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. 

About that note

So I was reading AAM the other day, and she was talking about passive aggressive notes at work. (Here's where we pretend I wasn't too lazy to get a hyperlink to that post.)

I started thinking about it, and thought, wow, I don't think there are any at my new job.

Not so fast. There is one. And it's on my door. I put it there myself.

I want to believe its nice than passive aggressive, whatever the word for that may be, but it's there all the same.

See, since I'm in HR, there's stuff in my office (still can't believe I have my own office) that people are not supposed to see. So it's supposed to be locked when I'm not there.

Someone is having a hard time with that. I say someone, and I genuinely don't know who it is, takes a "shortcut" - which is the exact same distance - to the hallway from the entrance. They open my door to go into the hallway, and then leave it open.

I don't get there till after 7, and this could happen at 6:45, or 3. Who knows. Thus, the note, reminding whoever it may be to shut the door behind them

Doing my happy dance

I'M GETTING A BOSS!!!! I am so excited. Unless he's recently had a fit of hedonism, after his background clears, he will start early Feb. (Also, autocorrect's suggestion after 'getting a' was divorce, which is weird for me, a single person.

Thanks to everyone who said to suck it up and ask my boss if I was supposed to come to those meetings, the answer was yes. It's made my job easier when I can be there while everyone is in the same room.

Someone paged um... Sally... on the intercom. I was confused, cause they just said Sally. I wasn't sure how they would get the right one, but then I remembered. There is only the one. I have a fairly popular name. I am the only one here. Not surprising when there's only about a dozen women, (Ah, STEM) but it hasn't happened since elementary that I've been the only one with my name. I have taken great joy in not signing my emails with my full name. Is this what Beyonce feels like?

Someone threatened to get a lawyer involved in something yesterday. No one has threatened me with the law since I left the paper, and it's been over a month. I was almost starting to miss it.