duck-shaped pain

Highlights/lowlights:

• Apparently, no one has been checking things for spelling for two months (the amount of time I've been gone). I was looking over a report this morning, checking to see if it was ready to be sent to the client, and I kept coming across all sorts of misspellings. Some were exciting and new, others were things that I [1] I asked L., the woman who took over while I was gone (she of the infamous comment), what the deal was, and she told me that she didn't think she had to check documents for spelling when she was proofreading them. Huh? What do you think you proofread for, anyway? Wouldn't spelling be something that was pretty obvious?

• Every time someone leaves, whether temporarily or for good, the remaining employees band together and wildly redesign all the forms for entering well data. This is understandable: even after my redesign earlier this year, the forms are still much too complex and confusing. People out on the well site -- people with advanced graduate degrees, mind you -- cannot manage to fill out the forms correctly. While in some cases the errors are due to people being momentarily dumb, for the most part, the problems lie with the forms themselves, not their users. So a total redesign is a good idea, if done correctly. The thing I came back to is � interesting. The concept behind them is one that seems like a good idea at first -- embed a bunch of the forms with macros so that if you fill in some information on one, it's replicated on other forms. However, in reality, there are all sorts of places things could go completely wrong and create even more work. The key here is that data has to be entered in a very precise style and fashion -- dates have to be typed one way, footages another, and this is near impossible when you have six or seven different people all working on these forms, who all have a different way of operating and who all think their way of entering such information is completely right and everyone else is dead wrong. Fights have broken out over this before, and there's no macro out there that can stop something like that. I just see big headaches ahead, probably because I'm not the one who came up with the forms. [2]

• I left some cheese in the refrigerator when I left (bad me, I know) and it was still there today. Unmoved. I guess refrigerator vigilance is less of a virtue now than it used to be.

• I seem to have been placed back in charge of what is the most interesting job there for a non-scientist. I got assigned a bunch of editing, proofreading (because I can spell and all) and some light technical writing. L. is off answering phones and writing correspondence and being The Employer's suck-up. Ha!

• I had forgotten how cold the office is in the winter. I could see my breath when I got in. This is always an alarming thing to experience indoors, and it's worse here because the only reason this chill exists is because The Employer is cheap, cheap, cheap when it comes to heat and comfort. I had to leave at four p.m. because I couldn't feel my feet any more.

• In general, it wasn't a terribly bad day because for the most part [3] I just didn't care. My plan was to show up and do whatever work was required, but not to get involved. So when I found myself being accidentally drawn to some sort of nano-crisis, I thought, this is just so not important. Let's see if I can keep that up -- it seems to be the key to office happiness.

• When I got home, I had a nice red sweater waiting for me in the mail. Happy thing.

[1] Did I mention that this report was nearly done when I left? That I put a lot of effort into making it that way? All that was left to do when I departed was print it, add a few maps, slap a cover on it and send it out the door. What the hell happened to it while I was gone?

[2] Had I been the one to come up the thing, I would think everyone was insane for not wanting to jump on my macro bandwagon.

[3] Excepting the foibles of L., that is. And the forms.

previous | next