And I'm Back To Thinking I'll Be Laid Off Again

Working in The Fourth Department Wednesday through today/Friday, and man, the first two days back there were like the hectic days of yore.  I don't know what happened, but the number of forms increased to almost twice as much as we've gotten on a daily basis lately.  Now, there has been some reorganization of tasks; before, forms that had some missing pieces of information were shunted to The Third Department, but now that my co-worker was shitcanned for still-unknown reasons, every form that is missing something is sent to The Fourth Department.

Even that streamlining of tasks, however, does not explain fully, in my humble opinion, why there is so much work coming my way this week.  It's not as if the full shipment going outside has increased.  I guess there are just a lot of mistakes being made by collectors.  And it's my job to hunt that missing info down.  And it has made me stay later than eight hours -- nine Wednesday, nine yesterday/Thursday.  I like to think that I've gotten good enough that, if I were faced with this much work when I started out back there, I would've gone ten hours and still had stuff left over.

Still, I am back to the thought that my boss isn't happy.  To be fair, on Wednesday, he e-mailed me that if there was enough work that kept me late, stay no longer than an hour.  I managed to get done when I left after 8 hours and 59 minutes of work.  Yesterday/Thursday it was a full nine.  When there are forms to which you e-mail clients about what is missing, they generally answer you in e-mails you receive the following morning.  That happened yesterday/Thursday morning, which meant I got to the new stuff in the early afternoon, and like I said, there is more stuff than has been coming in in 2024, and after all processing all the answers I got from clients before I left for the day (as well as one phone call that for which I had to drop everything and figure out how to deal with), boom, it was 5:30.

My boss, by the way, didn't e-mail saying I could stay up to an hour extra for overtime yesterday/Thursday.  I am thinking he gave me grace Wednesday, but that's it.  I have a ready-made excuse -- look at all the work that came in! -- but I wonder if the person who just got fully trained in is as fast as the other person who works all four departments like me.  If they are faster, and if my boss is happy at the number of answers they both get ... well, the company will think of me as a liability.

Man, these are the dog days of summer.  I just want to hit the State Fair, eat, and say goodbye to this endless summer without working about unemployment.