"We Are Running Out Of Papers"

That is what our supervisor said at my current scoring project.  Goddammit, I knew it.

This is a math project, and after doing this for a few years I know that math projects go really quickly; you're not looking for nuance or signs the student is thinking, comprehending and ably communicating the right answers, you're more likely just making sure he or she's got the right numbers.  With one huge exception, a graph, that's what we've been doing.  And we, as a group, have blazed through two very fast questions to grade, prompting him to say that today.

As a rule with this company, when I get a project I find out its projected end date, then cut it in half.  We are usually so fast -- too fast -- that we get done in half the time.  For this project, that means Monday; any day after that I consider gravy.  Well, we haven't been given any updates on our progress, but I kind of thought I might have been underestimating the time we'd be doing this.  But then he said that this afternoon, and I'm afraid I might be right.  Hell, we might be fuckin' done tomorrow.

That sucks for obvious reasons.  But I'm in more of a panic now because after I got home (early, thank goodness) I got money from the dole because I was unemployed last week.  Unemployment insurance gives me a set amount every year, and I am down to my last few dollars.  In fact, at current rates, I have only two weeks' worth of unemployment.  Good thing is is that I get reapply for a new year of benefits starting on the 1st.  That means that I will not lose a step if I am still at this job through the 14th.

As you can calculate, that makes next week very important.  If I am cut from this job early enough, I will be forced to get money from my dwindling unemployment insurance account that I have mentally "set aside" for the last weeks of the month.  And that would mean I would get no benefits the last week in June.  Probably not a killer, but I am back in a precarious position financially.

Of course all of this could be solved if I can find a job, whether through this company or somewhere else.  Which means I need to polish off my résumé, again.

It's funny: I stood up and went to the break room for a bit, and when I came back a fellow worker, with whom I had worked on at least one other project, said that the supervisor told him I was blazing fast.  Well, we got our individual statistics for the week, and not only am I not the fastest, I am kind of closer to being the slowest.  In fact, it makes me wonder if I should ... work faster.  Yeah, that would mean we would get done sooner, which means we would get a smaller paycheck.  But I'm not sure if that's outweighed by looking like a slowpoke next to the rest of my team.  Hell, they're the ones that are going to make us finish up sooner than we should!