Work Is Hell

I was very, very angy and stressed out today. All week, I’ve been unable to settle into some kind of routine with all the new duties (most of which don’t play well together, so multi-tasking is right out). Also, all week I’ve been pulled about 6 different directions a day looking at someone’s malfunctioning screen, key, or non-priceable international record.

Some of my cow-orkers are great people who are much better than I am at masking their own stress and not hosing it about in great gouts like I do. Some of them are great at picking up the slack and doing things that I should have been doing had I not been pulled 6 ways from Sunday.

Some of my cow-orkers are like millstones of one kind or another. Today, one of them was traipsing around having the day off and bringing her dogs in for a visit, while I sat at my desk and fixed yet another one of her screwed up, fucked up, very bad, so sad group files that she’d neglected for more than a month. Oh, I was in a mighty pissy mood, plus one of the visiting dogs got stepped on and screamed (not just a little “yip!” – it was an agonized shriek), and I about burst into tears and ran out of the room. Because yeah, stress, anger, and a lot of other emotions were about to boil over.

My back and neck were aching and I had a headache when I finally drove home, after realizing there was nothing more I could do with the messed-up file until Monday. I came home, cried like a little baby for a bit, and then David and I went out to get sushi and see Steve, and another friend, Jim. Steve gave me a neck rub and told me everyone loved me. David said he’d always loved me anyway. Even Jim said he loved me (the elbow in the ribs from Steve probably were his big clue).

Eventually, I felt better. But I’m still pissed at the pile of crap my cow-orker dumped on me.

I drank two bottles of sake and ate much sushi.

I am feeling much, much better now. Although… my neck is starting to bother me again, now that the sake has worn off.

The extended entry will probably end up getting deleted when I think better of it for the sake of continued employment, so read it while you can.

And Her Little Dogs, Two

Yep, the person I like to call “Gubba Gubba” is on my list, because I spent the entire frigging… no, I spent the entire FUCKING day trying to fix a hotel group that she dumped on me.

And while I was at my worst and growling at the most inoffensive and friendly of my cow-orkers for daring to suggest I’d screwed up their programmable keys when trying to fix them (guilty), Gubba blows in with her little dogs two, in improvised carry bags (actually, freebie travel bags with their heads sticking out of the zippered compartments). The dogs were cute, I will admit; I petted them and talked to them and thought it was funny when one of them wandered under my desk. However, they were a distraction and a big sucking black hole in terms of productivity and time management.

There I was, petting her dogs and thinking evil thoughts about their mother for dumping all that extra work in my lap; I’ve been complaining that I couldn’t get to it all week. Actually, my TL told her to dump them on me, rightly thinking that I’d find plenty of crap to fix based on previous experience.

I’ve been the hotel group person since January, although Gubba still had a couple of “her” advance groups that were active. Well, as the dates for these groups finally came up in the last month or so, each one had date problems or cancellation problems, and also quite often NOTHING had been entered into the system for them, so it was a lot of work just getting them invoiced, let alone fixing the errors and inconsistencies. And a lot of the inconsistencies were precisely because the hotel dates had never been put into the system and emailed to the travelers, so they made their air reservations separately with slightly different dates, not knowing their real hotel dates were different.

Why?

Because the travelers never actually give their real travel dates to the secretaries that book the hotel groups, and the secretaries routinely book dates that are merely approximations of when they think the travelers will check in and out. And then I end up fixing a lot of records when I discover the date discrepancies, often close to or after the hotel cancellation policy kicks in for changing the arrival date. This forces some hapless hotel reservations clerk to do a whole boatload of late changes based on my call or fax – sometimes there’s a little negotiating done to get people out of late change fees. All because my cow-orker chose not to set her groups up with all the dates entered into the computer from the beginning, so that our other cow-orkers have a chance of finding the records and adding the air segments into them when the travelers eventually call to book flights. That’s when I catch the wacky records – when I get a call that starts out “Red?? I booked this guy’s flights and found his hotel you booked, but the dates are different and you put ‘group fax’ in the confirmation field so I thought I’d better call you.” Yep, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Wordy, but effective.

On my OWN groups, the secretaries get told the date by which the hotel needs the FINAL name list and the FINAL travel dates – I don’t mess with any “preliminary name list with approximate dates” shit anymore. I’ll hold approximate dates without names til the cows come home, but I only want to see the names and dates on or before a reasonably early due date. That way, the first time I see the namelist and travel dates is usually the only time I’ll have to enter the information in the computer and send the list to the hotel.

With our clients, change is inevitable – but I’d much rather change 3 or 4 guys’ flights and hotel dates once rather than send a whole raft of changes at the last minute to the hotel. Which is what I’ll be doing Monday: a group of 24 people, and every fucking one is checking out one or two days early, and some of them are checking in on different dates, and it will be less than 7 days prior to arrival on Monday, and I don’t give a fuck.

I could have been working on this Monday or Tuesday, but the international desk blew up about then and I was swamped until today.

I was angry because I sense that this is going to blow up in my face, and there was very little I could do about it. Also, it doesn’t help that this particular group is booked with a “block shop” housing bureau; they insist on getting everything via email, which is a proven loser for us. The last group of Gubba’s that got screwed up was a mess because she sent her “final name list and final dates” to the wrong address. Then printed out her email (with wrong address) to add to the file to show that it had been sent. That was a lovely mess to fix; we had travelers calling from the front desk of the hotel wanting to know why their dates were wrong. Same block shop/bureau for that group, too.

And apparently, I have to work with this bureau 4 times a year now. And guess what?? They don’t get faxes – one I sent to my “contact” to try to add a few latecomers to the current group never was delivered (though I could prove that I sent it), so I’m stuck with the non-provable email option.

So every few months I get to look forward to setting this crap up. Apparently they have a web based option that is their “preferred” method – Gubba never trusted it.

Hmm. For that reason alone, I should check it out. And why “Gubba?” Well, she often has to justify her actions for things small and large that went wrong that were her responsibility; rather than TAKING responsibility she makes excuses so quickly that only a sort of “gubba-gubba” noise comes out.