I think they're trying to kill me

Y'all. Except for Monday and today, I have been at work before 5:30 every day this week. I can in at 8 on Monday, and a little after 6 today. I cannot take it. If it wasn't Friday, I might lose my mind. I am not a morning person. If you need me to stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning, fine, whatever. But get up just before 4? No thank you.

We're switching to a new timekeeping system soon, and I'm trying to get everyone's fingerprints registered. There's about 15 I still have to do. Five of them are issues with the account registration, and the other 10 have been hiding from me. Rude.

To get third shift, it's late to bed and early to rise for me this week. We've also been dealing with another layoff, so that's been so fun to deal with on top of everything else. I'm so tired. I almost fell asleep at my desk yesterday. I keep trying to think of the sweet sweet overtime money, but I would pay someone to let me go to sleep right now, so it's not really working.

We also had our fire safety training this week. We had five sessions, and I was in all of them. I worked on emails and stuff most of the time, but whew. In one session, one employee proudly informed everyone that he's put out two fires while working here. And he only started one of them.

And it's back to work for me. I keep feeling like I've been here forever, and it must be almost lunchtime. It's usually around 10 when I feel that way, so. Five hours in usually is time for lunch, but not this week. Frankly, I'm just glad I've had a chance to eat, because that is not always the case.

Finally, I will leave you with this jem from one of the maintenance managers. It should be noted that this is a man built like a bear.
"Well, the line is running, and it hasn't wham, bam, jammed, and caused me to cry."

I got suspended

Yes, internet friends. This is not a clickbait title. Last week, I got suspended from my job. See, one day last week was my birthday. I love my birthday. I do not love being the center of attention. So I just didn't bother to mention it to anyone. Well, one of my coworkers that I know outside of work saw it on facebook, and outed me. My boss was not pleased.

Apparently, I was not supposed to work on my birthday. No one told me this. I knew if I wanted the day off, I could get it, but I did not want the day off. I had things to do, and people to see, and didn't want to take off a random day and then go right back to work. No thank you. Well, that was a big no-no, which culminated with my boss standing in my doorway saying that I'd been bad bad bad. And then he suspended me. I was not allowed at work on Friday. Now, I didn't exactly mind the long weekend, but it was presented as 'you will do this because you have brought shame upon yourself for keeping your birthday a secret.' So it didn't exactly feel like a yay, free day off kind of thing. More like what I imagine getting sent to the principal's office feels like. I don't know for sure. I never got sent to the principal's office.

Thankfully, I didn't miss too much work while I was gone. I did have forty something emails to contend with Monday morning, but that's sadly not outside the reasonable number. A little high, but I've had worse and more urgent things pop up on Monday mornings.

I still can't believe I got suspended. Honestly, I'm a little offended by it. More the fact that I'm one of the stubbornest people alive, and it was an ordered day off, not an offered one. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, I know lots of people who don't have such a forgiving schedule, and have worked places *cough* the paper *cough* that didn't care what was going on, you were there or you were in trouble, and the leave/vacation/holiday schedule was a joke. I am grateful that this job is not like that.

I guess we'll see what happens next year!

Way more complicated than it needs to be

Whew. Overcomplicated seems to be the watchword for this week. It seems like half the things I've been dealing with are way more difficult than they need to be.

Exhibit A: One of our managers, who will have a name as soon as I can get my cheat sheet written, forwarded us a resignation letter from one of the interns. This is fine, we knew it was coming. However, he just put "letter of resignation" in the subject line. So I panicked. We've had some staff turnover, and I didn't think he was going to leave. He isn't. We had a talk about how he could maybe not do that ever again. This job is going to give me gray hair.

Exhibit B: One of the supervisors calls me all worried. One of his people's pay is wrong. I look at the timesheet, and what we actually paid him, and cannot for the life of me find a discrepancy. I called the supervisor in to the office so we could go over it together, because if I made a mistake I need to know what it is so I can fix it. The guy says he's short overtime. No, he's short two more scrolls on his phone that would show it under a different code.

Exhibit C: Not quite work related, but sort of. I am setting up a new blog, as myself. This one will still be around, and I am debating if I want to link the two. If I do, it will only be one way. I will link from here to the one that's me, but I won't link from that one to here. I would like to keep my job. Not that there's anything that I've written that's bad, I just wouldn't necessarily want any of the people I work with to see. Anyway, Blogger is making it way harder than it should be. I have almost doxed myself at least twice in the last fifteen minutes. They try and make it so easy to put all your stuff in the same place. Which is great, if you want that. If you're running a secret anonymous blog, and another as yourself with personal info, you don't necessarily want to link the two. Or have the anon name posting on the personal blog. Ugh.

There's a lot more that's been going on that I'm going to try and get written up this weekend to put up next week. I'm just not sure where my days are going. It's like I don't get a minute to breathe, then I'm home, dinner, bed, time to wake up and do it all over again, with no pauses in between. But it's almost Saturday!

I don't think so

I have an awful poker face. Really, it's horrible. I don't play poker, but I would lose every time. I may say something is fine, but my face gives me away every time.

We've been interviewing supervisor candidates for a couple of weeks now, and haven't found anyone yet. They've all been fine, but just fine. No one who we really think would be a great fit.

One guy, fairly young, had a strong resume and we thought might be a serious contender. However. He gets there, and isn't having a great interview. Someone asked what range of money he was looking for, and he said he'd want it to be in line with the next promotion he'll get at his current job. Ok, fine. We pay very well for the area we're in, and it's competitive with other companies.

This dude though. This dude names a number 20k higher than what we'd pay. And he was not worth it.

In that moment, I was really glad he was not looking at me, cause I'm pretty sure my eyebrows hit my hairline. He was not that good. Needless to say, he's not getting the job. We have two interviews this week, and maybe one of them will be a good fit.

I'm super glad to be on this side of the table, it's a whole lot less stressful, but I'll be super glad to get it over with. Of course, then we have like three other positions we're hiring for.

I don't think it's going to end anytime soon. On the plus side, I could about do one of the interviews in my sleep.

Mission Impossible it's not

So this week y'all. Whew.

We are switching to a new timekeeping system. And it uses fingerprints. On a closed system.

And people are going to lose it.

We're in an area that's not super developed, which I actually enjoy. However, that also means that a lot of people are very resistant to change. And technology. And things they don't understand.

There's a lot of people where I work that don't understand how email works. Which is fine. It's not an essential part of their job, so whatever. There are starting to be parts of their jobs that do require more technology, and if they have a problem with learning how that's a different issue.

The timeclocks are going to be one of those issues. We have several people that are a little... suspicious of technology. Which is fine. To be totally honest, I'm just enough of a conspiracy theorist that it would bother me a little too.

On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't have a rant that I recite whenever the subject comes up, talking about how I'm not going to let people steal my identity, and we've already got my social, and birthday, what else could they want, what's next.

First, no one wants to steal their identity. It is not a massive conspiracy so I can turn into a cat burglar and steal from the Louvre using their fingerprints, with a mask like in Mission Impossible.

It's so they can clock in and get paid. The end.

So that's on my plate this week. Thankfully, Boss has gone through this before, and he's not someone to suffer fools, which is something I really appreciate.

There's enough else on both our plates that if someone raises too much of a stink about it, he'll show them the door. Especially if they get nasty about it.

That happened last week. Not the showing the door part, but the nasty. We had a early meeting, which went fine, other than the fact that it was at 6 a.m., which is not a time that meetings should be. The 7 a.m., though. There was a guy in that one that had some opinions about having to use a new program, and he was not afraid to share them. I was not caffeinated enough for that. It was so fun.

I'm not looking forward to it, but after this week it will be over, then on to the next problem!

Only mostly alive

Hello internet friends!

I am still here. I'm battling a cold/seasonal allergies right now, so I only feel mostly not dead, but we will persevere.

I'm planning on typing up a bunch of posts this weekend to hopefully go live starting next week, because I miss blogging.

The issue that I'm running in to, besides lack of free time, is that there's a much bigger cast of characters in my new job, and I'm not sure how to keep them straight when writing about them. I don't want to use real names, because I like my job, and would like to keep it. I mean, they have normal men names, and the likelyhood that someone would care is small, but still.

So as soon as I can figure that out, it will open up way more opportunities for me to tell stories about my coworkers behind their backs.

Cause y'all. I have seen some things.

Off with her head

Y'all. There was a literal mob at work yesterday. There were no torches, no pitchforks, but there was a mob all the same. 

See, there was an issue with payroll. It was right when it left on Monday, but there was an issue when it was transmitted to the system that does the checks. No one got their overtime pay, or any other extras. 

It was so fun. 

Have you ever had the sudden realization that your head is attached to your body, and been profoundly thankful? It's never something I've thought to be thankful for before.

I had just walked in, and was booting up my email, just going about my morning. Suddenly, three supervisors were in my office. No one, then boom. I didn't know they could move that fast. They asked if I knew what was going on, and I saw the emails rolling in. 

There's about 175 people that didn't get paid correctly. That's a lot of mad. I don't think the phone stopped ringing all day. When the supervisors came in, people were waiting. They did a really good job to deflect the maddest of the employees off of me, which I really appreciate. 

I only had one person be straight up rude to me, and she's done it before, so it was not surprising, just offensive. Girlfriend needs an attitude check. Most people just wanted to know what was going on, and that they were going to get paid. 

We got it resolved fairly quickly, and I printed out info about what's happening next. I posted them on every possible route to my office. Inside the plant, there's a window in the supervisors' office so they can see what's going on, and I pressed one of the papers to the window so they could see. They all about came out of their seats reaching for it. 

Hopefully, everyone will be paid after today. We're switching to a new timekeeping system in a couple of months, and someone said they worked at another plant that did, and no one got paid for two weeks. I told my boss if that happens, I won't be here. I'll be somewhere far, far away, in a wig and sunglasses, hiding.

As I'm typing this, the customer service manager came in, and was super rude to me because his computer isn't working. There's something wrong with that.