dianaschnuth

You will all be pleased to know that, after a few days of wearing skirts exclusively, my previously moist and painful heat rash has now dried out and diminished to a strange dry flaky spot. Better that than the other, though.

So I’m walking down the hall at work to get myself a Mountain Dew, and who do I see coming up the hall toward me? None other than Rob "Champion of the World" Wozniak, of RCC summer fame. I tip my head in my typical ‘huh?’ gesture, and approach him closer.

"Rob?"

"Di," he answers smoothly. "What are you doing here? — You work here. What am I doing here?" I kind of nod and say the words with him, and he answers that he’s been working in escrow for the past two weeks. Says the temp agency told him they had a clerical job for him, and here he is. I told him that’s how I got my start last year, and they hired me on after a few months. I also said that it sounds like they always need people in escrow, so they might hire him on… if that’s what he wants. He said that’s the plan, and he hopes it works out that way.

So… the world gets smaller and smaller. How many RCC people have worked at the Sky Service Center? Me, Donna, A, and Rob, at least. It seems to be a starting point. One in which I’ve stagnated and from which I have failed to successfully emerge. The fly in amber? Hmm.

FYI, next weekend is my long-awaited weekend trip to DeKalb, IL for the DCI Midwestern Championships — the midseason show-of-shows. I haven’t been to this show since I was *in* it back in 1996. This is going to be so cool.

OMFG. New networking crap at work sucks. …Well, no, I actually find it pretty cool myself. Teaching my co-workers to use it (after I figured it out by myself yesterday) sucks.

Before this week, we were using Groupwise for our e-mail client (never heard of it), BitWare to fax from our computers (that one looked homemade), and were happy in our own little domain on Sky’s Novell Network. However, at the end of last week, our fax program magically stopped sending faxes. Upon calling the helpdesk, we discovered that the rest of the company was migrating to a new system, and BitWare would no longer work because they had rerouted the faxserver to work out the bugs in the new fax program. Nice to know. So, for several days, we had to print out our reports and manually fax all of our fax clients — about 70 or so, I think — rather than sending them like attachments from our computer. That slowed us down a bit.

But this week, the real fun began.

Since I send the most faxes right now, I became the guinea pig in our department to migrate to the new system. Lucky me. Scott from the tech support side of things spent over an hour migrating my computer to the new domain and figuring out how we could still access our old server (since it has all of our reports and important stuff on it). That was over an hour during which I could do nothing. Good thing it was a light day, anyway. Actually, once everything was installed and set up, life was OK. I enjoy learning new programs and playing with computers, so using Outlook (yay! seriously, yay!) and the new fax program made me happy. Even troubleshooting how to transfer our old address book into the new was a fun challenge, though a little frustrating. But life was still… OK.

Until today. When they migrated Rama and Loni.

OMG. It must be the age difference. All the stuff I’d had to figure out on my own or with minimal instruction, they had to ask me about every five minutes. I barely got any work done today, because I was walking over to talk Rama through attaching an e-mail and finding a contact from the address book and blah blah blah. Not that I mind, I guess, but after explaining something twice, I expect not to have to babysit a person as they say, "Now I click OK, right?" or just plain forget steps altogether. I am so not cut out for tech support. Then, it made things so much better when Rama and Loni found out they weren’t added as users to the faxserver, so I had to fax (from my computer) all the accounts they had tried to fax before and just not noticed the error messages they were getting. Aargh! For God’s sake, people, read your e-mail when it comes in! It might save me having to fax, say, two dozen files!

Ahem. I’m better now.

At any rate, this was not one of my better weeks. And I’m not done yet — I have to work tomorrow, too. From 11:15am to 5:00pm. End of the half, you know, and we have to keep up so we get everything done on Monday in time. *sigh*

I need to start looking for another job again. Sounds like we might be having an exodus of the temps soon, because they’re tired of barely getting 35 hours a week. I don’t want to be there when shit hits the fan, or whatnot. I think I could find a job with comparable benefits (besides the free checking). I still scope out the job postings on Sky Central (our intranet), but nothing comes up that is really in my field. There’s only a few jobs that I’d really jockey for, and Loan Support or Customer Service (aka bank teller) are not those.

Plus, I must admit that I’m feeling a bit belittled by the fact that A got out of the same job I’m currently in, except she was a temp and I’m a Sky employee. Same thing, pretty much. I don’t know how much she’s currently making, though, and I don’t know anything about her benefits, so I’m sure I could still have the better job on that front… but still. Did I drop the ball? Did I ever actually take possession of the proverbial ball? I don’t know. All I know is that I keep playing "sour grapes" by maintaining that I get good benefits, and I never had to move back in with my parents, and that outweighs the fact that I don’t have the job I want.

Eventually, pull factors and push factors will propel me to find a new job. Until then, the pull of a steady gig with vacation time outweighs the pull of another, more relevant and enjoyable job. And I’m willing to deal with that. For now.

My former co-worker, A, got a job doing web work for Harley-Davidson. No offense to her (well, maybe), but I’m working at a bank, and she has a job with a nationally-known corporation, designing their website?

I think I’m going to shoot myself.

Some of you will be surprized that I ever break down at all. Back in drumcorps (in Northern Aurora, anyway), they used to say I was a rock. But everyone has his or her breaking point. I reached mine on Wednesday.

I came to work Wednesday morning feeling generally sick. Sore throat, dry eyes, headachy, nausated, mild fever (I think). But I didn’t even consider not going. I wasn’t puking, and I could walk, so off I went. (Note: Monday was a 12-hour day. Tuesday was a 10-hour day. I was expecting things to let up just a little…) Of course, oodles of mail came in — three full mail tubs full. (Two is a light day, and four makes you want to give up and camp out on the floor and just work all night.) But I plugged away, all day, feeling like shit. Loni left at 5:00 to get her hair permed, and Rama and I continued to plug away. Andrew, our Team Leader, jumped on Loni’s machine after she left and started processing work over there. Aaron called around 6:30pm to let me know that work let him go home early, and I told him I’d be home in about 45 minutes. Still felt like crap, but I was looking forward to seeing Aaron soon.

Now, there are two phases of the processing that we’re responsible for: (1) entering payment information into the computer and printing reports for clients, and (2) encoding checks and preparing the client’s deposit for Item Processing, where the actual banking magic happens. (You know the line of numbers on the bottom of your checks? Well, after you write a check, someone at the bank encodes the amount of your check on the bottom right-hand corner of the check. Look at your cancelled checks online sometime, and you’ll see.) We got to a point in processing where Rama and Andrew were processing the last account, so I started encoding their checks from previous accounts. And, in the middle of encoding one deposit, my computer told me to change my encoder ribbon. *sigh* Annoying, but only mildly so. Changed ribbons, continued being highly productive. Only half an hour to go.

Or so I thought.

Justin from IP (Item Processing) came and picked up the about 1200 checks we had processed and encoded and took them back to work their magic on. They use the encoding we put on the checks (and they encode other checks from other places, too, like banking centers) to debit each checking account for the encoded amount. Hence, your check gets "cashed." Anyway, I continued to encode.

About two deposits (of 300 checks each) later, I saw something bad. Very bad. The encoding wasn’t right. The bottom third of the numbers weren’t printing correctly. This is bad, because the machines in IP are automated, and read the MICR line to enter the info into their system. If the numbers aren’t printed right, the machines can’t read them. At all. When I had changed the ribbon on my encoder, a little piece of plastic in the new ribbon had been defective. I should have checked the encoding sooner, but I didn’t. It was my fault, but it wasn’t. I almost swore aloud when I realized what had happened. But I kept my cool, got out the box of white stickers, and began putting blank stickers over the encoding for over 500 checks. Called Aaron to let him know I’d be later than I thought.

After all the checks were stickered up, and I’d fixed my encoder, I began encoding again. But this time, the machine I work on made me do it differently. Usually, the machine encodes by showing you the amount that is to be encoded. If it’s right, you hit enter, and it goes. On to the next check. After it’s encoded once, though, you can’t go back and do it that way again. You have to do it the hard way, which is to enter each check amount manually on the computer, then hit enter. This relies on your being able to read the checkwriter’s handwriting. So, of course, once I reached the end of the first deposit, I found I had misread one check and I was off by 60 cents. So, I had to compare the calculator tapes to the amounts I’d encoded. (If you’re not following, it’s not all that important. Suffice to say everything was going wrong at 8:00 at night.)

Cue Justin from IP. He came in with two more deposits that he’d taken back earlier, and said, "I can’t run these."

Without even turning from my computer, I snapped (a little too sharply), "Which ones did I miss?" At which point I turned to see two full deposits in his hands.

I saw them, and I knew I was fucked. I could feel the tears starting in my throat. He left, I went back to trying to find my encoding error, and something just snapped. Finally, abruptly, I turned away from my co-workers, put my elbows on the desk and my head in my hands and cried, "I’m tired and I’m sick and I just want to go home!" And, embarrassingly enough, I started to cry.

This seemed to weird out my supervisor, who said, "OK. Go home."

I answered in my best teeny weepy cute voice, "Really? I can go home?"

He said yes, and asked if I had found my encoding error, and asked what else is left to re-encode. I wiped my eyes, handed him the checks, apologized, and went home. Aaron had Hamburger Helper ready for me, and I laid down on the couch and watched TV with my Honey-Muffin and took aspirin and went to bed.

And that’s the story of My Very First Breakdown. The End.