I may have blog posted about this before, but one of the duties in My Main Department at work is checking how many folders we went through every hour. It is needed for our supervisors to know how many of them went through us in case we need to improve the process, retrain someone who is struggling, etc.
We denote the folders for an hour with a different color, and at the top of every hour the person designated for this job grabs the clipboard with the sheet on it, check in our software to see if we actually did do everything we needed to do for each folder, and count up the number of folders done for that hour.
That task yesterday/Wednesday fell to me. (I was surprised that it was my job yesterday; I didn't think I was working there because the online calendar had me somewhere else. But then I saw no one was sitting at the desk where the person doing this task was supposed to sit. I asked my boss if I was supposed to do it; he looked at the paper sheet that did have me listed at the spot, to be fair, then apologized for not updating the calendar.) Now, close to the end of the day we sometimes skip doing the folders for the 1 o'clock hour because starting at 2 the folders come at us fast and furious. We just switch the colors at the top of the hour; assuming we aren't being jerks and just doing shades of, like, blue all day, it'll be obvious which folders were done which hours.
After I come back from break at 1:15, I grab the clipboard and check the folders done for the noontime hour. The color for that hour was brown. Once I checked everything, I swear -- I swear -- I put the brown pen away. I didn't replace it with a different color; I am not the one who was sending the folders through, and those who were could pick out the new color.
So we got done with everything -- all the folders were processed, blah-de-blah. It's past 2, so I have to check folders for the past two hours. That means two pens. But one of my co-workers had a problem at the clipboard. There were two pens out. One was green. The other, for some odd reason, was the brown pen. Unfortunately, the latest series of folders (these are numbered, always) were checked off in green. Assuming that green pen was for the 1 o'clock folders ... which color was used for the folders done in the 2 o'clock hour, of which there were many?
In the grand scheme of things using the same pen for two consecutive hours isn't the worst thing in the world. Nonetheless, I was stumped as hell, and so the grizzled veteran of the department did some things on our software to best figure out what the problem was and what could be done. Her best guess: The brown pen was used for the folders for 1, and the green was used for 2.
That can't be right. How did someone decide to use the brown pen again? I put the cap back on the brown pen and put it off to the side. Or did I? Frankly now, I don't know. After I reviewed everything, I easily could have put the clipboard back with the brown pen on it, uncapped, as if someone decided that all folders passing through during the 1 o'clock hour would be in brown. Shoot, that might have been what happened.
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At any rate, I want to get something off my chest. I was working this part of My Main Department with two others. One was the grizzled vet. The other is basically a newbie, although I think she's been at it for a year. She's also very quiet, just doing her job with an achievement I can't complain about.
However, when I was in this crisis over too few pens, I needed her help to retrace the steps we took when we were getting done with each folder. I asked her, and this was in the 2 o'clock hour, if she could remember which numbered folders she did after 2. To which she basically replied, "Uh ... I did ... lots of ... folders?"
Maybe she was being funny. Maybe she was trying to say she genuinely doesn't remember, which is understandable. But her response didn't really help me at my moment of need. And for someone who has been solid ever since she began working there (albeit without much of a personality), that truly was the first time I was disappointed in her. It wasn't as if I asked her whether she put a brown-colored pen back after reviewing folders an hour ago. It was, like, half an hour ago. And she can't remember that? (sigh)
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There were two other times yesterday/Wednesday where I didn't pay as much attention as I should have, but this tale I just recanted is long enough for its own blog post, so I'll save those for another time.
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