Today is supposed to be my last day regularly working the front counter. Which is to say, what with our upcoming permanent and temporary absences at work (did I mention the other remaining member of my team is having surgery in a few weeks? BECAUSE OF COURSE THAT'S HOW LIFE GOES), they are implementing an Officer of the Day. What this translates into is that the lower ranked customer service staff are going to have to cover the counter, but we'll all have to work three hour shifts in which we handle all of the weird problems that they get coming in. In a practical sense, it means we don't have to sit there and take in forms and page people on the online system to come out and wait on the more specialized problems. On the other hand, we're going to be the designated Person Who Gets Paged A Lot To Come Out, for three hours at a time, and have to come out and hear everyone's terrible stories....Basically, still kinda doing the same job except part time at our desks. I honestly don't know if this is gonna be an improvement or not, but there isn't any better solution since hiring more staff is apparently categorically off the table.

I seriously wonder Just How Broke they really are given how they are about this. I get that it's hard to hire people as a permanent staff member, but seriously, we don't have the money At All? It really makes me wonder.

(On a tacky related note, the staff picnic is going to be while I'm out, and apparently everyone is only being alloted one lunch item--hot dog or burger or whatever--apiece. You should hear my retiring coworker on that one.)

Today's counter service involved, as usual, very upset people freaking out. I felt particularly sorry for one dude who has chronic health issues and essentially got told "tough nuts, you're fucked" for having his heart stop and having to go to the ER instead of where he was supposed to be. It sounded like he is one of life's buttmonkeys: everything can and will go wrong for him at any time. There's a dude on a podcast I listen to that's the same way: every single aspect of the dude's life is awful every single week and getting worse. He does a fancast and I have to skip the first half hour of it because it's a litany of what else went terribly (death, broke, handicappedness, homelessness, more death, more broke).

And of course since I was out of the office for three days, I spent the day having to do catchup. I dread the catchup I'm going to have to do when I get back from moving.

I spent most of the week in supposedly computer training classes, like I did in March. It ended up pretty much being the same thing of "slight amount of training, mostly we just sit here while she asks us how we want it customized.) Which is weird. I am perfectly happy to sit and surf the Internet for six hours while this happens, mind you, and not be waiting on people, but it seems silly. Meanwhile, I think the program company people hate us and most of my group apparently kinda hates them. On their end, I think they think we're a giant pain in the ass because we're their hardest client EVER to deal with and the most complicated. (Though one of my coworkers said, "Hey, they LOOKED at our stuff before they took the job...they had to have known what they were getting into." One hopes, but apparently that didn't help. On our end, most of my group finds the company people off-putting, and to be fair, I think the trainer's annoyance at us is definitely coming out and she said a few things even I thought were kinda bad. And this time her supervisor flew out here, but for the life me I can't figure out why because he did next to nothing and most of the time was gone making phone calls. He earned a nickname involving the word "slacker," I'll put it that way. Meanwhile, both of them didn't know a rather astonishing amount of things. Apparently there's a lot of errors in the program and they don't know what they are yet. They fired our programmer and neither of them know anything about the new programmer they hired. Whaaat?

I asked the head of this project if he'd been in on the hiring process and he said NO, he was only asked onto it after they picked this company, for whatever reason they did that. We're kind of baffled as to how and why these people got picked in the first place.

I used to really like where I work, but good god has it ever gone downhill.

Well, I'm off on "vacation" to pack. I'm not sure which is worse, being at work or packing. Though I did go to see the musical improv shows last night so I could have one last bit of fun. They did a musical on the title "Is That Chicken Bad Or Not? I Can't Tell," which turned into a "nice guy" chicken leading a rebellion against Brice the Butcher who "sends chickens on vacation." The guy playing Brice tripped over a chair at one point and then made it into a running gag, so of course in the end he had to get killed with a lot of chairs. It was really great.

previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry