By The Way…

…I do have a bit of an explanation for why the blog has slowed down a bit in the past few months. It’s almost all (about 75%) related to work. Another 15% is due to allergies, and then another 10% due to the classes I just finished up.

Yes, that’s right, my classes are finished so I’ll have about 10% more time now! Hurrah for me.

My allergies are, unfortunately, making my nose into a runny faucet. This has been very non-enjoyable, as you might imagine (or as you might empathize with, if you’re currently experiencing this yourself). Unfortunately, I have a giant tree outside my window that I’m allergic to. Also unfortunately, it gets hot in my room (since it’s on the western side of the house I live in) and thus I have my window open to provide fresh air. This means I get lots of icky pollen since (did I forget to mention) the tree is planted in my neighbor’s yard so I can’t “accidentally” chop it down…

This is somehow Bush’s fault.

Anyway, as to the major cause for the slow-down…work. Ugh, what to say about that.

Firstly, in my department we have (when fully staffed) about a dozen people. Last month, three of them quit for various reasons. I should note that none of these were for negative reasons; instead, one woman went to work with her husband at their home business, and another moved back to be closer with her family, and the third went to be a full-time counselor.

So good stuff for them…but we lost a quarter of our staff right there. They’ve been replaced, but our new people are still being trained. This actually means that, for the training process, we are actually down more than just the missing three people, as the “new people” have trainers from our “left-over” staff. So we’re functioning at about 50% capacity right now. The good news is that this will increase once training is finished.

The bad news is that they picked this time (not on purpose, as they didn’t know we’d be short-staffed now or anything) to implement some accounting changes. Basically, our local areas have to close all their local bank accounts and everything has to be run through the national office now; which means that what used to be one transaction sent in on a monthly basis is now multiple transactions sent in on a daily basis for a certain sector of our workload.

Unfortunately for me, on a personal work-level area, this means an increase in work for me even though I do not specifically handle these transactions and actually process them. However, my job involves everything ultimately going through my workstation, which means that I have to put each of these individual transactions through too (even though I don’t have to do anything with them other than that). By itself, this wouldn’t be a major thing.

However, there’s another side effect to being short staffed. We have to answers phones in my department too. But since our new people aren’t trained yet on how to answer all the questions we get on our phone calls, and since the people who are left in the afternoon have to do their specific jobs that require their attention away from the phones, this means in the afternoons I’m basically the only person “available” for a few hours.

Thus, as I try to do my job, I get interrupted every few minutes to answer another question on the phones. This makes it that much more difficult to remain focused on my original task, and I’m sure my error rate has correspondingly jumped up a bit.

Of course, I am not alone in this. Everyone in my department has an increased workload. But, also of course, I am the only one in my department who runs this blog (which, if you’ll remember, is the reason I’m posting this blog entry in the first place)!

Now, I want to make it clear that I do, in fact, love my job! If it weren’t for all these circumstances falling at the same time, it would not be a problem. Furthermore, it’s something that in a few months we will be all done with.

Or will we? We have one person who is leaving in June (she’s retiring). Another lady is pregnant, and it’s been my experience that roughly 50% of pregnant women I work with quit work after the baby is born. Furthermore, another one of my coworkers is currently suffering from kidney stones. And he, unfortunately, is in the “back-up” role for my position (i.e. he takes over my normal tasks when I’m on vacation or out sick, etc.) which means I’m not allowed to get sick until he’s healed or another person is trained!

At least I can thank God for the job security! :-)