Category Archives: SABRE2th Tigress: Book ’em, Dano.

SMRT! It’s working!

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I am so SMRT!

smrt.jpg

OpenNTF.org – Print attachments with OLE Automation

I can’t believe it, I got a Lotusscript working that prints file attachments from selected emails! It almost worked “out of the box” from this website, but the comments included additional clues, and I ended up registering so that I could ask a couple of specific questions.

In the meantime, I learned a tiny bit about how to load a Lotuscript – and even how to remove whitespace so that it’s properly formed (not difficult, as Lotus has highlighting all set up so you know when you’ve gone wrong). I tried a couple of copied-and-pasted methods, but this one was clean, and with the addition of the agent from the comments below it into the “Initialize” section, it worked – although it printed all the worksheet tabs, resulting in multiple sheets. I only needed it to print just the first sheet – but that question was quickly answered in the comments, and now all I have to do to print these is select a bunch of the incoming emails and hit an action menu item. I can’t seem to get it working automatically on incoming mails, but maybe it’s better to have a little more control so that I know that the printer is working… my printer is a trashed one that doesn’t have a working error code display for “Load Paper.”

This solves a really tedious problem we’ve been struggling with at work – basically, from one department at our major client, we receive all reservations as file attachments that can be TIF, PDF or MSExcel formats. We have Lotus Notes, and printing file attachments is normally done one email at a time, and there’s a lot of mouse-clicking. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when we receive 30-70 emails per day, that’s a lot of time spent opening, clicking, printing, closing, opening, clicking printing, closing. My supervisor has been doing this to free me or one of the other agents up for more important work taking calls or working on groups. It was a ridiculous use of her time.

The bit that I had to modify in order to just print the first sheet was in the Excel subroutine:

Private Sub PrintMSExcel (fname As String)Dim app As Variant  

Dim docToPrint As Variant  

On Error 208 Goto err208  

Set app = createobject("Excel.application")  

Set docToPrint = app.workbooks.open(fname)  

' No background print option for Excel, no need for special handling.
' Change (1,1) to () to print all worksheets  

Call docToPrint.PrintOut(1,1)

  

Call app.workbooks.close  

Call app.Quit()  

Set app = Nothing  

Exit Sub

It’s all good now, though. Monday, we’ll be ready for the onslaught. I even added a commented-out note to change the one setting to print all sheets if that’s what’s needed.

Junk Fax (Printer)

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This is the closest approximation I can find to what was "liberated" for me at work:

 junkfax.jpg

It needs a power cord (though there may be one already at the desk it's at that fits) and probably needs new ink cartridges. No telling if it works – would need a phone/data cable to attempt to hook it up. The pillager who found it for me mentioned in passing that the "fax part is busted." We'll see about that once I get a chance to find the online documentation.  

Buy supplies for Officejet 6110 direct from the HP Home & Home Office Store

Actually, a less fancy model that would suffice is available for around $99, possibly for less through the company's link to Staples.  And I found an even better deal at HP's.

It's the simple things that make life easier, but other peoples' decisions conspire to make them more complex than they need to be. 

 

The 52 Hour Pick Me Up Off The Floor Work Week

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This was not one of my better weeks.

I found myself spinning in place, buried in paper, trying to adapt to this new process at work for handing a whole new division of our main client – a division that’s completely and never will be, because they won’t ever have company corporate cards. This forces us into an untenable situation – arrange travel (mostly hotels, some air, a few cars) that is completely paid for by the the division, and handle all of these reservations not by phone, but by forms that are either faxed or emailed as attachments to us.

It was described as “easy.” One person per week would be designated to handle all their requests, and the air and car portion really is easy to set up and pay for. The hotels were supposed to be “goof proof,” using a special credit card designated as for direct billing.

They are not.

Problem is, WE know it’s a direct bill card, but the hotels don’t, and a significant fraction of them require more documentation than a bit of verbiage in the reservation comment section indicating “direct bill ghost card.”

It is not “easy.” The request forms are designed to pack a lot of confusing information into the smallest possible print in the smallest possible boxes of a highly colored, backgrounded spreadsheet, and when they are printed in black and white they’re somewhat less distracting but still hard to read.

Up to six people can be booked on each form, not always for the same destinations, dates, or needed elements (some only need hotel, some need air and car too).

The admins and those travelers that submit their own forms are not travel agents and so they don’t know airport city codes. Most often, we get a hotel request with something cryptic for the location like “Hanford” or “Martinsville.” No state, no zip code. Did you know there’s a Hanford in California? I only knew about the one in Washington. One traveler typed something in the “location” box that was so long, it was truncated on the printout. The cell sizes are “locked” so anything that’stoo long is invisible unless you’re looking at the spreadsheet on the computer and click on the box.

When they are faxed, the most critical information is most often a black or dark gray block, completely obscuring the sender’s contact information and email.

Quite often, the same form is sent again and again, with minor changes that are not highlighted in any way. Notations about the changes needed are in the cover email, which most often is NOT printed along with the attachment.

The designated agents find themselves calling on these request forms a lot to clarify confusing information or to advise that a hotel choice is sold out. That’s where they bleed off a lot of time, chit-chatting or waiting on hold or leaving voicemails and waiting for them to be returned.

Late last week, after a month of handing the duty around to just a few designated agents, we started to identify a lot of problems and hear a lot of complaints about the hotels not letting guests check out without charging their personal credit cards. So we kept changing the verbiage we were transmitting to the hotels, which has to be typed manually. This was to avoid having to stop and fax something on letterhead that my team leader had put together. I’ve since modified the form a lot – the letterhead imagesand copy are still there, but now there’s a table into which you can copy and paste hotel address, phone and fax quickly from their property record in the reservation system. The travelers change hotels constantly – CONSTANTLY – either because they don’t like them and check out, or they finish their install or their sales presentation and check out. So I’m seeing the same guys’ names for the same or similar dates, over and over again, for different hotels.

Plus there’s disputes where I have to call the hotel, persuade them to transfer their charge from the traveler’s personal card to the “ghost card,” and fax them the authorization letter. This is mostly for those reservations made before the middle of last week, which was when we realized we really needed to fax every hotel until the great majority of them became used to our process. Previously, this division was using a different agency just to do their direct bills – and the hotels don’t have our documentationon file.

It’s a bother.

Did I mention that we have to use the “new” booking software (I’ll just say it’s a highly programmable graphical interface with many bells and whistles) to do these in? Because this interface is so feature-rich, it’s a total hog on system resources, and proceeds with all deliberate speed (which is to say, not much). Also, the hotel part of it is the worst in terms of finding the properties you want. You have to know where it is to find it, basically, and for all these little rural podunkpodunk, that’s atrick. Even with the fancy global-positioning package it uses to locate hotels by town name, it often comes up blank when my “old,” reliable reservation software finds it fast and truly easy.

The generic template for this division is set up with the special “direct bill” credit card but needs some tweaks. Also, it’s a slow process at the best of times, and these booking forms are so time-consuming to digest and translate into reservations. Much of the time, the hotel specified is not available, and although we’ve got a disclaimer saying “we may substitute a less expensive hotel within policy or book elsewhere due to availability” we’ve found that in practice, the admins don’t really READ theemails we send them and assume that we’ve booked their techs at the hotels the specified

This means that techs are driving up to the wrong hotel, and have no idea they should have gone to the hotel we booked. This would have been avoided had we picked up the phone every time we booked a tech somewhere other than specified, but the whole thing was sold to us as “just book what they tell you on the form, no need to call them, just email them the itineraries.”

So.

It became clear that the single biggest thing driving the problems we were hearing about was some hotels wanted documentation of the direct billing that was more than just a comment from us to direct bill the card used for the guarantee. And they were hassling the techs at check in, at check out, and in between. Since we didn’t know which hotel required it, we were stuck with printing and faxing every single hotel a direct bill authorization letter, on the account company’s letterhead. And as the weekwent on, I took that on, very much to the detriment of my own work.

Meanwhile, I was covering for 1, 2, or 3 people all week long – another reason I couldn’t do my own work.

Monday – covered for groups agent, ticket support agent. Did not get everything done.
Tuesday – covered for ticket support agent, got well stuck in with hotel faxes. Apologized to groups agent.
Wednesday – covered for team leader, support, groups agent again, faxed hotels. Day from hell.
Thursday – covered for team leader, support, faxed hotels. Gradual progress on my own backlog.
Friday – covered for team leader, support, faxed hotels. Spun in place but made progress late in day.

At all times during the week, I was interrupted numerous times or had to break off and do something completely different from what I was doing at any one time, and multitasking was not an option due to the way various tasks do not play well together. I can’t run file finishing programs on records, for example, and do anything else on my computer (email, print faxes, etc.) because the file finishers take focus.

Here’s a list of the kinds of things I can be interrupted for at any time, sometimes several at a time:

  • Phone calls from hotel group arrangers wanting to book a new or change an existing group
  • Emails, ditto. I tell them all apologetically that I can’t get to any hotel groups until next week.
  • Phone calls from international travelers who seem to only want to talk to me and no one else
  • Emails, ditto. These can’t be put off until next week, and they usually totally derail me for a while.
  • Agents complaining about something not working, errors, password resets, programmable keys.
  • Agents calling to tell me some long-winded story about this guy with this problem at a hotel
  • Have to drop everything and print up an authorization letter for this guy with this problem, etc.
  • Walk to printer, walk to fax, make sure acknowledged from hotel fax machine, file and document.
  • Call hotel and speak to human, document fax acknowledgment with name and “OK” problem fixed.
  • Talk to team leader covering for my TL about call stats and the backlog from the “easy” division
  • Walk to desk of designated agent doing “easy” bookings, drop off fresh requests
  • Pick up one or two “finished” request sheets after dropping off 5-8, some with multiple names
  • View with alarm the backlog stack on agent’s desk, which is getting taller, not smaller
  • Realize with some horror that agent is spending a lot of time documenting, calling, chatting.
  • Encourage, beg agent to just pump them out, offer tips for more efficient handling of requests
  • Panic inside, think about the many emails and messages from “my” groups and travelers pending
  • Repeat all of the above several times
  • Go through several ticket support queues after several requests from other agents needing stuff.
  • Print tickets, do refunds, issue invoices or send to file finishing programs as the case may be.
  • Troubleshoot records, identify typos or other errors preventing something from ticketing or invoicing.
  • Waste time here and there kvetching and moaning on phone to sympathetic callers.
  • No more kvetching! Nose to the grindstone! No more inefficient popping back and forth!
  • 2 minutes later, realize it’s been a while since went through email catching up on changes
  • Find a bunch more urgent requests in email for same day, received in late afternoon
  • Wonder if blood pressure medication can handle it; wonder what “lunch” concept is about.
  • Check queue for more hotel reservations needing authorization letters (my idea, that worked well)
  • Print emailed requests, print hotel authorization letters, pick up and go to fax machine
  • Find several more new incoming requests that were faxed and are therefore nearly illegible
  • Fax authorization letters in a batch, leaving them ready for a return visit for acknowacknowledgments
  • Drop off new requests to designated agent (at least 7-10, with multiples on each)
  • Pick up 2 finished request sheets from agent, listen to how time-consuming each one is.
  • Commiserate, panicking inside, think “need to make a change here, need TL guidance.”
  • Speak to covering team leader and get agreement to change designated agents.
  • Advise designated agent to take calls and relax, since they’re celebrating something today.
  • Speak to new designated agent, who is speedy but leaves early every day, give big stack of sheets.
  • Repeat all of the above – print, fax, distribute, read email, use “shotgun” approach on easy stuff.
  • Bid farewell to deliberate agent, who is leaving us to get married. Sorry I screwed up your last day!
  • Bid farewell to speedy agent, who is leaving for the day, take remaining sheets and hand off
  • Brief the new new designated agent, who is not speedy, but not slow. Give sheets. Pray.
  • Return calls when possible – actually do some hotel groups of my own (one for next week!)
  • Send several records for ticketing, but will realize later about half will fail for weird reasons.
  • Check queue for more hotel reservations, set up authorization letters, print, fax, file (15 or so)
  • Feel sense of relief that backlog is being beaten back into next week or later. Thanks, agents!
  • Discover a number of request sheets from May 1 required air reservations, but travel date is farther in the future so the original designated agent had marked them up and collated and sorted them to farther down in the pile where they wouldn’t have been worked until next week
  • Hear scuttlebutt from several agents that some travelers and arrangers have called numerous times screaming for their air reservations – find all pending sheets with air reservations, pull from pile, put on top of stack for immediate attention, make sure they get booked and ticketed.
  • All through day, take calls from “high volume” request sheet senders resolving problems
  • All through day, think about how to improve process so it’s less labor- and time- intensive
  • All through day, think about how my many unticketed international reservations require callbacks
  • All through day, think about hotel groups that I haven’t been able to work on for a week or more.
  • All through day, think about how every night this week, have left work at 8pm, 9pm, 930pm.
  • End of day. Late-working agents depart. At last, blessed quiet! Too late to make callbacks, though.
  • Work after hours, catching up on personal backlog, issuing tickets, checking error queues
  • Call husband, advise coming home Real Soon, get order for Chinese takeout.
  • Go through all critical queues, including overnight emergency queue, looking for “easy” records
  • Find several records in emergency queue regarding “easy” travel needing authorization letters
  • Print final batch of authorization letters, more than expected because last agent caught up some.
  • Print final batch of request forms that can be left until Monday, leave on team leader’s desk.
  • Mark up problem requests, customer service issues resolved, and leave all on team leader’s desk.
  • Clean out personal queue, find a number of tickets that didn’t issue, fix and issue manually.
  • Bitch, moan, complain, swear under breath (actually, this is a constant during the day)
  • Chat in Spanish with housekeeping guy about being tired and having too much work
  • Call Chinese restaurant and order
  • Go home.

I’ve got several ideas for how this ridiculous process that I saddled myself with could be semi-automated, and one of them has to do with the email program we use at work. As it happens, David runs a discussion list for users of this program who are also programmers on the midrange computer that is his area of expertise. He will put the word out to find out if there’s a way to get the file attachments to print automatically. I’ve already got it set up to filter the emails from a generic inbox to my own and myteam leader’s inboxes, but then all the emails have to be physically opened to and then the attachments opened in order to print them, and that’s the tedious part. I can “batch print” the cover emails all at once, ,but most of them don’t have special notes so it’s a waste of paper.

Another thing is if I didn’t have to make the trek halfway across the office to the printer, it would be less wear and tear on me and the carpeting. My TL has her own printer and originally was doing all the printing, and then I cover for her when she’s out but have to use the “shared” printer that’s between my desk and the even more distant “shared” fax machine. I told her Monday it was ridiculous for her to spend all her time printing requests and authorizations, so here I am doing it – and it really isan all-day job. Today, someone brought me a printer to be directly connected to my computer – oh joy of joys – and it’s a fax printer too. However, it’s missing the power cord and the phone cord, and it’s somebody’s castoff and I’m told the “fax part is busted.” Maybe Monday, I can find the needful things to hook it up. I’ve got the cable for it, at least.

If we could get this old and busted fax printer hooked up and working, that would be a huge time saver. Based on what I know of the new division, buying a new fax printer is probably not in the cards, so I’ll take whatever I can get for now. If it only prints, that’s a help.

If we could get or have access to a fax-to-email program, for those happy few, those band of techs that don’t have email with which to submit their approved travel requests, I would be one happy agent. That would solve the problem of the illegible faxes that get scuffled into the “general” pile and buried at the shared fax machine.

There was no file system for the sheets in place when this began a few weeks ago, and they are in a pile that is now 10 inches high. We are waiting for some fancy file thing that my TL ordered. It’s probably the box that’s been sitting at her desk since just after she left. She has a number of completed sheets and “problem” files stacked all over her printer and monitors. I had found a numbered accordion file for her, and it was still unused, so started putting just the faxed authorization sheets (with “ok”transmission acknowledgements) in each numbered pocket by arrival date. It’s to be cleaned out monthly, ie., when we reach June 1, all the sheets for May 1 will get filed in a 12-month file. Or thrown out, as the case may be. There’s not room to put the request sheets and all the fax acks together in the accordion file, I think. I was originally taking the time to collate them all together, but can’t do that and get anything else done.

Now, the agents are putting all hotel records they book on a holding queue. I print the authorization letters from there, and move the records to a second queue as I go. Anything in the second queue has been printed and is being faxed or waiting for the fax acks to print. I document and remove from the second queue asacknowledgments fax acks come in. When I manage to work efficiently and not send to a wrong number, the records are in the same order as the letters, as are the acknowledgements. It allcomes together beautifully in the end, and then the letters and acknowledgements are stapled and put in the date file. I’ve learned to keep the acknowledgements because sometimes the hotel wants a re-fax if we call them to extend the tech’s stay. ARGH. Why you do this?

A small, a very small number of hotels have refused to honor the request for direct billing in the reservatiion comments, and also refuse to honor the faxed authorization letters, and have to be called and cajoled. Most of them eventually agree to the arrangement, though they may ask for a slightly different authorization letter to put in their permanent files or binders. A smaller number of THOSE require that we fill out a form of their own that they insist on faxing to us. Some of them flat refusethe direct billings in any way, and the techs will remember the agony and embarassment of having to pull out their personal credit cards knowing that it’s a pain to get reimbursed. However, the admins won’t remember those specific hotels are to be avoided and won’t warn against them on future requests, so we’ll have it all to do over again with some other hapless tech that happens to stay there.

I’ve designated a “customer service problems” queue for my team leader to review on Monday. By coincidence, I co-opted a queue she was using for the same purpose for a previous project that has now ended.

The admins I’ve spoken with have all been satisfied once we’ve worked out a resolution – there is one lady that will be a tougher nut to crack, but we hope that the process will improve and the angst be reduced.

Meanwhile, the persistent cough is with me always. One night – one of the days from hell – it got very bad again and I wondered what the hell was going on – I was taking all my prescription meds?? Then I realized that it must have a stress trigger, too. Dammit. So amidst all of this, I have to work even harder to keep an even keel, laugh things off, and make friendly and supportive noises at all times to all cow-orkers.

This is not in my nature, the interpersonal schmoozing. I’m good at laughing things off, but can let things get away from me to that point that nothing at all is funny when constantly fielding questions, calls, and demands for action or help. I cried like a baby, a big fat blubbering baby, on Monday night. And that was with my team leader still in town!

David has been my rock. But then he was out of town Sunday and Monday, hence the blubby baby act. I went home to an empty house, getting there at about 1015pm after stopping for gas, Wendyburger, and more goddamn discount cough drops from Walgreen’s (I’m on my third bag of 100).

That’s about it. Oh – and what the hell is with the price of gas all of a sudden???

I’m going to bed.

Things Done and Left Undone

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It’s been a busy week at work and at home and at church. I’ve gotten through a ton of work at work, done not so much work as a lot of thinking at home, and did some interesting new things at church.

Saturday, didn’t do too much – I was thinking a lot about family members near and far, hoping for the best for one person in particular. Schlepped around and relaxed, otherwise. Much playing with the cat. David went in to work for the whole day, leaving me to my own devices.

Sunday started out with a big last-minute rush to church, and I arrived late and heard about it from the choir mistress, you can be sure. I’ve been in the habit of attending both services, as I think I’ve probably mentioned; last Sunday was no exception. The early service was well attended – surprisingly so! That’s one of the things that I’ve somewhat-surreptitiously been monitoring; it’s not an “us and them” thing, it’s that I’m hoping that there’s good attendance at the early, moreformal service because people are getting what they need out of it.

And some Sundays, attendance at the early service is really sparse, so that I was a little concerned that eventually it would be decided to combine into one, contemporary service. But this last Sunday, there was a good crowd – better than I’d seen in a long time back at Holy Innocents. It was a mixture of old Holy Innocents people and some St Nick’s people, plus a few visitors (one was apparently a friend of a young woman in the choir). The choir had a good showing, and the music we’d been working off paid offwell. As Jill and I kicked back and forth previously, some contemporary music is very bad, but some is quite singable, and Sunday’s music was actually quite enjoyable. Lent at St Nicks-with-the-Holy-Innocents is interesting, because grey panels block some of the windows, and 3 big panels are hung floor-to-ceiling between the main sanctuary and the baptistery, literallyblocking us from that symbol of hope and redemption and resurrection. The chairs are all set up to face inward, which reinforces the psychological inwardness that Lent can be. Apparently, at Holy Week the chairs get re-set again in a cruciform pattern, with the altar table (which is movable, obviously) in the middle. Plans are for 4 of us choir members to chant the Exultet from four different points in the sanctuary.

So, anyway, there was a good-sized crowd at the early service. I sat in on the adult discussion of other religions for a while, and then the choir had a short confab before the second service with a couple more members that came for that service. So, I stayed for the second one.

Monday, work was nuts. Also, I was sick with a nasty cough that I feared would become whooping cough, just like last year. I covered for another groups agent who was out all week, and I had a lot of different bases to cover – air groups (which started out with a moderate “bang” but which petered out by midweek), and hotel groups (which are always my beat, but February is my busiest month, and March has a lot of groups too). In addition to which, there are certain people who know to ask for meby name for international bookings, even though this week I wasn’t officially on the international desk, so I had to work those in when I could.

After work, I attended a meeting of local ONE campaign volunteers. I had only been lurking on their Yahoo group, but the local organizer is pretty dynamic and focused on getting more people on board, and there had been some “can’t we have some meetings in the suburbs? The city is too faaaaaar” comments. It was on my way home, so I went. It was interesting. I had no idea how focused some people were. I picked up a few extra ONE white wristbands and stickers and things, and promised to mention it at churchand see if anyone else is interested in getting more involved. It’s a big deal at high levels – our own PB ++Katherine is pushing the Millennium Development Goals – so I think I’ll give it a whirl.

And then there’s my current millstone, the “helpers” in a certain distant city. I’m riding herd on them more than ever – its a source of great frustration to me, and to my leader, and to her manager, and on up the line. These guys are handing a number of our calls while our own agents are farmed out on other accounts up here while the Great Re-Education Project continues. They were trained, quickly, over the phone, and at the beginning it sounded like they’d be able to handle it. But it seems that almost as quicklyas these people would be trained, go through a breaking-in period where they made a lot of mistakes, and got to where they were almost competent – emphasis on “almost” – and then they’d be pulled off our account, and put on another one. And they’d be replaced by a completely green, wet-behind-the-ears newbie who couldn’t even use the reservation system very well. We kind of lost track who was “on” and “off” our account – for several weeks, their team leader never bother to let us know who was cyclingin and out, so my emails to the “helper group” were going to people no longer on our “team,” or even no longer with the company. Many of them were temps who had no commitment to the company, let alone to doing a good job. My leader and I were caught flat-footed, because we weren’t told how the leader in the other city was choosing to cycle her temps in and out. It just seemed like my leader was constantly having to schedule conference calls to train new “helpers.”

Then everything blew up – the travelers had figured out after a couple of weeks that some agents were in the other city, and the regular agents were still in our city, and they started complaining about problems, messed up reservations, and big errors. The errors were expensive, and they started piling up. Then one agent in particular started showing up in the customer service reports – giving out erroneous information, refusing to take reservations if the caller had not gone online before to “claim” their profileso that it’s visible in the new ID/booking system. More emails, trying to encourage better performance. I had to start keeping a log of minor errors, and major errors are being logged elsewhere. All the “helpers” had to start sending all their records to a QC queue, but I know damn well that most of them don’t bother. The one guy got fired, because his errors were egregious, he stubbornly refused to follow procedures designed to minimize errors and maximize accuracy, and he took WAY too many shortcuts. I gotreally tired of fixing his records when they wouldn’t pass the auto-file finishing/accuracy software, too. The “helpers” are a continuing pain in my ass.

I ended up with PADS laundry duty this week, too – I totally forgot last week, and the coordinator covered for me. That was embarassing! But she asked if I could cover this week because she hadn’t been able to find anyone else, so that turned out okay.

Tuesday was more of the same, but not as horrible as Monday. As well as covering the normal bases, I was also covering for one of my fellow support/lead agents, so I had a lot of crap to wade through – ground through a lot of queues fixing things, and filed a customer service request for a really bizarre ticketing error, which of course was caused by a helper. I started to make some headway against all the different things I was watching, and just kept plugging away. That night, I stopped offat the PADS shelter church to pick up the dirty laundry. Was hoping for a light load, but ended up hauling 9 big blue bags of SOILED LAUNDRY!! HOSPITAL!! out to the RAV, using the completely crap laundry cart someone made. It’s designed so that if you pile more than one layer of bags on, they fall off the front or sides. And there’s an elevator, in which the cart just barely fits, and in which I almost don’t fit unless I squeeze against the side rail thing the cart has. I piled the bags as best I could, and droveoff home, very late. By daylight, the SOILED LAUNDRY!! HOSPITAL!! warnings printed on the bags are even more noticeable. I wonder what other drivers think when they see the SOILED!! LAUNDRY!!mobile drive by. I did a little tidying at home before bed, since Wednesday would be a late night, too.

Wednesday did indeed turn out to be an incredibly long day. Work was busy, busy, busy. However, I got out more or less on time, and drove the soiled!laundry!mobile to St Nick’s for the Wednesday night choir practice, which was superceded/preceded by a Lenten program with a Labyrinth walk. Now THAT was neat. I got there just in time to join everyone for a short prayer and then we all grabbed bowls and plates and dug in to a very nice little soup-and-side dish potluck. Greeted people warmly, asit had already been a stressful week what with concern for the one family member and dealing with the “helper” idiots at work. So seeing my church friends in the middle of the week was a break from all that. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised at the turnout – there were at least 30 or 40 people there! I’m so used to coming to midweek events and its the same 8 to 10 people… it was just a welcome change. After supper, we turned to the Labyrinth. St Nick’s owns a very large, canvas one that comes in 3 piecesthat are stuck together somehow at the edges – I think it must be with Velcro strips – and the labyrinth is painted in dark purple paint. It looks like a commercial one, as I saw a logo printed on the underside of one piece when they broke it down afterwards. Mary Ann had placed candles all around, and there were two candles on standards placed on either side of the entrance point. After a preliminary explanation, we were invited to begin when we were ready.

It was a very interesting experience. I’ve walked labyrinths before that were more like art installations, but I made a conscious effort to be quiet in my thoughts and concentrate on breathing, and as I walked I tried to think just one word at a time on the things that concern me – a loved one, peace, health, my family, our community, our “sad divisions” in the Episcopal/Anglican world, and after a while, the universe. About halfway through, after passing through the center, I started thinking about planets,moons and stars, all dancing gravely and ponderously through the cosmos, and how we were emulating that dance. Sometimes I would be walking alongside someone in another track, and other times we’d turn away, only to meet up again later. It was very calming. Mary Ann had some Gregorian chant going, and that was the only sound, other than the shush-shush sounds of stockinged feet brushing against the canvas as we walked.

Afterwards, I put my coat on and walked up to the choir mistress. “Are we having practice?” I asked naively, as I hoped to drop off the soiledl!laundry! at the hospital down the street. Oh, boy. You bet – 90 more minutes. We sang, listened to a few rants about the amount of music we still needed to learn, and sang some more. We found out that Betsy, the girl with the amazing voice, got a veterinary internship in Houston in June, so we’re losing her. The choir mistress was not pleased. Heh! I like her – her nameis Mary – but she’s always going off on something. I keep thinking she’ll calm down when she gets her paws on the new organ.

Got out of there at 930pm, debating with myself whether I should stop so late to try to swap the laundry out. I decided to swing in and see if I could get it done, because if I couldn’t, I’d have to get it done somehow Thursday, because that’s kind of the deadline. So, in I went. I left the soiled!laundry!hospital! bags at the bottom of the ramp, where it’s out of the weather (I’ve been told to do that numerous times before) and just as before, there was no cart or anyone around to help me carry the new, shrinkwrappedsheet/blanket/towel sets out to the car. So all 23 sets had to be schlepped, four at a time. There was no hope of the church still being open, so off home I went. Tidied a tiny bit more, as the cleaning ladies come in every other Thursday.

Thursday started off fairly successfully; due to my schedule and the location of the PADS church, I was able to drop off the clean laundry sets in the morning before work. This has the added benefit of being able to say “good morning” to people who were there to start things off in the church day care – it’s a much cheerier place in the morning than it is at night, when all the activity (AA meetings and such) are in a different part of the building. Got to work, and guess what? I was coveringfor my team leader, too. So more things to keep an eye on, more errors to log, more hotel groups to set up (including a couple using a very slick online process, I quite liked that), more records that needed direct-billed hotels and forms of payment, more corporate pilot car-and-hotel reservations booked, more questions answered, more stuff dealt with, and still made headway. Pretty much all week, I’ve been satisfied that I’ve well and truly earned my pay. Still trying to make time to design a form to be usedon the client’s intranet to set up small hotel groups, that may have to be done this weekend at home. I’m trying to swing a deal where all small hotel groups would have to be set up via emailed requests, at least for the initial inquiry. The calls I get at random times of the day really derail me. For dinner, we made a delicious but spicy curry using the last of this brand of curry powder that I got at Meijer. Have to blog the adapted recipe later, but the brand is Sharwood’s Hot Indian Curry Powder, andit also calls for Sharwood’s (or any brand) Major Grey Mango Chutney. Mmmm. We adapt it by adding a bit more tomato sauce, and also potatoes and carrots. Went upstairs early and took a shower and listened to my spacy iPod music before bed.

Friday Slept like a LOG last night. I seem to have gotten over the pestilence I brought into the office; I didn’t bother to take any Nyquil last night, either. Woke up with weird dreams connected to whatever NPR’s Morning Edition was covering, and also with stuff about fundraising (it’s spring pledge season). Busy all day, but productively. Got three hotel groups set up for future invoicing – meaning, I built itineraries for each person, added a lot of formats via a “replay” feature that the”new hotness” reservation completely LACKS, so hurray for old skool, and rode herd on the newbies in the far distant city. Their leader is now a) pregnant and out sick a lot and b) getting ready to go for a week’s training on the “new hotness” reservation system so she can be their office’s champion. Honey, we have 3 such champions in our office, and she’s got a lot of catching up to do. Almost picked up the phone to call one agent because he Would. Not. Re-Store. The. Damn. Airfare which had changed. He justkept sending it back to the file-finishing program without correcting, and without actually reading my “please re-store fare” remarks, although he was documenting “Fixed” every time. Not the brightest bulb there – I sent it back to him for correction 3 times, finally did it myself the third time, he stored the OLD fare somehow over my new lower one, and I re-stored it AGAIN with “DO NOT TOUCH RECORD – STORING LOWER FARE” in the QC remarks. For some reason, he just could not figure it out – I think he’s gotan old version of the software, actually. None of them are technically savvy, and their leader isn’t all that expert in the systems, either.

David and I had discussed making teriyaki chicken with rice. On my way out the door from work, however, I started thinking “I wish we could put off the chicken until tomorrow night, I kind of want to go out.” When I walked in, David said “I don’t really feel like cooking chicken, let’s go out for sushi.”

“GET OUTTA MY BRAIN!” I shouted. “NO, I LIKE IT IN HERE, IT’S ALL WARM AND SQUOOSHY,” he hollered. So I put my rain jacket on, instead of the leather one I wore this morning, and we went out into a rainy but warm night.

Mmmm. Sushi. We went to Kampai, where they’re about to begin some renovations. They’ve upgraded the sushi counter, removed the old “sneeze hoods” over the floating boats, and they’ll probably build newer, more attractive glass hoods/shelves over the stainless steel water channel that so charmingly floats our sushi boats in an endless circle. After our return, David played around with a new lens, taking pictures of the cat. Aw! we love Riley!

Tomorrow David’s going in to work again, and I’m going to start gathering my gear for an upcoming trip to be described in more detail after our return. Also, printing some pictures to cheer my family member, who needs a little extra support. And if it’s not too rainy, clear out the old china from the back of my car and take it over to the dealership to have some spark-plug-wire-cap-doohingus-thingy installed, as the part is now in stock. The car can be left, as the dealership is walkable.But I have to remember to pick it up before they close, as they are not open Sundays.

Sunday – might be getting together with David’s parents, not sure. Getting to choir practice before the early service will be awfully damn early (and dark!) with Daily Savings Time coming on early. Must remember to reset clocks. Must remember to reset clocks. Hope computers don’t blow up. Hope computers don’t blow up.

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Work, work, work

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There’s something that’s been building and building for months now; I feel really overwhelmed and stressed out much of the time, while simultaneously feeling like I’m not pulling enough weight for other people on my team.

Problem is, the tasks that I currently cover don’t play well with each other. Also, the new technology that we’re supposed to be using for making reservations leaves much to be desired.

Here’s a partial list of tasks, some of which I’ve been totally neglecting because the first two tasks take up the great bulk of my time:

  • Small group hotels (taking up about 80% of my time now)
  • International travel (should be taking more calls, can’t because of hotel groups)
  • “Group” air reservations (actually, individual reservations using special group profiles)
  • Hotel reservations for certain interviewees that have to be direct billed to a specific person
  • Small group air – “photo shoots” (a new task that I’ve asked to take on to reduce the workload for a teammate)
  • Customer service inquiries (time-consuming, and lately, totally neglected if not something quick and easy to resolve)
  • Billing inquiries – I get stuck with these because I’m willing to solve the puzzles
  • QC (quality control) on several very inexperienced and unskilled agents in another office who are “helping” us
  • Format and exchange ticket help for other agents (not as much of this as there used to be

So: the problem is that the hotel group stuff is ONLY going to increase, because I found out to my horror (no understatement there) that another category of small hotel groups that used to be handled by a meeting planner at the client home office will probably be foisted off on me because the meeting planner doesn’t want to bother with them anymore. Doing the hotel groups keeps me off the phones, off email for large chunks of time, either entering lists of names in spreadsheets, entering those names into individual
hotel reservations, and emailing or invoicing them. And then I spend a lot of time maintaining files, calling hotels, faxing namelists, and emailing namelists, and printing everything I do, and so on and so on, scooby dooby doo.

More moaning and groaning to follow…

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Traffic Refugees

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Last night at about the time when people log out and go home, we got word that there was a big accident at the intersection at the far end of the parking lot. Supposedly, the intersection was closed and they were re-routing cars around it; it's been listed as one of the most dangerous intersections in this part of the suburbs because of the high number of serious accidents that occur there.

Fair enough, I made mental note to possibly hook around and take the tollway in the direction of home. As I left the building, a long, long string of cars was going along the edge of our lot, headed toward the access road that leads toward another major intersection. It was clear that the police had allowed some traffic to detour through our lot in order to clear the area. So, I avoided them as well, and hooked around to a nearby on-ramp. The line of cars stretched back, back, back, for all the world like refugees fleeing some catastrophe.

This morning, the word went around just before lunch… another major accident at the same intersection, which again cut off my access westward. As I had a half-day today, there I was again, hooking around to the tollway, this time in daylight. It was a dark, grim, foggy day here, so flights at O'Hare were backed up in their own right, not just because of Denver's blizzardly woes.

Weird.

In Communicado

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I've got a long, password-protected draft going. I'm not sure if I will publish it or not, as it's all about a training experience I'm currently having. 

It is not going well.  It's not good when a class starts out with cartoon characters depicting change as the Big Bad Wolf, and with Lisa Simpson quoting the well – known but possibly Snopesian phrase that in Chinese, the words for change and opportunity are the same.

I must be flexible yet strong like bamboo, and not unyielding and sharp like katana.  Arrrrgh.  

I’m Having A Bad O.J. Flashback

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Popping Off: Its up to us to put an end to the O.J. frenzy

“If I Did It.”

That’s a heck of a title for a ghostwritten book about how O.J. Simpson would have killed two people who many believe he did kill in 1994.

One was his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, with whom he had two children, Sydney and Justin. The other was her friend, Ron Goldman. Both were found in a bloody heap in the courtyard of the condo complex where she lived.

I’m having a flashback to a year that was a big turning point for me, and the whole OJ story was in the background and sometimes the foreground that whole year.

I used to live in Seattle, and this article is from a Seattle-Tacoma paper. My former boss was the sort of person who would become consumed by whatever big, lurid murder story was in the news, and all conversation in the office was nothing but endless speculation and conjecture, with no grisly detail omitted.

1994 was the last full year that I lived in Seattle as a completely single woman. I met my husband David late that fall, and within a few months, we were a long-distance couple

But before I met David, I was trapped in a job that I didn’t like, working for someone who prattled endlessly about whatever her current fixations were in the news, and how to transform her business, but she never actually settled down to do much work. And that year, it was OJ, and earlier the same year, it was a big murder case involving someone she knew slightly. Every interaction she’d ever had with
the victim in the latter case was repeated endlessly, and over-analyzed until I was ready to scream. Meanwhile, the TV was always on because her school-age sons same to the office after classes. Although they lived in a distant neighborhood, they had the boys in school near work. It was partly practical, and partly snob appeal; she wanted her kids to go to a nicer, more socially acceptable Catholic school than the one nearer their home. Also, the interaction with the other parents at fundraising
events and science fairs was supposed to be good for business.

But I digress. I remember watching the slow-speed chase of the white Bronco all too well; we had no choice but to be glued to the TV, because it was at the end of the workday and it was on all the channels anyway. Remember? There was nothing else to watch but OJ that day.

5 years before that, it was all Ted Bundy, all the time. Every possible encounter my former boss might have had was relentlessly dissected. He was active in both Washington State and Utah in the late Seventies, and I have to admit that I knew of someone in Utah who thought Ted Bundy had followed them home once. Ted Bundy was every woman’s ultimate bogeyman, the attractive killer who appears to need your help. We spent a year discussing his last murders, his arrest, and his trial before he was executed.
I had read the book by Anne Rule, you see. And then I stirred the pot by discussing the most famous murder case from my former town, because I knew several people connected with the Diane Downs case, including a prosecutor and a social services volunteer who had met her surviving kids.

It seemed all we ever did in that office was discuss gory murders or sexy scandals, and occasionally were interrupted by phone calls or visits from clients. It wasn’t a healthy work environment.

So I had that to look forward to, working in that office – every year, the next sensational murder trial, the big lurid news story, on and on.

And what do I think, ultimately, about OJ? There is no “if” in my mind. The investigation was screwed up, the trial was screwed up, all the little players screwed up the timeline, the evidence was manipulated in court, and of course they never found the damn knife. But of course he did it, and for him to go through with this ludicrous “If I Did It” project, and for Fox/Murdoch to have actually contemplated putting it on the air is deeply offensive to me.

Of course he did it. And I’m tired of hearing about it. And I agree, we should stop paying OJ any money, or any attention, ever again.