J is for Job Pt II
Jul. 26th, 2009 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanI woke up yesterday morning from a dream where the new senior manager was sitting on my bed and yelling at me to get up and go to work. Not a good start to the day. I blame the fact that I was opening the centre for the second time in a row and I was already really really tired and seriously worried about sleeping through the alarm clock.
One of the regular day people is taking a week's holiday soon and I'll have to get up that early every day to sub. I expect my brains to be running out my ears by the end of it. I am so not a morning person. (Diurnal people insist on telling me that I'll get used to it. Bollocks. I worked a day job at the pharm for 9 years and never got used to it.)
The thing is overall I still really like my job. It's challenging enough to keep me interested and I know that given half the chance there are a lot of things I could do to improve the way we do things. There is also ton of stuff that I would love to learn more about and anything that keeps my brain engaged is a big win for me.
The trouble is I never have the time to do those things, and that part is starting to really frustrate me.
We have been short-staffed for two months now. There are only five of us so when one of our team got another job that had a huge impact on our work load, which was pretty much already at full capacity. The guy who was hired to replaced her backed out after only four weeks and during that time he was still in training so having him there was sucking up a lot of the available time of the people training them.
Add to that the fact person four just does not seem to be capable of doing the full job. He would be maybe 75% of a full-time person if he didn't make so many mistakes. As it is the rest of us spend a lot of time fixing things so he probably counts as about 50% of a full-time person.
And we're swamped. I'm digging through piles of work from the moment I get there to the second I leave. Mr 50% is the only one who really takes all his breaks, the rest of us take maybe half of ours and some days we don't take any all. (I tend not to on Saturdays because Axel isn't there to drag me out of my chair and force me to take a walk.)
Requests that should take an hour take days because I just Do Not Get To Them. Things I am supposed to update daily are getting done weekly. People who have time-sensitive requests are starting to send second and third follow-up emails - and I can can completely understand why but it doesn't help reduce the workload any to have to go through twice as many messages in our Inbox. And forget my personal email. If you sent it to me directly, I didn't see it.
Our manager quit last week. When he was here he was letting the three of us work as much overtime as he wanted. In a meeting he told somebody it was so we could work on extra projects and I didn't really get the chance to pull him aside afterward and tell him that all those extra hours were barely enough to keep us caught up on our routine stuff. Now the new boss wants to cap the overtime, but I'm just too tired to care. Fuck it. If it doesn't get done, it doesn't get done. They can bloody well get that empty job filled.
It probably adds to my disillusionment that the last thing my manager did before he left was make Mr 50% permanent. So I'll be picking up the slack for him for the rest of my tenure there.
Oh well. The extra money was making a nice dent in my debts, but maybe if I just work my regular 40 hours a week I'll actually have energy left over for things like cleaning my house once in a while.
One of the regular day people is taking a week's holiday soon and I'll have to get up that early every day to sub. I expect my brains to be running out my ears by the end of it. I am so not a morning person. (Diurnal people insist on telling me that I'll get used to it. Bollocks. I worked a day job at the pharm for 9 years and never got used to it.)
The thing is overall I still really like my job. It's challenging enough to keep me interested and I know that given half the chance there are a lot of things I could do to improve the way we do things. There is also ton of stuff that I would love to learn more about and anything that keeps my brain engaged is a big win for me.
The trouble is I never have the time to do those things, and that part is starting to really frustrate me.
We have been short-staffed for two months now. There are only five of us so when one of our team got another job that had a huge impact on our work load, which was pretty much already at full capacity. The guy who was hired to replaced her backed out after only four weeks and during that time he was still in training so having him there was sucking up a lot of the available time of the people training them.
Add to that the fact person four just does not seem to be capable of doing the full job. He would be maybe 75% of a full-time person if he didn't make so many mistakes. As it is the rest of us spend a lot of time fixing things so he probably counts as about 50% of a full-time person.
And we're swamped. I'm digging through piles of work from the moment I get there to the second I leave. Mr 50% is the only one who really takes all his breaks, the rest of us take maybe half of ours and some days we don't take any all. (I tend not to on Saturdays because Axel isn't there to drag me out of my chair and force me to take a walk.)
Requests that should take an hour take days because I just Do Not Get To Them. Things I am supposed to update daily are getting done weekly. People who have time-sensitive requests are starting to send second and third follow-up emails - and I can can completely understand why but it doesn't help reduce the workload any to have to go through twice as many messages in our Inbox. And forget my personal email. If you sent it to me directly, I didn't see it.
Our manager quit last week. When he was here he was letting the three of us work as much overtime as he wanted. In a meeting he told somebody it was so we could work on extra projects and I didn't really get the chance to pull him aside afterward and tell him that all those extra hours were barely enough to keep us caught up on our routine stuff. Now the new boss wants to cap the overtime, but I'm just too tired to care. Fuck it. If it doesn't get done, it doesn't get done. They can bloody well get that empty job filled.
It probably adds to my disillusionment that the last thing my manager did before he left was make Mr 50% permanent. So I'll be picking up the slack for him for the rest of my tenure there.
Oh well. The extra money was making a nice dent in my debts, but maybe if I just work my regular 40 hours a week I'll actually have energy left over for things like cleaning my house once in a while.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-27 07:28 pm (UTC)What is it that you do exactly?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-28 02:28 pm (UTC)That means we run and monitor the dialer jobs, monitor the agents, do attendance, set up schedules, maintain the extensions, order headsets, run reports for managers and operational strategy, do testing of whatever new equipment or calling scheme the O/S department or managers come up with, and are first-step tech support for the agents. Two or three really big jobs and five kajillion little piddly time-consuming ones.
With five people in runs really smoothly. With four it can be done but it keeps us on our toes and it's pretty tiring over the long haul. With 3.5 it's just not physically possible.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-28 05:30 pm (UTC)But aside from my good-natured bitchery, I can see why this would be a piss-off. I've encountered similar, uh, routines as