Getting to the other side
Apr. 29th, 2010 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matthewdalyAnother twelve hour shift, another $WHOA thousand pieces of paper printed, another coming back home with my brain slightly tired but my body ready for more and needing to sleep so that I can do it again tomorrow.
Okay, I need to make one point about yesterday first, because this will probably be completely amusing to any snigglers reading out there who know of my horrid mutant power. So I mentioned that I was helping a pleasant young woman gain some confidence in her Excel intuition, and along with showing her how formulas can be copied and pasted and how to add and remove and resize rows and columns, I mentioned that a great tutorial is "Excel for Dummies" if you can get past the demeaning (and truly unfortunate) name.
So in addition to working my mouse-clicking finger to the bone, this was the day that I settled my employment future. I talked to the superboss I mentioned before (who is apparently so highly competent and effective that she only seems like a superboss) and she recommended a phone number for me to call that got bounced around a few times and wound me up with an admin rep on the other end of my cubicle farm. So I went to visit her, and she took down my vitals and said that she'd see what she could do. The next hour or so seemed to involve everyone in the office to some degree, including my great-grandboss who walked me around all the maps in the office until we could find one with fine enough detail to show what census district I lived in for placement purposes.
After all this, and a brief picnic lunch to enjoy some of the sunshine, I came back to my workspace to see a memo with training info for me for next week signed "Deb". And then a voice behind me said "I got it worked out for you," and turned to see the co-worker that I'd been helping with Excel. So in addition to the dumb luck of even getting all this work instead of sitting by the phone waiting for a message that still hasn't been returned, I made myself useful to the most important person in the office without even realizing it. So I was floating for the rest of the shift, even though getting trained this late means replacing someone who bails out, which might not happen and might put me in a position where bailing out might have been the rational choice. The training itself is another week of work and these contacts have strange and wondrous ways of extending my employment and giving me reasons to get dressed and leaving the house. Later, I found the admin rep from earlier and thanked her for her help, and she said "Deb really likes you ... but you know, you shouldn't have called her a dummy." *headdesk*
Okay, I need to make one point about yesterday first, because this will probably be completely amusing to any snigglers reading out there who know of my horrid mutant power. So I mentioned that I was helping a pleasant young woman gain some confidence in her Excel intuition, and along with showing her how formulas can be copied and pasted and how to add and remove and resize rows and columns, I mentioned that a great tutorial is "Excel for Dummies" if you can get past the demeaning (and truly unfortunate) name.
So in addition to working my mouse-clicking finger to the bone, this was the day that I settled my employment future. I talked to the superboss I mentioned before (who is apparently so highly competent and effective that she only seems like a superboss) and she recommended a phone number for me to call that got bounced around a few times and wound me up with an admin rep on the other end of my cubicle farm. So I went to visit her, and she took down my vitals and said that she'd see what she could do. The next hour or so seemed to involve everyone in the office to some degree, including my great-grandboss who walked me around all the maps in the office until we could find one with fine enough detail to show what census district I lived in for placement purposes.
After all this, and a brief picnic lunch to enjoy some of the sunshine, I came back to my workspace to see a memo with training info for me for next week signed "Deb". And then a voice behind me said "I got it worked out for you," and turned to see the co-worker that I'd been helping with Excel. So in addition to the dumb luck of even getting all this work instead of sitting by the phone waiting for a message that still hasn't been returned, I made myself useful to the most important person in the office without even realizing it. So I was floating for the rest of the shift, even though getting trained this late means replacing someone who bails out, which might not happen and might put me in a position where bailing out might have been the rational choice. The training itself is another week of work and these contacts have strange and wondrous ways of extending my employment and giving me reasons to get dressed and leaving the house. Later, I found the admin rep from earlier and thanked her for her help, and she said "Deb really likes you ... but you know, you shouldn't have called her a dummy." *headdesk*
