Things felt really good yesterday morning. Like I said, what I thought was key to managing The Fourth Department was the amount of workload I had to deal with. Amazingly, it was not as much as it had been my previous sub stints. And it wasn't in the morning. There are stages of work I group the papers I have to work on into, and there is an order I need to do them. My benchmark in how my day is going to go depends on how early or late I get to each stage. The big one for me is the new work I have coming in. Those are important because no one knows about the problems with these yet. But it's been dictated to me that forms that are already in the system need to be dealt with first because these involve samples whose results people have been waiting on, and the longer the results aren't known, the antsier our clients get.
Anyway, the old stuff I got out of the way early, earlier than the previous three days. That meant I started on the new stuff way earlier than I had even compared to the rest of the week. Once I crossed that benchmark those previous days, I felt like I had a leg up, so yesterday I felt even moreso. I actually thought I could get out on time.
Boy, was I wrong.
I don't know what happened, exactly. The new stuff wasn't voluminous. In fact, the number of forms I had to deal with were smaller than in previous days. Now, a co-worker has to give me some work once it gets so many days old, so those forms folded into my work, but still, it wasn't enough for me to think that I have to stay late. It's just that ... well, at some point in the afternoon, going up to scan in a form for the umpteenth time, I thought to myself, "Geez, there are more of these than I thought." When I got done with all that stuff, the new stuff and the stuff given to me by my co-worker, I had an hour before I was supposed to leave. And the replies from all the people giving me the answers I need were waiting for me in my inbox. And I needed to take my break.
Getting answers is something I have been told I need to stay late for. No worries; one of the things that has slowed down for me in this position is processing the replies for the numbers I need. That doesn't overwhelm me anymore. Unfortunately, it felt as though that a lot of people replied to me last night. Guess that's a product of finishing up work before the weekend. Again, I wasn't bent out of shape about about that because I at least knew what to do. But, and I'll be damned, I had, like, three or four questions that were all, "Hey, can you do this?" and I have no idea what the hell that person wanted. So I had to stop what I was doing and figure out what the hell to do with this problem. And for these curveballs, I had to bother my supervisor, who was out working overtime in a different part of the building and company. I'm not sure how much of a time suck dealing with these weird issues were yesterday, but it took me over the edge stress-wise.
By the time I got done with everything, including the end-of-day stuff, I clocked out of work 75 minutes after my shift. That is as late as I have ever stayed after work working The Fourth Department. That is incredibly frustrating after staying late only 20 minutes the previous two days and only ten minutes Tuesday, and that was only because my supervisor chatted with me about a problem I was willing to leave until the following morning. One of the eventual outcomes of understanding how this job works is getting to leave when you're supposed to. Seventy-five minutes is bleeping insane, and it feels as if everything I worked on and tried to improve upon completely unraveled yesterday. I hate it. I absolutely hate it. Oh, and I couldn't get myself tested for COVID because I got out of work too late.
I bought minibar-sized bottles of whiskey and bourbon. I bought them as a treat for myself for this particular job; if it was a long, bad day, I would come home and, to reward myself, take a swig from both bottles before going to bed.
I actually didn't need either bottle Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday because I thought things went relatively well. That wasn't the case on Friday. I took a nip from both, and then I went to bed early. Because I needed and deserved it.
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Two other things I noticed/had happened to me during my time in The Fourth Department this week that I don't like.
First, back to the end-of-day stuff. I need to do that to check that I have crossed my t's and dotted my i's. There is a series of things I need to do in our software that eventually leads to the testing of urine and blood samples. It's a lot of documentation that lets the relevant people know that these samples are here or there, if you know what I mean. Well, in checking, I saw that I didn't one step at least, oh, half a dozen times. It involves attaching e-mails to a piece of software we all use to let people know these samples are being tested. That's not as bad as stopping samples from being tested, but my greater concern is how many times I failed to do this. This is a step that I understand has to be done, but I just flat-out forgot to do them so many times yesterday. I forgot a few times each of the previous three days, too. I'm scared that this is going to continue to happen because of the blizzard of tasks I need to do in this job.
Second, and more worrying, is the run-ins with rude people I will eventually have to deal with. I was concerned that at some point I would get a call from either someone with the company or a client who wasn't going to be, uh, mannerly. That happened, or appeared to happen, with this bitch of a nurse who called me about a report of who she only had a social security number. I rarely use SSNs because we are told not to unless that's the only information upon which we can search. Well, that happened.
Also, this was the first time I ever got an inquiry about results from someone on the outside. By law and by policy, I am to never release results. I can tell them when the report is released, but not the details of it. And so I was thinking of what to say to her when I finally got around to bringing up the report, and she then said she'll call me back and hung up. Not a fan of hemming and hawing?
Goddamn, if that woman ever deigns to call me again. ...
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