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Jan. 13th, 2012 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupThis has been the longest week of my life. It's been easily eight or nine weeks long. And that's despite the fact that I took Wednesday and this morning off.
We are at half our normal staff level right now, and half of the remaining staff was out sick for at least some of the week, including me. The Davos conference means we've been compiling research profiles like crazy, so crazy that my boss actually assigned me one, because there just wasn't anyone else to do it.
I'm totally fine with doing a research profile, because my ultimate aim is to move up from administrative manager to researcher. I've made no secret of that, and my department is supportive of it, which is why they give me learning assignments like this. But researchers get really intensive training before they're given this kind of assignment -- and on top of never having done one before, this was an international profile. International researchers are so specially trained and so thin on the ground that we've been trying to hire one for a year without success. Right now we're in talks to import one from Canada.
I've already talked a bit about the budget projections, which we have to submit next week. And also because we're at half-staff, we're both interviewing and hiring new positions.
So here is what happens on Tuesday:
-- My international profile is due.
-- The budget projections are due.
-- I am chaperoning a prospective employee around his interviews.
-- I am giving our new employee a tour of the building on her first day.
Because she's new, I was also in charge this week of making sure New Employee's access, computer, phone, and desk were set up.
The thing is, because Monday's a holiday, everything had to get done this week, and it did. New Employee's desk was set up by ten. I turned in the profile at noon, got it proofed, and turned in the final draft by one. At two we had the budget meeting, and I had final projections in the spreadsheet by three-fifteen.
Getting the profile proofed was really funny. The coworker who's been guiding me through compiling it all week told me not to be upset if I turned it in to be proofed and it came back all marked up; my boss, who did the proofing, was really apologetic about all the changes she wanted. You guys know I take criticism extremely well, it's part of my basic philosophy of creation, but they didn't know that and it really, really showed. Their relief when I made the changes without complaint or hurtyface was almost tangible.
Incidentally, while looking for budget documentation from previous years, I came across a file kept by my predecessor on the network drive we all share -- we have private folders on the drive only we can access, but we also have a shared folder that anyone in the company can browse. In this SHARED FOLDER, that anyone in the company could look at, I found her administrative file, which included a document containing a list of our staff's corporate credit card numbers, a spreadsheet of their birthdates, and a file of results from personality tests they'd taken.
CRAZY. SHE WAS CRAZY.
So on top of everything else, I spent an hour today sanitising the public file and transferring the relevant bits to my hard drive for future study.
I feel like this three-day weekend is a personal reward for this week. I plan to spend most of it unconscious.
We are at half our normal staff level right now, and half of the remaining staff was out sick for at least some of the week, including me. The Davos conference means we've been compiling research profiles like crazy, so crazy that my boss actually assigned me one, because there just wasn't anyone else to do it.
I'm totally fine with doing a research profile, because my ultimate aim is to move up from administrative manager to researcher. I've made no secret of that, and my department is supportive of it, which is why they give me learning assignments like this. But researchers get really intensive training before they're given this kind of assignment -- and on top of never having done one before, this was an international profile. International researchers are so specially trained and so thin on the ground that we've been trying to hire one for a year without success. Right now we're in talks to import one from Canada.
I've already talked a bit about the budget projections, which we have to submit next week. And also because we're at half-staff, we're both interviewing and hiring new positions.
So here is what happens on Tuesday:
-- My international profile is due.
-- The budget projections are due.
-- I am chaperoning a prospective employee around his interviews.
-- I am giving our new employee a tour of the building on her first day.
Because she's new, I was also in charge this week of making sure New Employee's access, computer, phone, and desk were set up.
The thing is, because Monday's a holiday, everything had to get done this week, and it did. New Employee's desk was set up by ten. I turned in the profile at noon, got it proofed, and turned in the final draft by one. At two we had the budget meeting, and I had final projections in the spreadsheet by three-fifteen.
Getting the profile proofed was really funny. The coworker who's been guiding me through compiling it all week told me not to be upset if I turned it in to be proofed and it came back all marked up; my boss, who did the proofing, was really apologetic about all the changes she wanted. You guys know I take criticism extremely well, it's part of my basic philosophy of creation, but they didn't know that and it really, really showed. Their relief when I made the changes without complaint or hurtyface was almost tangible.
Incidentally, while looking for budget documentation from previous years, I came across a file kept by my predecessor on the network drive we all share -- we have private folders on the drive only we can access, but we also have a shared folder that anyone in the company can browse. In this SHARED FOLDER, that anyone in the company could look at, I found her administrative file, which included a document containing a list of our staff's corporate credit card numbers, a spreadsheet of their birthdates, and a file of results from personality tests they'd taken.
CRAZY. SHE WAS CRAZY.
So on top of everything else, I spent an hour today sanitising the public file and transferring the relevant bits to my hard drive for future study.
I feel like this three-day weekend is a personal reward for this week. I plan to spend most of it unconscious.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-14 05:02 am (UTC)We do often hire people with library backgrounds -- our person we just let go had an MLS, which is why she was hired. (She didn't make it past her probation, but that was because she wasn't picking up certain basic office skills like Excel fast enough -- nothing to do with her research chops.)