Azure Jane Lunatic (azurelunatic) wrote,
Azure Jane Lunatic
azurelunatic

Hooray for work! Innuendo, angst, and, um, stuff.

Today at work started out with a crash-boom-bang when the formerly long-haired dayshift guy told me that by the way, he was sending his dayshift people who had been scheduled in to work the evening at one rather than at three. This threw my seating charts into dismaying disorder; I could really have used some help juggling everyone.

Of course, the people who were dayshift were also the good people who know everything, and of course the 1 pm jobs are few and far between. What happened was about 50% of the people working the small evening jobs that take finesse and skill and aren't briefed on so often were actually from dayshift. And the jobs open at the 1 pm shift are the big jobs that everyone's briefed on. And you can't start dialing one of the little jobs too early, so they all went on $ISSUE_SIDE_JOB and that other job that damn near evvvverybody is briefed on. Fortunately there were seats for them all, though there was some finagling for that. And then I had to try and replace the staffing on the little jobs with the displaced people who were coming in at 3 but whose seats had been taking by the 1 pm people, and naturally there weren't enough of them briefed on the right jobs to replace the dayshift people whose schedules had been re-arranged...

In the end, my pretty-maids-all-in-a-row strategy was at least semi-successful. I want to become adept at arranging seating charts to create not only good people on jobs, but felicitous combinations of phone goons sitting next to each other. Lining up dustraven, trystan_laryssa, and figment0 was a good thing today, though I warned the Stressy College Chick that while this combination was safe, the combination of trystan_laryssa, azurelunatic, and figment0 in a row could lead to either high productivity and high spirits or an unabashed giggle-fest.

By the time I got done arranging and got my e-mail open, I had gotten the exercise in documentation I'd done last week returned red-inked to me, with instructions to work on it and fix the notable problems and return it by Wednesday, 5-25. Um. Anyone see the problem with this scenario? Namely, the part where it didn't occur to anyone at the other end of the situation that I was not scheduled in until Thursday. I don't blame the office, because they're so very used to being Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five people that this seems to be the default, but I could have done without the part where I got a stern little e-mail telling me that my assignment was overdue five minutes after I sat down in front of the computer. That part did not make me happy. Before attending to the rest of my check-in duties, I dashed off a brief e-mail (to both the person who'd given me the original assignment and the person who'd obviously been appealed to to send me the scolding) apologizing for the delay, and calling to their attention the fact that I wasn't scheduled in until Thursday (past the deadline) and had unexpectedly not made it in on Thursday, so today was in fact the first I'd had the opportunity to see that I needed to work on this some more. Not entirely my fault. Didn't get it until now. Don't kill me. This went over well, actually, and I got a swift response back -- not the "Ooops, our bad for setting a bad deadline" I'd been secretly hoping for, but at least a "Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter."

I didn't actually get a chance to work more on the documentation exercise until later in the evening after the office people went home, but I did get it done on the same day I actually received the assignment.

Note to self: whenever sending out time-sensitive deadline-type stuff to people in an office environment, be sure to request a read-receipt as part of the documentation trail. Those things can be fudged/ignored/what-have-you, but it'll save loads of hassle to track down, "Okay, why have I not gotten a read-receipt from Josie Doe on the e-mail containing the assignment information for the Xyzxyz project that she has to do?" rather than, "Josie Doe, you haven't turned in the Xyzxyz project. Bad Josie!" as the first is far more neutral and allows for things like unseen schedule conflicts, Acts of God via the e-mail system, as well as Josie Doe not checking her e-mail and/or not reading the message and/or just slacking it. Part of the Good Documentation Lecture, in fact, was the idea of addressing the facts rather than accusing the person. And while the situation was handled decently, I'm already seeing where I can improve on it in my own future management style. This includes using the techie-tools to their full extent...

Cute Geek Super and Rev. Nice Super were talking with much innuendo in the bullpen during the end of the shift, attempting to get Stressy College Chick and me to admit that we "like Tang" (where "tang" is not the soft drink, but has a "poon-" tacked on the front) and like petting kitties and eating peaches. There was much giggling. Stressy College Chick and I rolled our eyes at each other a lot. Cute Geek Super is 23. Rev. Nice Super is 27. They are both male. Stressy College Chick and I concluded that while it's not just males, when males act like that, it really does make them look like poopy-heads. We're so mature.

trystan_laryssa and dustraven are brewing a comic strip about their gaming adventures. figment0 will feature in it here and there. trystan_laryssa was practicing drawing him today. He's cute.

dustraven has the software I'm looking for. Gooood.
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