company to have your best interests in mind

The Waiting Game

I did not expect to be without a new position for as long as I was. Because I was still employed by my contract agency, I was still being paid, even though I wasn’t doing any work. Some companies call this beach time. Other companies call this bench time. I was under the impression that beach time would be a strong motivator for the company to find me another job, but several weeks passed without an interview. I called about once a week to check in with my company. Most of the time I got the answering machine because my account manager was never in. Other than that I didn’t hear from them. Either out of loyalty or laziness, I didn’t start looking for positions on my own. I worked on my novel, redesigned my web site and played a lot of pool. I think I played Sim City 2000 for about a week straight. I didn’t start to worry until the checks stopped coming.

Fighting for my rights

Apparently TDI decided that they didn’t have any work for me, so they stopped paying me. They didn’t send me a notice or call to tell me that they were giving up. They just stopped paying me. I was, as you might expect, upset. I tried to call the Phoenix Account Manager, but he was out of the office as usual. I then tried to contact the main office, but no one seemed interested in talking to me. At that point I wrote a letter. In the letter I accused them of fraud and wrongful termination and I told them that if I did not hear from them by the end of the week I would file a grievance with the state labor board. Because I lived in Arizona, a right-to-work state, there really was no state labor board for me to go to, but this was a California company so I assumed they didn’t know how things worked in Arizona.

I faxed the letter to their head office and waited. At this point I was prepared to hear the worst, or nothing at all. Within a half hour my phone rang. It was a company vice president, and he was just short of apologetic. He made it clear that they couldn’t keep me on forever, and I made it clear that their failure to send me on even a single interview didn’t represent much of a commitment on their part. By the end of the call he had agreed to pay me for the past three weeks and for one more month. He also promised to make a genuine effort to find me more work. They sent me my back pay by overnight mail.

Getting back in the game

I still hoped that TDI would find me another gig, but at this point I was no longer counting on it. I needed work. I was still up to my armpits in debt and I couldn’t afford even a few weeks without pay. I posted my resume on Dice and Monster and mailed it to all of the Tucson and Phoenix technical employment agencies I could find. Three more weeks passed without much movement, but in the final week before my last paycheck, interest picked up. TDI, the company that still employed me, managed to land me a job interview in Dallas. Meanwhile, my resume had generated two more interviews, both in Phoenix. I was about to experience three very different interviews, and get two offers…

Further reading

• EmployeeIssues.com is a great site for researching your rights and the ways to defend them
• Time Management for the Unemployed: When you need work, you need to pay attention to time management

Questions

• Have you ever had a dispute with an employer about pay? How did you handle it?
• Do you have any tips about the best use of employment downtime?

Related links

• A Career in Technical Writing: The beginning of a new series (0.500)
• A Career in Technical Writing: Life as a wannabee (0.500)
• A Career in Technical Writing: Two dates to the prom (0.500)
• A Career in Technical Writing: The fax about outsourcing (0.500)
• A Career in Technical Writing: A strange new world (0.500)