measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The little things that people do As I drove to work this morning, I was mentally going through the checklist of things that had to be done today, and in what order. I was dreading the piles that would be on my chair, and the chunk of work that's fallen further and further behind. Let's face it... August has been a weird work month for me. I was out on vacation from July 26th to August 4th. Then had to take Aug. 13th off to pack up the apartment for the floorboard guys to come in and nail things down. And that afternoon, I get the call about Grandma's death. I went into the office for about two hours on the 14th, and then left. My first day back has been today. So I've worked a whopping... 7 days and change this month. And it's the 25th. Needless to say, work's piled up a bit. And I was NOT looking forward to the sight that I was going to find when I got here. I arrived at my desk to find a surprisingly small pile on my chair-- about a dozen or so requests for contracts, but nothing that I don't normally get in a couple days, depending on where various projects are in the scheme of things. A couple invoices to check into... but nothing too bad. (and nothing that had to be dealt with immediately). I open my email to find a surprisingly small amount of email-- only 120 new messages. Ten of which were from the 13th that I never had gotten around to checking. Another 40 or so were spam messages, thanks to my stupidity of opening Interviewed's guestbook with my work email account, since I didn't realize at the time that I could have multiple guestbooks with the same email address there. Another 35 were timesheets from employees. About a dozen others were well-wishes from those who had heard the news about my grandma. All in all, a respectable amount didn't exactly cause concern in any way, shape, or form. *shrug* So I settle down and contact a couple people that I knew were important regarding priority work-- payroll. Gotta get timesheets into the system by noon. O-kay. Roll up sleeves, type a message to my contact at payroll, and prepare to lose my morning in about three weeks worth of timesheets (111 in all) that had to be entered into the database system. This could take me the better part of the morning. I get a message back from my contact at payroll. My counterpart in New Jersey had taken care of them for me over the past couple weeks. All but two, which they couldn't get because people were unreachable last week (folks that I knew in advance were on vacation). Out of those 111 timesheets, I entered only two. And then did a virtual kau-tow to my counterpart in New Jersey, promising her all sorts of yummy chocolate goodies in return. And entering timesheets is not exactly a joyous job. And I have twice the number of people in my department as she has. Plus, she works directly for Bigger Boss. How she dealt with the added stress, I don't know. So I've spent the day simply contacting people, answering emails... answering phone calls, all with a "was out for a family emergency last week... I'm getting to work on everything, but making sure I contact everyone first so they don't think I'm ignoring them." All in all, a pretty decent, routine day. Thank Goddess for helpful coworkers. Today could have been absolute hell. *relaxed sigh* ~ Mel. 4:47 p.m. - 25 August 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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