@dropdeadchris, this post’s for you! Thanks for the kick in the butt. It is indeed high time I got back to REAL blogging and not just Tweeting, Google-sharing, or posting del.icio.us links here at Blogula Rasa.
My team at work has been decimated by whatever bug is going around the office; my supervisor noted on Tuesday that we were going to have a “legendary” week.
There’s a slight chance there could be one of us at work tomorrow on my team: me. But only if my only other healthy team-mate has some emergency problem with her mom, who’s had some health problems lately. We’ve been joking all week about our not-very-wonderful, really-quite-awful “legendary” week, and it would really make a better story if there was one heroic l’il travel agent struggling to keep up. But more than likely, there will be two of us to open at 7am, and two of us to close at 5pm. It’s going to be a long day.
Here’s the setup: Friday of last week, one teammate went out sick, probably with the flu. We knew Monday we’d be down 2, because another teammate had scheduled that day off for a long weekend. But when I got in, we were down 4, because a third member of our little working group was ALSO out sick, and the fourth was dealing with an ill family member who’d been hospitalized in the middle of the night (nothing to do with flu, but serious).
When I walked in, there was only one person, the only other “early shift” agent. The phone lines were backed up to hell and gone, and it stayed that way almost the entire day. Miraculously, things eased up toward the end, we caught up on tasks that we handle via queues and email, and there were no “whammies” at the end (calls that come in late enough that you’re held over after closing time to finish up). Our supervisor congratulated us both on getting through the day and said something about how it was going to be a legendary day.
Well, it’s already shaping up to be a week of legendary, even epic proportions of suck.
Tuesday, we were eventually up by two; one sicko was in, but not feeling all that well, and my former team leader/now teammate was in, after getting her relative settled with tests at the hospital. But we should have been up by three; turned out that my newest “teamie” got sick over the weekend, and her nice Monday off turned out to be just the first of 4 sick days this week. But the miracle held; at the end of the day, in spite of all, we were caught up and had nothing pending at Blessed Logoff time. Woo-hoo!
Wednesday, we were briefly cheered by the sight of our original sicko, who hadn’t seen the doctor yet, was still sick, and was sent home until he was clear of The Pestilence. Le sigh, we were back to… (counts on fingers)… 4 including me. That night, another lucky Blessed Logoff, and I got out in plenty of time for my Wednesday night ritual of Sierra Turkey and soup at Panera before choir practice. But then I got stuck in the most baffling traffic jam I’d seen in a while; ALL directions, ALL arterials, all jammed up and barely moving. I got to the restaurant in time to hang out with my iPhone reading and sharing via Google Reader, but had to gobble my food to get to St Nick’s in time.
Choir went well, by the way, and we’re working on Christmas music, of course. Yours truly got tapped to sing like a li’l angel in a short section of one piece with our newest soprano, a funny and acerbic woman named Cindy G. We’ll see if I continue to be allowed to sing like a l’il angel, as both Cindy G and I noted that our halos are held up by our cute l’il devil horns. It was a fun end to the day, as we all laughed a lot and got a lot of work done. The bishop’s visitation is Sunday Dec. 6, St Nicholas’ Day, and we’re planning on a lot of music for every Sunday in Advent in addition to the Christmas Eve musical blowout we’re hatching.
Anyway, that brings us up to today.
Thursday, today, Original Sicko was out and being implored to see a doctor or nurse and quit farting around with over-the-counter remedies. He’s being stubborn and is trying to tough it out, which is just asking for more trouble. I don’t expect he’ll be in tomorrow, either. And we were back down to three, because the other two sickos were still out.
It was a busy enough day, with a lot of emails and queued records (they come from the client’s online booking tool) to process in addition to calls coming in steadily all day. I volunteered to sit on the email inbox, which mostly yielded file attachments that get turned into booking shells, mostly for recruits. I guess it’s a positive sign that we’re seeing a big spike in “interviewees,” for freedom and LOLs! But handling the bookings takes a lot of extra steps, and the travelers are usually unsure of what they need at first, although very pleasant to talk to for the most part. Things went steadily enough, but got piled up at the end of the day. Meanwhile, the air quality in the office was terrible – not only my usual complaint about scented hair stuff and perfume, but also there was a controlled burn at the nearby forest preserve, and a lot of the smoky air made it into the building. Yep, lovely day. And then it worked out that I and the other lone “closer” got late hits on records in the queues, so we got out about half an hour late.
Tomorrow: will be horrible. Because there will just be two of us, me and my fellow closer – as the only other person that wasn’t out at all this week is taking tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday off.
Oh boy! Tomorrow will be a legendary, epic, architecturally significant Tower of Suckitude! Because due to the way our schedules worked out, I’ll go in and open with my former leader at 7am, we’ll take staggered but long lunches probably, and then we’ll both close. And then as soon as Blessed Logoff finally comes, I’ll go downstairs, work out if I feel like it, and then meet my husband David for some carbonized ruminant protein (and quite possibly wine for me, YAAAY!).
That pretty much covers the week as far as work goes. Home and its entertainmental charms is a whole other post, as is workout-related stuff.
So thanks to Chris, that’s my week, all documented and written up tidy-like.
Maybe now I’ll get around to tweeting that haiku that occured to me on my way to work one morning this week… maybe.