Category Archives: the ongoing saga of my job

the ongoing saga of my job

Back To Work

Been back from vacation for a day and a half now. Having trouble concentrating this morning. Good excuse to blog.

Lots of weirdness happened at work while I was gone. Our supervisor had already told us that he was leaving the department, so that was no surprise. His replacement was announced in my absence, though, and was met with lukewarm enthusiasm at best. His successor is a supervisor from another department, which left that department with a supervisory vacancy. In turn, yet another supervisor from another department — the department for which James and I are currently developing a new tracking database — is moving to fill *that* vacancy. Which leaves the department with which we’ve been working currently in limbo. So, the supervisors are having a nice little Chinese Fire Drill, people are leaving their respective departments like rats from a sinking ship, and James and I are a bit dazed.

The timing of the announcement was impeccable, too, being that I was on vacation last week and James is on vacation this week. So, he was pretty much flying solo last week, apart from us trading a few update emails, and I’m flying solo this week. These two weeks are enough to confirm our suspicion that this job really does require two people. It could be that we’ve just grown used to bouncing ideas off of one another, or it could be a function of my struggling confidence level, but I hesitate to make any drastic changes or embark on any new projects without confirming with James first.

That said, I should probably try to focus and make some headway on something.

geekspeak, the ongoing saga of my job

Geekery, Continued

Everything just seemed to fall into place.

We had talked to our department’s trainer, and asked him if he thought we should train everyone on what we had of the database so far, or whether we should wait until the database is complete — god only knows when that will be. The trainer agreed that we should train our department ASAP, and fill them in on any additional updates as necessary.

We worked on borrowing a projector and a laptop, and making sure one of the nearby conference rooms had network access. Then, a supervisor from an IT-based department upstairs said that we could just use their training room, already equipped with a projector and laptop and room for eight people — exactly big enough to train half of our department at a crack. We booked the room for a week and a half in the future.

We continued to work on getting reports and statistics-gathering forms functional in the development copy (aka the test database). We met with our supervisor after he returned from vacation earlier this week, and got his reactions to the database and the reports we’d created for him. He gave us some suggestions for tweaking the reports, but said that we could go ahead with implementing the statistics-gathering from team members. Month-end is tomorrow, so the new method of gathering stats in the database would be implemented effective Monday. Just in time for training.

Everything was ready to import into the live database yesterday afternoon, and we did our update at 4:30pm yesterday. The import had only one minor glitch in one report, due to some previously-entered data that invalidated the referential integrity we’d set up between tables. We came in early this morning to fix the problem, rather than staying late yesterday. After correcting the data in the main log table, everything was fine. The database was essentially complete. Again, just in time for training.

Our first training session was at 9:30am today. I stood at the front and did the public speaking, while James sat at the laptop and did the demonstrating. Other supervisors in the loan area were invited to attend one of the two sessions, so that they might be able to see whether an Access database might benefit their department. One supervisor was in attendance for the first training session, and our own supervisor popped in for the first half of that session, making a full house.

The first session took just over an hour, including questions. That was a little longer than we’d counted on, as we’d scheduled the second session to start at 10:30am.

The second session actually ended up starting at 10:45am, and one more supervisor was in attendance, in addition to the supervisor of all Loan Servicing departments. (No pressure.) Our supervisor came in for the second part of the session this time. This session took almost exactly an hour.

Overall, we did well on our two scheduled training sessions… but we weren’t done yet. Two team members who process payoff checks had asked if they could wait until 3:30pm to train, since the end of the month is a busy time for them. We agreed, and ended up having four people in an afternoon session: the two payoff ladies, one supervisor from yet another department, and one team member who had gotten caught in a 45-minute phone call during the 10:30 session and hadn’t been able to attend. That session was a little awkward, being that there was such a small but diverse audience, but it seemed to be well-received nonetheless.

We didn’t get much actual work done on the database today — combined a couple reports into one (thank jebus for union queries) and started working on calculations for another report — but, overall, considering all the training we did, I think we had a productive day.

The next potentially stressful issue? How to tell our supervisor that we want a change in job description before we work on databases for other departments. Neither myself nor James are terribly good at standing up for ourselves… but we need to stand firm. It would be easy for The Man to take advantage of our apparently rare and valuable skills. If they had to hire new people to replace us, though, any self-respecting Access database programmer or administrator would scoff at our current wage.

I hate being a self-serving jerk. Our boss is cool, though, so I think we should be able to get our point across in a non-threatening and un-jerk-like manner. We’ll see.

Even if I do remain a mere Operations Associate… I love being able to do what I enjoy at work. This is why I went to college. I’m glad I wasn’t just chasing rainbows.

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Twinkie-misu, Year #2

Work was surprisingly pleasant today, really. No one felt like being terribly productive, so we were all chatty and friendly and social instead of being isolated and, well, productive. And the boss was on vacation this week, so he wasn’t around to scatter us back to work, like he tends to do. That always makes for an enjoyable Friday.

Also, I guess I inadvertently advertised my birthday at this week’s department meeting. Usually, our department holds a monthly potluck in celebration of all the birthdays in that month. I haven’t been participating lately, though, due to my diet, and I had assumed that the person who usually organizes the potlucks had taken notice of that, and was intentionally skipping April for my benefit. At the department meeting, though, she said that she’s organizing a building-wide potluck for Relay For Life instead. I piped up and mentioned that I’d thought maybe it was because I was the only April birthday. 🙂

So, today, a few people came into my cube bearing chips and salsa and cheese dip and 2-liters of pop — oh, yeah, and an African violet. (Very pretty pale silky flowers, BTW, in contrast to my dark velvety-flowered one at home.) On top of that, Scott made Twinkie tiramisu for my birthday, for a second year in a row. Mmm, so good!

Of course, since my cube was where the food was, everybody in the department (almost) made it into my corner of the world for some chatter. I learned some interesting facts about my co-workers and their backgrounds, and got more comfortable with some of them that I don’t usually talk with. That made for an unusually talkative day for me, and a very relaxing day-before-my-birthday at work.

I ended up bringing a good deal of Twinkie-misu home with me, with Scott’s blessing, and even brought home the rest of the chips and dips for good measure. Twinkie-misu gets me so high… Twinkies (soaked in espresso) and coffee ice cream and whipped cream and fudge sauce… yummy, but wow.   o.O

We’ll see what happens tomorrow. I’m still trying to downplay it… but I know that at least one other person is involved, from what Aaron let slip. So, something’s happening, at some point. I’ll be pleased with whatever it is, I’m sure.

the ongoing saga of my job

Well, Little Miss New Media Designer…

Sheryl asked me this week whatever happened to that guy who signed me up as an independent contractor for new media design work.

You know, now that I think about it, that was really kind of a turning point for me.

At the time, I was in the midst of the LSM redesign, so I didn’t immediately contact him to ask for work. Once I got done with the LSM site, I was glad to have time for my own projects again, so I still didn’t call. After a while, I realized that I enjoyed having time in the evenings to do my own personal projects, and that being asked to sign up for contract work was enough of an ego boost to keep me going for some time.

I’d still like to get away from the bank gig eventually, of course, but it’s no longer a major priority for me. Maybe someday, after we pop out a little Schnuthie Junior, I can take on one of those part-time web design gigs like I used to pass up in favor of paying rent (or, these days, the mortgage payment).

Until then, I at least know that I’m good enough, I’m smart enough — and doggone it, at least *one* design company out there likes me.

the ongoing saga of my job

Annoyance

I should not be so thoroughly annoyed by something so simple, but…

I keep a bottle of water at my desk at work. I buy Dasani out of the machine on Monday, then continue to refill the bottle with tap water throughout the week. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I’ll put the bottle in the freezer with two inches of water in the bottom, to make ice for myself. Sometimes, if I don’t want to take the time to swing past the break room, I’ll just leave the empty bottle on my desk instead.

Every single day this week, my water bottle and the napkin on which it sits have gone missing. Presumably, the cleaning people have been throwing it away. Yesterday, I got so annoyed that I wrote on the napkin, “This is not trash. Thanks.”

When I came in this morning, both bottle and napkin were gone. Again.

It’s a small annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but even so, it’s still annoying.

Today I got a styrofoam coffee cup and filled it with ice water. Hopefully I don’t spill the whole damn thing on my desk or anything.