So how's your day going?

Been at work for a little over 90 minutes and have completed about 50% of my daily production quota. I should be done about an hour before lunch time. Not sure how I should feel about that.

Well, let me see. My staff consists of three people.

Underling 1: Blue-screen error message on her computer first thing (discovered because hers is the computer the printer is hooked to). Can’t find her start-up disks. Blah blah blah – turns out her hard drive is totally freakin’ dead.

That’s okay, she can work on Underling 2’s computer (even though U1 has a PC and U2 has a Mac, and U1 has never used a Mac) – because U2 had to leave abruptly – his wife is having some kind of medical thing. (Symptoms sound like early stage miscarriage, frankly. Poor kids.)

U3 seems to be okay so far.

I’m kind of in the same boat. I at no time need 8 hours a day to do my job. This isn’t because the workload is insufficient, it’s just that I’m supremely skilled at what I do.

I have a theory: All these people who put in long hours and seem constantly busy are really just stupid, and they have to act busy to compensate for their incompetance.

I’m having a bad secretary day.

  1. She can’t understand why I can’t send a letter to a bus company that’s going to hire one of my soon-to-be-ex drivers and tell them not to hire him, mostly because she doesn’t like him.

  2. She’s not grasping “no more OT unless I sign off on a per day basis because you’ve officially made 30% of your take home pay this year on OT, and you’ve hit your annual budget for OT, so NO MORE”.

  3. She started a fight with the guy responsible for assigning and supervising our night janitorial people. That’s the one guy (besides me) that she needs to keep on her good side.

My power went off sometime last night and I awoke to the flashing LED display. I woke up at 8:19 - I’m usually at work by 8:00 (start time is 8:30 and didn’t arrive until almost 10.

I work with a very high strung person who freaked out because she had to do my stuff for a bit. (It’s very chilly in here right now.)

My boss just gave me a gift card as a personal Christmas gift and I’m thrilled that he took the time to think of me.

Not so good. I have 8 pages written of a 15 page minumum paper, and nothing yet written of a commentary, both of which are due tomorrow. I’ve been pretty lucky (or stupid) and have gotten a bit more than 5 hours of sleep for the past two nights, so hopefully I’ll be okay with no sleep at all tonight.

MBG, can I be your secretary? I’m very good, I never get into fights, I won’t ask you to do unprofessional things. And I need more pay. And I work damn hard but like to go home when the day is over.

But I guess I have to move to Chicago.

My day’s going fairly well. I don’t have a lot of work in this season. It’s a quiet time of the year, this last week (we get next week off, nyah, nyah, nyah!) I have minutes to type up from the last board meeting so I’m leisurely doing those.
And surfing here, which I actually haven’t had much time to do lately.

We have had a dramatic work week.

A legal secretary who has worked at this firm for twenty years left yesterday for another job. Her main boss is about to retire, the other job paid more and was closer to her house, so it was a no-brainer. However, she sobbed and cried nonstop all morning long. I don’t blame her, but it was emotionally exhausting.

Then, that afternoon, my main boss left for several weeks. She’s leaving to have a lumpectomy on a cancerous lump in her breast, to be followed by radiation and chemotherapy. As she was portioning out her work to various other attorneys, with my help, there was crying all afternoon long. I don’t blame her, but it was emotionally exhausting.

In between these two crises, we discovered that our head IT guy was fired for stealing large amounts of money from the firm. I always thought he was a weird duck; I’d try to joke around with him a little and be sociable, but he always put up a cold wall between himself and his co-workers. Everyone had to instantly change their computer passwords, as he presumably might have been able to access sensitive data from offsite. Now we are in desperate need of another head IT guy, as his underling can’t handle it all on his own. This is happening just as we’re trying to roll over to a different system and to upgrades to newer versions of all our applications.

Then, I discover one of the twenty-year-veteran secretary’s bosses wants to switch to me as his secretary now. To do this, I must shed one of my present attorneys. That’s fine with me; one of my guys is an uber-disorganized doofus and I’m glad to get rid of him and gain the other guy, who is super nice. As welcome as this is, it’s coming on top of all the other unsettling stuff going on and is a bit hard to process right at the moment.

This four-day weekend coming up will be very welcome!

The day is moving right along. A big decission is coming up fast. What to have for lunch? Within a five minute drive I can get any of the following:

Authentic Mexican (at least 6 seperate restaurants)
Peruvian
Ethiopian
Japanese
Chinese (also, at least 6 locations)
Gyro’s
Fast Food: Arbie’s, McDonalds, BK, Hardee’s, Taco Bell/Pizza Hut, Rally’s, White Castle, etc.
Stake N Shake
Subs: Subway, Quizno’s, Blimpy’s, Penn Station
Fazoli’s
Chains: Olive Garden, Chili’s, Friday’s, Red Lobster, Lone Star, O’Charley’s, Applebee’s, Hooters, BW3
Indian
A local chili joint.
DQ
KFC
I’m sure I’m missing some…

Really, this is one of the toughest times of my day. I hate making decissions.

Hey now.

I direct a department of over 160 people, we transport roughly 10,000 kids each day to 17 of our schools, and another 12 or so out of district on a mix of about 160 of my own and contractor’s buses. Besides the day to day of that, I co-chair two commitees as the superintendent’s designee - one to study and establish attendance boundaries for the 14 or so new schools we’ll be building here in the next 7-8 years, and another to examine IN DETAIL traffic concerns, loading/unloading plans and safe walk routes at all but the 2 high schools in the district.

Little Tommy gets assigned a seat by the bus driver because he flicked boogers at Maria and that’s 2, five to ten minute phone calls from parents. Every student discipline instance involving a bus, every employee problem, every traffic problem near a school - I get to handle.

I’m extremely well compensated, but I can’t tell you the last time I worked an 8 hour day during the school year. I’m here at 6 am most days, and head home sometime around 4:30 - 4:45.

I’ve got a lot to do, but the most important thing I was able to take care of within the first 30 minutes, so now it’s just a matter of staying productive.

Which is, or course, why I’m here…

My vote’s for Hooters. :smiley:

My day? It’s going along swimmingly, aside from the carpal tunnel and arthritis I have in my right wrist and thumb, and the DeathPeriod (first in two years - ugh). I’ve got a significant portion of my work for the day done, and I’ve been here two and a half hours. This always happens. I love my job but damn do I hate how fast I get most of my work done. They can’t cut me to part time cuz 1) I’d be pissed, and 2) SOMETIMES I get horribly busy, such as, when elections come 'round and I run the election board, and other times as well. So I sit here, feigning activity, and surfing the SMDB.

Ahhh. So glad I paid that $15.

~Tasha

I’m at my uncle’s house in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood in an unfamiliar house and I am freakin’ hungry. My cousin is sleeping like the dead and no one else is home. They will all come home to me passed out in the kitchen, the cabinets all overturned in a frantic, futile search for food.

UPDATE: I picked an “authentic Chinese restaraunt”. True, or not, I’m not sure. The food’s good, and the tea is nice.

I hear ya, trashabot. Thing is, Hooter’s makes me nervous. I’d like to brazenly stare at the ladies. I just don’t have it in me. Instead, I just about have the menu memorized, and it ain’t that great.

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, Mr. (Short) Bus Guy:smiley:
I’m kidding!

I am a blubbering idiot myself for overlooking the fact that some people are indeed overworked because their management is too stingy or stupid to realize that they’re asking their employees to do more than one job.

My vote in your case is stupid management - overworking someone to whom they are entrusting children’s safety.

Kind of like making ER Drs. work ungodly hours…yeah, that’s what we need…life-or-death decisions made by someone who’s had less than four hours of sleep in the last three days!

Not bad, not bad. We got 12-14" of freshies last night, and it’s still snowing. The plow won’t be by for a while, so I have an excuse to work at home. I went for an xc “ski” in snow up to my knees - my workout for the day. After another hour of work, I’ll take a nice hot shower, then lunch, and so on. I love snow days!

I’m having a fun day.

I’ve been trying to explain everything to my new English-is-a-second-language boss, and she seems not to be grasping much of any of it. (I guess standing with your hip out with your arms folded and a major look of entitlement on your face as you tap your foot is a universal management technique. :rolleyes: )

She doesn’t want to go into the database to see the work tracking, because that’s ‘too much work’. :rolleyes: So, I have to stop my production and create excel worksheets to spoon-feed her the data that she is either too lazy or stupid to see for herself. All so she can Micro-manage me (in pigeon-English to boot) about my loss of productivity, much of which is caused by me having to stop work to spoon-feed her production data… :mad:

(Who knew that Women could come in “Pointy-Haired” models too…!?)

I took my daughter to Cbeebies Live! - Cbeebies being the BBC’s channel for pre-school children, for the benefit of those who don’t know it.

She, and I, had a blast. Spencer & PC Plum from Balamory, Postman Pat, Boo and the Tweenies were her favourites.

All in all, my day was very good.

Nothing going on at my job right now. The week before Christmas is always slow. Nobody needs anything from me, so I’m snooping around the Dope and eating some soy yogurt. It gets dreadfully boring around Christmastime. In fact, my first year’s membership to the Dope just got renewed, so obviously I was in the same boat last year- thank god for this place!

UPDATE: The “Authentic Chinese Food” is making me sleepy. I’m beginning to wish I’d gone with the red tea over the green. Maybe it’s the resume reading. There can’t be a much more dreadful task than reading resumes all day. Could someone please outlaw the work “utilize”?