Job

It seems a long time since I have posted and I feel an inkling to let the world know I am alive.

Mondays have always been my busiest and often hardest days at this job. I feel like I do more work on Monday than I do the rest of the week combined. Because of deadlines and when things get done, there really doesn't seem to be much I can do to change this or spread Monday out over the rest of the week. I do leave what I can for Tuesday, but that's not much.

The last few Mondays have been very trying though- more so than ever. Usually a good hard Monday is a good way to start the week. Being busy makes the day fly by and I don't have time to have "a case of the Mondays." Then Tuesday I catch up and finish up and by then it's Wednesday and the week's half over. But these last few weeks...

For my job, I receive orders from solicitors. It's my job to track how many orders they turn in, what kind they are, get them to the right people to "fill" the orders, keep track of how many do get done, how many don't get done, and then do all the stuff to get the solicitors paid for the good orders. (When I say it out loud, I actually think my job sounds impressive. I feel like I do a lot and am learning a lot and it's not just a run of the mill job.) Throughout the week, different solicitors bring in orders on different days. But on Monday, everybody brings in orders. Not only do I have all the solicitors bring in orders, they bring in a lot of orders because they've been selling all weekend. In the last month, we have had three new solicitors added to our business here. For the last 8 months, I have had 10 so, for the mathematically impaired, this is a 33% increase, ie. a lot more work. Not only that, the new groups all have special needs that have increased my work load a great deal. Then, to top things off, the company has made some changes to what we even are selling. This means I've had to make changes in my databases. This means things got all messed up, even things I didn't change, because I'm still learning how to manipulate things in Access. We'll call that a learning experience. We have only one full time person who actually enters the orders. The other two people who do this also have other work they do during the day. About a month ago, our veteran full time person quit without notice. This left a lot of us trying to catch up to all her work. They did, thankfully, quickly replace this full time person, but the new person's training has been a slow process. All in all, Monday's have been a mess. I spend a great amount of time also entering the orders and not doing the rest of what I have to do. Then because of all this, they give orders to just anybody who even thinks they know how to do them so when they come back to me on Tuesday I have a bunch of mistakes I have to fix. Yesterday it seemed not just that people had made mistakes, but that in their laziness and/or all the rush they simply didn't do things that could have been done and it all gets left to me. I was very frustrated.

I go back and forth a lot with my job. At the same time I feel like I'll never get it (like learning Access all by trial and error) I've also become so busy with tedious stuff (doing a lot of the orders myself) that I have no time for what my actual job is. I have days (or sometimes just moments) of feeling like I'm going to take ownership of this job and really get good at it and be professional in my attitude etc. Then I have days where I feel like I'm not giving anything to this job, it's not giving me much and I could (or should) be doing more with my talents and education.