Anybody reading this who’s not a spammer knows I’m not what you call a “consistent,” or “focused,” or even a particularly “interesting” blogger. I have my same few dead ponies I enthusiastically beat around and around the blogular racetrack.

Yaaaargh. My husband David is not alone in being pretty bored with endless “Amazing Race” gushfests; now that TAR7 has run its “halfway round the world and back again” course I won’t have quite so much easy found blogfodder to post.

Hmmm. Hmmmity hummity hmmm. That’s a lot of thumb-twiddling on the horizon unless I get cracking, eh?

So, what’s really going on? Work… has been circling the drain and making a slurpy bathtubby sort of sucking noise for a while. It’s made me a crabby, crabby person, never more so than when the entire batch of team leaders take off en masse for meetings somewhere warm and tropical. My job description these days can’t be summed up in a few words or phrases; I do a LOT of multitasking. Unfortunately, some of the things I do (okay, a lot of them) can’t be multitasked very well. Or they can’t be done at a time when I’m also expected to be available to take incoming calls… or at least, I maintain the polite fiction that I am supposed to work on certain tasks in the first 2 hours of my day, then be available for all hell breaking loose on my other tasks the rest of the day. In practice, you may assume that all hell breaks loose on all tasks all day, and I may be interrupted for any reason.

Some of my tasks require that I drop everything more important to my own workflow and hustle around making photocopies and dropping stuff off at people’s desks. It’s potentially time-sensitive and it’s to do with getting time off scheduled, and I hate hearing people whine when I misguidedly let the work pile up until I can do the running around all at once, rather than several times a day.

I’ve learned some hard lessons from the whining and complaining.

However, no one else seems to learn the valuable lesson that I have absolutely no control over how quickly these little pieces of paper will be acted upon by other people, who being farther up on the totem people have the leisure to let them build up to a conveniently sized stack. Which stack will get dumped on me after a week or two, requiring me to drop everything, etc. etc. etc. just to get the whiners to stop making that piercing nasal droning noise.

So. Team leaders away, the lesser folk make jokes about running off to the local Chili’s for margaritas and play, but actually we hunker down and try to deal with contractors and builders tearing down cubicles and stacking stuff up (my opposite number has more to do with this) and trying to head off potential customer service issues and dealing with format and policy and fare rule questions (more my area of expertise, especially when it comes to screwing up, alas). And of course we deal with copiers being out of toner, scripts that no longer work for some but not all, and computers going down (baby, you’re going down only when the TLs are out of town). Oh and joy, rapture; the storms last night and the news about United’s pension plan decision made for an… interesting day.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, work work work.

I don’t really have friends at work. There are people I am friendly with, but they’re not on my own team (with a couple of exceptions). The people on my own team mostly ignore me, unless they’re complaining about small pieces of paper and so on. This may be a direct consequence of the crabbiness thing. Probably. Most likely.

Also, I’ve never gone out and gotten shitfaced after work with any of my cow-orkers (or gone on a “fam” trip and gotten shitfaced, for that matter). Frankly, I used to do just that very thing early in my travel career, but fortunately I pulled up in time and avoided auguring in. I just can’t hang out in smoky bars any more, and I never want to be hungover again, so the whole importance of being shitfaced now eludes me (where once it did not).

Occasionally, I have a better day than usual just by making an effort to laugh crap off rather than grumbling about it under my breath, but grumbling is so much easier.

Still, things are in flux at work, and there’s a really decentish chance that my team may be made redundant. If I start making jokes about being from Swindon in the next few months, that’s why.

Meanwhile, we at the office are treated to a constant series of complaints that we’re not handling enough calls. And we’ve had a lot of people out sick, or on long-term medical leave, and lately we’ve been shorthanded more often than not. My opposite numbers on other teams and I keep getting loaded up with more tasks, and then told that our call stats need improvement. Hello? Ah. If only I could afford to one of these implanted.

Don’t get me wrong – occasionally I have a lot of fun at work joking with clients or other agents (while getting the work done, natch). But there are some other odd little facts of life in that office that still flummox me.

Like for instance, this: Why do people leave “sanitary toilet seat protectors” on the toilet without making sure they flushed properly, leaving a perfect bumprint on the tissue-thin surface of said item?

Two days in a row now, there’s been a bum-print left in the first stall on the right. It happens a little too often for an office that boasts so many women freaked out about hygiene.

Rest assured, I shall get to the bottom of this.

UPDATE: I had taken this post back for a day or two because people were Googling each other’s names a little too much for comfort.

However, in the meantime, some strongly worded signs appeared in the lav the other day. They’re still up, and they’ve caused a scandal because of the way they’ve been posted on the outside of the stalls, rather than on the inside on the back of the door. They read:

PLEASE BE COURTEOUS TO OTHERS.
PLEASE FLUSH THE TOILET AND BE SURE TO REMOVE YOUR SANITARY SHEET FROM THE LID

From now on, anyone using one of those paper sheet things (the rustling noise is a dead giveaway) will be chastised severely for leaving it on the seat. No one will own up to either leaving the sheets “behind” or to posting the signs. It makes for interesting times here. 😉