Important shakeup at work. A longtime employee in one department abruptly left last week. She and her family apparently had planned to move down south for some time, plus a family emergency has changed her short- and intermediate-term plans, so she decided it was time for her to leave. She was really nice to me when I kept asking her questions, sometimes probably the same ones I asked her before.
That means that, until (or maybe even if) my boss can find or hire a replacement, I will be working in her place a couple times a week -- just a few hours, but I am expected to be there until he can find someone. Don't know how long that will be. Maybe this is not a good comparison, but when the person who had done the wraparound (Saturday through Tuesday) job left, I thought that me filling in on Sundays (the day of the week that had to be covered) was going to be temporary. It's been almost four months now, and in the e-mail I blog posted about prioritizing duties, he hinted that me coming in on Sundays was going to be "long-term."
Trying to find someone who will work Saturdays through Tuesdays is probably a lot tougher than finding someone to work a usual workweek. Hope so, because if yesterday is any indication (and it might not be), it's probably best my boss finds someone quick.
Basically, filing's just not my thing. I get in in the morning, and there is a pile of stuff that I am confronted with (nothing unusual there), and ... well, I know that other people could probably do it all in three hours, but I didn't. I don't really know why. Sure, I was sidetracked by doing other things. But ... well, this is going to sound like excuses, but they're my excuses ... it was a Monday ... and this was the first time on a new work schedule that I might need to be in for some time ... and I needed to get my radio going at the computer because I can't work without it, but the goddamn headphones were in my way the whole time I was sitting down at that workstation, and that was really harshing my mellow ... and That Guy wasn't working yesterday, so I felt as though I could be self-indulgent with my work environment ... anyway, I was slow, OK? I was slow. It felt like I did a lot, but if I weren't so slow to get up to speed first thing in the morning, and if I didn't mess around as long as I did with getting the satellite radio station I wanted, I think I maybe could have done all the work I had when I came in in the morning.
I say all of this because there was no one else in the department working that day. Someone from somewhere else was working in the department too, and since she's been there a long time (or she wasn't stuck on finding the right radio station), she blazed through all the stuff that she needed to do. She even had time to help me. But when I had to leave for my regular duties, I left her with a good-sized pile of folders to put away. And I know that since she was now the only person in that department yesterday, plus she has her own duties with her own job of which she still had to stay on top (she is the only person in that "department"), she probably saw everything I left her and went, "How come he's so fucking slow?" I like her, she's not a bad co-worker at all, but I'm pretty sure she thought that.
I kind of felt bad leaving that much work behind, and maybe that affected me the rest of the day. I did that thing whereby I left one program open so a technician in the lab could not access that folder, so he had to come up to the window and remind me to close the program so he could get in. Thankfully he was not in a bad mood, and thankfully he was not that other guy who actually pounded on the fucking wall to get my attention. Moreover, me and my other co-worker in my main job were assailed with work in the afternoon. She estimated that we did between twice and three times as many forms as we would normally encounter on a Monday. We were in the shit in the afternoon. But, somehow, we got out of work in time. We had to work through our afternoon break, and I don't like that, but we got out of work in time.
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So I'm up after conking off at 7 this past evening and waking up at a quarter to 1. I may be dead tired going into work today. But it is a new day. The full cast will be there, so assuming we won't get dumped on with work that would overwhelm a dozen people and not just two, we'll be fine. And the day after that I'll be back in filing, and maybe with one clumsy day gone and That Guy back putting a damper on everyone's work environment by his mere uncooperative presence, I'll have my head on straight and be willing to just work. At the very least I doubt it'll be as bad as yesterday was.
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