Category Archives: the ongoing saga of my job

the ongoing saga of my job

I Did It

I finally did it. I got my hair bobbed. It is now just a shade longer than chin-length. I feel like a new woman. And I look like one, too. I can’t stop shaking my head and running my fingers through my hair.

Damn, now I’m going to have to break out the round brush and blow dryer on a regular basis.

So, today at work I got yelled at by the IT guy. See, we’ve been having these problems with the new fax program scrunching numbers or just plain eliminating columns of numbers from reports. So, someone’s report will say $1,115.79 when it should really say $15,115.79. This is ungood. Our clients very irately reported this issue to us, and we reported it to Andrew, and Andrew reported it to the IT department. And the IT guy mainly in charge of the fax software had a little bit to say to us about it.

He storms in while Loni’s on the phone, and starts ranting at me, since I’m closest to him. "I cannot be held responsible for every fax," he announces, and shows me what we already knew: that there was a column of digits missing. Yes, yes, we know. But then he claims that it’s the client’s fax machine at fault. It must glitch while feeding paper at that point. I politely explain that when we fax these same clients manually, it goes through fine. This steams him even more.

At this point Loni is off the phone, and tries to jump in. Her normal, interruptive conversational style isn’t working for her in this instance. (It rarely does.) She chimes in and says what I just said, that manually faxing works fine. Larry says that we can manually fax every client, then, and he’ll just get rid of the software entirely. Loni shoots back that we’ll have clients pulling out for lack of service, then, and that will be bad for Sky. She also mentions that BitWare (our old, Windows 95 compatible fax software) worked just fine. Larry yells back — over his shoulder, since he’s already started to storm out — that we can find fax software on our own and tell him all about it, or he can just put us back on BitWare, then, and be done with it.

Of course, the red-faced yelling and pissed-off attitude doesn’t really come through in my little transcription here, but I think you get the point. As much as I hate to admit it, I share my mother’s dislike of confrontation, and I try to defuse every volatile situation I find myself in. From my perspective, we were just pointing out a bug in the software, and asking them to look into it. From his perspective, though, I’m sure we were personally attacking this project he’d spent months working through and perfecting. I can understand where he’s coming from, though I don’t think I’d react nearly the same way.

After he stalked out, we told Andrew how Larry had treated us and spoken to us, and I communicated to him that I found it unprofessional, ill-mannered, and uncalled-for. Andrew talked to his boss, Ruth, and I’m sure she talked to HR. So, we’ll see what happens.

Oh, Loni told me later on that this Larry guy has a reputation for having a bad temper. He got a talking-to from HR once for throwing a printer across a room. Yikes.

drumcorps, the ongoing saga of my job

Backblogged

I think that’s the term for when you’re backlogged with blog topics. Backblogged.

Mom wants me to take a road trip with her to Denver next summer. She says it would be fun. I say we would probably kill each other halfway there. Although, now that I see that the 2004 DCI Finals will be held in Denver, I say maybe I could put up with Mom if she could put up with a weekend of drum corps.

After going to the Dekalb drum corps show with corps alumni buddy Paul and his sister (who was my seat partner in ’95), I’m more seriously considering joining a senior corps before Aaron and I decide to have kids. Only thing is, I don’t think I’m ready to spend all of my summer weekends away from my honey-muffin, and I certainly don’t want to make a five-hour roadtrip one way just to march senior corps. (BTW, senior corps is like what I did in Northern Aurora and Bluecoats, except you can be any age from 15 to 60-something.)

Of course, then Paul (who sings barbershop) suggested that I find a chapter of Sweet Adelines to join. Sweet Adelines are like barbershop quartets/choruses for women. I did discover that the Pride of Toledo is the best group in the region, and I fired them off an email about membership. They rehearse on Tuesdays at 7pm in Toledo, on Holland-Sylvania, which is doable as far as getting out of work goes. We’ll see what happens.

I would also like to say that nothing quite compares with being berated for receiving accolades that were deserved by more people than just you.

See, a couple weeks ago, we received a payment for someone’s water bill that was astronomically higher than what they owed. Like, $15,000.00 for a $150 bill. The person who was prepping the work caught it, and brought it to Loni, and asked if that could possibly be right. Loni knew that the client banked with Sky, and knew their personal banker, who then said maybe we should make sure that was correct. So, Loni called the phone number on the check and left a message. Of course, Loni left work before I did that day, so when the client returned the phone call, I took it. He was soooo grateful that we caught his accounting error — his software had printed the wrong amount on his check, and had it been processed, it would have bounced a lot.

So, the next morning, Loni had me write him a note and mail the erroneous check back to him. I located some Sky Bank stationery on the intranet, typed the note on it, printed it out, and sent it off. I felt pretty good about myself, but mainly because I got to do something different. Something other than stomping a footpedal, typing in invoice numbers, and hitting return.

A few days later, Andrew hands me a card he got out of an interoffice envelope. It’s a "Gotcha Card" — Sky’s version of RCC Performance Points, or any other company’s relatively meaningless rewards system. The client’s personal banker had heard from him, and she thanked me for providing such outstanding customer service to Mr. LaRoe. I felt all tingly in my bum until Loni shot me down with "And who was it that caught it in the first place?" Not only Loni, but the prepper who did catch it in the first place both gave me shit for being the one who got the credit.

Hey, it’s not my fault that the last person to touch something is responsible for it. Take the credit or take the blame, but it’s always the fault of the last person to touch it.

I grow progressively more disenchanted with my job — if, indeed, I was ever truly enchanted in the first place.

the ongoing saga of my job

Who Knew?

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.

the ongoing saga of my job

Troubleshooting

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.

the ongoing saga of my job

Good For Her…

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.