Yeah, yesterday at work was a fucking turd.
I was busy, man -- so busy that I wonder why there wasn't a second person working a full eight hours there. I didn't mind that at first. It was nice to be on your toes and have a full day of work, the first time in months. And the crush of work I was dealing with wasn't a big deal ... until my supervisor yesterday kind of intimated that it was.
To kind of describe what I was doing while not totally blowing my cover ... there are three stations in this department. My boss said that two of them have priority, and one of them should be done before the other. That station has priority because we have to go through these folders and then hand them off to another department. Sometimes these folders have applications which involve tests whose results people are waiting on, so it's very important to push the work through in order to get those results released to them.
The other station I needed to dote over is, basically, filing. Those folders I send over from the first station to that other department come back and are to be handled by the person manning the second station. (Yesterday, I was handling both stations.) Since the last time I was working in this department (and it has been months -- shoot, yesterday may have been the first time I pulled a full day there in 2020), the process for doing the folders which come into this station changed. I got a crash course Thursday, but I still had to fend for myself yesterday. Now, compound that with the fact I literally had to fend for myself yesterday, as in I was by myself in this department for the first few hours of my shift, and that these folders come back to us once that department is done with them, and you might be able to tell that if I had to prioritize this first station, the one that was pushing out work to another department, work was going to pile up at this second station. Now, I had no idea it was going to get as crazy as it did yesterday, since I thought we are far from normal capacity work-wise. But I got blindsided by how, well, normal the workload seemed. In other words, when I had worked this second station back in ordinary days, I'm swamped. And I was swamped yesterday.
And again, I didn't mind it, at least not at first. The first hint that, you know, maybe I didn't do what I was supposed to was when, in the afternoon, my supervisor looked over my work. All morning the folders coming into the first station kept coming. (Oh, by the way, a part of this job is hunting down forms and folders that, it has been determined, belong to that folder. I find this part to be fairly straightforward since I got trained some time ago, but it's time-consuming.) She noted that. However, she noted that I had neglected the second station. She told me to get on that station and, in particular, concentrate on folders that have these forms that, in the first station, I pulled from other places to put into said folders. I was reminded by her that the reporting process isn't done by the time a folder gets to this second station. Those forms still need to have other things done to it, and those have been sitting on this table all morning.
Maybe I could have felt defensive when she said that. I didn't feel defensive. I was following orders -- her orders -- particularly that I have to do work coming into this first station first. (Oh, by the way, did I say that another task in this first station is to personally fulfill fax requests for specific forms? Those are even a higher priority than processing folders because someone is specifically saying he or she is waiting on the result of a test requested on this form. It is my understanding that I should drop everything and do these requests toot suite.) I don't think she was questioning my mindset, not even inadvertently. In short, I believe I did the right thing, and I stand by the decision I made.
But with so many damn folders, and with more coming it was hard to keep up filing all the folders, let alone the "prioritized" one. Plus, I had questions I had to ask my supe. I don't think she answered out of frustration, but when I asked another one of my questions, she pointed out the mound of folders that got built up over the course of the day and noted that, ahem, I shouldn't have allowed such a tall pile of folders this late into the day. And OK, that's when, internally, I got fed up.
Look, I have a good relationship with this supervisor. She is a very good trainer. We get along especially when we're not talking about work. (I get along with many of my authority figures when we're not talking about work.) I think she understands how overwhelmed I felt being back there for the first time in a long time and after learning a new process -- I think. And I'm fairly certain she didn't mean to insult me -- fairly. But unlike what she said earlier in the day, I felt sort of undermined by what she said. Without context and just taking what she said at face value, she sounded like she didn't approve of what I did, or at least how I let things get out of hand. Either that or, worse, she was insinuating I was working too slowly -- to which I would like to remind her that I was doing triage on the crush of paperwork I was doing on my own and assert, as a fact, that I was working my ass off. And so I was kind of, you know, done after that.
It will be the same situation for me tomorrow/Sunday. I don't know if the workflow will be the same, a lot less, or a lot more. But it will be different in the sense that, with a possible exception of someone coming after a few hours by myself, I will have the entire department all to myself. And so, even if the folders keep piling up all day, I don't think I'll be as upset as I quietly became yesterday afternoon, if only because there will be no one breathing down my neck judging my work.
I was busy, man -- so busy that I wonder why there wasn't a second person working a full eight hours there. I didn't mind that at first. It was nice to be on your toes and have a full day of work, the first time in months. And the crush of work I was dealing with wasn't a big deal ... until my supervisor yesterday kind of intimated that it was.
To kind of describe what I was doing while not totally blowing my cover ... there are three stations in this department. My boss said that two of them have priority, and one of them should be done before the other. That station has priority because we have to go through these folders and then hand them off to another department. Sometimes these folders have applications which involve tests whose results people are waiting on, so it's very important to push the work through in order to get those results released to them.
The other station I needed to dote over is, basically, filing. Those folders I send over from the first station to that other department come back and are to be handled by the person manning the second station. (Yesterday, I was handling both stations.) Since the last time I was working in this department (and it has been months -- shoot, yesterday may have been the first time I pulled a full day there in 2020), the process for doing the folders which come into this station changed. I got a crash course Thursday, but I still had to fend for myself yesterday. Now, compound that with the fact I literally had to fend for myself yesterday, as in I was by myself in this department for the first few hours of my shift, and that these folders come back to us once that department is done with them, and you might be able to tell that if I had to prioritize this first station, the one that was pushing out work to another department, work was going to pile up at this second station. Now, I had no idea it was going to get as crazy as it did yesterday, since I thought we are far from normal capacity work-wise. But I got blindsided by how, well, normal the workload seemed. In other words, when I had worked this second station back in ordinary days, I'm swamped. And I was swamped yesterday.
And again, I didn't mind it, at least not at first. The first hint that, you know, maybe I didn't do what I was supposed to was when, in the afternoon, my supervisor looked over my work. All morning the folders coming into the first station kept coming. (Oh, by the way, a part of this job is hunting down forms and folders that, it has been determined, belong to that folder. I find this part to be fairly straightforward since I got trained some time ago, but it's time-consuming.) She noted that. However, she noted that I had neglected the second station. She told me to get on that station and, in particular, concentrate on folders that have these forms that, in the first station, I pulled from other places to put into said folders. I was reminded by her that the reporting process isn't done by the time a folder gets to this second station. Those forms still need to have other things done to it, and those have been sitting on this table all morning.
Maybe I could have felt defensive when she said that. I didn't feel defensive. I was following orders -- her orders -- particularly that I have to do work coming into this first station first. (Oh, by the way, did I say that another task in this first station is to personally fulfill fax requests for specific forms? Those are even a higher priority than processing folders because someone is specifically saying he or she is waiting on the result of a test requested on this form. It is my understanding that I should drop everything and do these requests toot suite.) I don't think she was questioning my mindset, not even inadvertently. In short, I believe I did the right thing, and I stand by the decision I made.
But with so many damn folders, and with more coming it was hard to keep up filing all the folders, let alone the "prioritized" one. Plus, I had questions I had to ask my supe. I don't think she answered out of frustration, but when I asked another one of my questions, she pointed out the mound of folders that got built up over the course of the day and noted that, ahem, I shouldn't have allowed such a tall pile of folders this late into the day. And OK, that's when, internally, I got fed up.
Look, I have a good relationship with this supervisor. She is a very good trainer. We get along especially when we're not talking about work. (I get along with many of my authority figures when we're not talking about work.) I think she understands how overwhelmed I felt being back there for the first time in a long time and after learning a new process -- I think. And I'm fairly certain she didn't mean to insult me -- fairly. But unlike what she said earlier in the day, I felt sort of undermined by what she said. Without context and just taking what she said at face value, she sounded like she didn't approve of what I did, or at least how I let things get out of hand. Either that or, worse, she was insinuating I was working too slowly -- to which I would like to remind her that I was doing triage on the crush of paperwork I was doing on my own and assert, as a fact, that I was working my ass off. And so I was kind of, you know, done after that.
It will be the same situation for me tomorrow/Sunday. I don't know if the workflow will be the same, a lot less, or a lot more. But it will be different in the sense that, with a possible exception of someone coming after a few hours by myself, I will have the entire department all to myself. And so, even if the folders keep piling up all day, I don't think I'll be as upset as I quietly became yesterday afternoon, if only because there will be no one breathing down my neck judging my work.
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