![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ALPS is gone.
Apr. 28th, 2018 11:16 pmSo it's been an exciting two weeks at work. Monday afternoon april 16th, company president calls in every employee in the building for a meeting. ALPS has just been bought out by 4WALL and is now 4WALL Boston. Took me totally by surprise. Some of the managers were told a week or so before that, and prior to that only the owners and one manager knew about it.
Lots of free floating stress and anxiety. Lots of rumors, very little data. It took them a couple of days, but all employees (except for one who had already given his notice) got formal job offers, and I think everyone accepted them. Since the buyout coincided with my anniversary date and annual review, they gave me a 3% raise in the offer letter, which was nice of them. They have a lower cap on vacation time, but with my seniority being transferred over, instead of being the second from the top bracket on earning vacation time, I'm now already at the top bracket. Sick time is now merely paid time off, and can be used for things like staying home for the cable guy to put in cable TV.
4WALL is organized differently. With ALPS, I was the repair guy for cables, conventional lighting, road cases, and backfill warehouse and delivery driver for crunch times. I don't have my DoT physical anymore, the diabetes made that too expensive to keep going back every three months to renew it. So I can only drive the van now. 4WALL has a bunch of individual departments that take care of subsets of the rental inventory. So there is a rigging group, a moving light group, cable, conventionals, and so on. Each group pulls orders and rolls them to a staging area, where the dock manager assembles them all for delivery. They go on a truck for delivery. trucking is also a group. When they come back, they go back to their various areas to be counted, repaired if needed, and put back on the shelf ready to rent again. So my job is being chopped up into a few different pieces. Haven't heard which piece will remain mine.
For our customers, nothing really changes. You call the same phone numbers. Eventually there will me new email addresses and a different web site to look at. The same folks will be handling your orders. Just gotta write a different name on the check when you pay. 4WALL runs their rental inventory differently. It turns over a lot more and faster. We have basically held on in inventory lots of fixtures that don't go out very often, but a few old loyal clients rent them every year. There is a cost to keeping a thing in the inventory in the warehouse all year, so things that don't earn out enough on rentals annually are gonna go to usedlighting.com which is the surplus equipment portion of 4WALL.
Still rentals keep going out, and things haven't changed much yet. I now have to abide by a dress code. CLosed toe shoes, 4WALL tshirt, hat and hoodie if it's cold. Have to punch a time clock in and out of work and for lunch. I'll bet I'll be messing that up lots. They say that I'll be able to flex my schedule with taking care of mom, but the employee manual does not support that statement.
Time will tell.
Lots of free floating stress and anxiety. Lots of rumors, very little data. It took them a couple of days, but all employees (except for one who had already given his notice) got formal job offers, and I think everyone accepted them. Since the buyout coincided with my anniversary date and annual review, they gave me a 3% raise in the offer letter, which was nice of them. They have a lower cap on vacation time, but with my seniority being transferred over, instead of being the second from the top bracket on earning vacation time, I'm now already at the top bracket. Sick time is now merely paid time off, and can be used for things like staying home for the cable guy to put in cable TV.
4WALL is organized differently. With ALPS, I was the repair guy for cables, conventional lighting, road cases, and backfill warehouse and delivery driver for crunch times. I don't have my DoT physical anymore, the diabetes made that too expensive to keep going back every three months to renew it. So I can only drive the van now. 4WALL has a bunch of individual departments that take care of subsets of the rental inventory. So there is a rigging group, a moving light group, cable, conventionals, and so on. Each group pulls orders and rolls them to a staging area, where the dock manager assembles them all for delivery. They go on a truck for delivery. trucking is also a group. When they come back, they go back to their various areas to be counted, repaired if needed, and put back on the shelf ready to rent again. So my job is being chopped up into a few different pieces. Haven't heard which piece will remain mine.
For our customers, nothing really changes. You call the same phone numbers. Eventually there will me new email addresses and a different web site to look at. The same folks will be handling your orders. Just gotta write a different name on the check when you pay. 4WALL runs their rental inventory differently. It turns over a lot more and faster. We have basically held on in inventory lots of fixtures that don't go out very often, but a few old loyal clients rent them every year. There is a cost to keeping a thing in the inventory in the warehouse all year, so things that don't earn out enough on rentals annually are gonna go to usedlighting.com which is the surplus equipment portion of 4WALL.
Still rentals keep going out, and things haven't changed much yet. I now have to abide by a dress code. CLosed toe shoes, 4WALL tshirt, hat and hoodie if it's cold. Have to punch a time clock in and out of work and for lunch. I'll bet I'll be messing that up lots. They say that I'll be able to flex my schedule with taking care of mom, but the employee manual does not support that statement.
Time will tell.
