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Going on...3 weeks now? I think, anyway. I have to say though, this is probably the longest lasting illness I've yet come across. It started out as your garden variety cold/flu. Mucus, aches, headache, that sort of thing. Normally that slowly transfers from nose to throat/cough, then it slowly fades. Not only did it not fade, but after a week or so, I started losing my voice, and may have ended up with bronchitis. Having never lost my voice before, it's been quite a novel experience, though it did mean that there were a few days where I had to call in sick when I was supposed to be on the phones. We're not the kind of phone place where you can get away with whispering...
On the plus side, after two and a half weeks, I've finally started losing what I've started calling custard nose. Partly I call it that because that's what it looked like, in both color and consistency (First time I've ever gone through an entire box of tissues in a week, too), but also because I quite enjoy the reaction I get whenever I tell people. I do so enjoy painting word pictures... Thankfully too, we've had a bit more work of late at work, so they've needed me to do my job in the back room, rather than on the phones, so I not only haven't had to call in sick, I've been getting a decent amount of hours at work. Too many, perhaps.
I worked a 9.5 hour shift today, which was super rough. Someone at work once mentioned that one can really only stand our work for 4-5 hours in a given day, and darned if he hasn't been right. My job in particular can be particularly stressful. I can multitask so-so, but when you end up running like 9 jobs more or less simultaneously, followed by hours of reports for every single one that performed poorly (double the work for each job if both landlines and cells did poorly), well, no one can handle that very well. And I'm the laid back one.
The worst part of tonight were the four jobs we've been running for the past few weeks and that have yet a number of weeks to go. The problem is that the jobs have problems. They crash constantly, which requires 20-30 minutes for tech to fix each time, they have a constantly decreasing pool of usable numbers to call, and our metrics are not even close to being correct. Normally, after a few days we have enough data from a job to rebid with a client if something hasn't been lining up with the initial expectations. In our case, not only is it a lot harder to get hold of people who qualify for this particular survey, but the average length for these bastards are anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes longer than they said they were supposed to be. At that's on top of the 20-some-odd minutes they're already supposed to take. Do you know how impossible it is to try and hit your goals for completes per hour when completes are twice as hard to get and take twice as long to finish? And then, having to spend so much extra time every single damn day to send up to 8 reports for the lot, all saying variations of the exact same thing you've said every single day prior? The futility of it all is super frustrating.
Oh! And not only that, but something in the coding of these jobs is borked, meaning some of the simple calculations we do for each one don't work properly, so each report requires several extra, time-consuming steps for what should be a simple look-up. Blarg.
On the plus side, after two and a half weeks, I've finally started losing what I've started calling custard nose. Partly I call it that because that's what it looked like, in both color and consistency (First time I've ever gone through an entire box of tissues in a week, too), but also because I quite enjoy the reaction I get whenever I tell people. I do so enjoy painting word pictures... Thankfully too, we've had a bit more work of late at work, so they've needed me to do my job in the back room, rather than on the phones, so I not only haven't had to call in sick, I've been getting a decent amount of hours at work. Too many, perhaps.
I worked a 9.5 hour shift today, which was super rough. Someone at work once mentioned that one can really only stand our work for 4-5 hours in a given day, and darned if he hasn't been right. My job in particular can be particularly stressful. I can multitask so-so, but when you end up running like 9 jobs more or less simultaneously, followed by hours of reports for every single one that performed poorly (double the work for each job if both landlines and cells did poorly), well, no one can handle that very well. And I'm the laid back one.
The worst part of tonight were the four jobs we've been running for the past few weeks and that have yet a number of weeks to go. The problem is that the jobs have problems. They crash constantly, which requires 20-30 minutes for tech to fix each time, they have a constantly decreasing pool of usable numbers to call, and our metrics are not even close to being correct. Normally, after a few days we have enough data from a job to rebid with a client if something hasn't been lining up with the initial expectations. In our case, not only is it a lot harder to get hold of people who qualify for this particular survey, but the average length for these bastards are anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes longer than they said they were supposed to be. At that's on top of the 20-some-odd minutes they're already supposed to take. Do you know how impossible it is to try and hit your goals for completes per hour when completes are twice as hard to get and take twice as long to finish? And then, having to spend so much extra time every single damn day to send up to 8 reports for the lot, all saying variations of the exact same thing you've said every single day prior? The futility of it all is super frustrating.
Oh! And not only that, but something in the coding of these jobs is borked, meaning some of the simple calculations we do for each one don't work properly, so each report requires several extra, time-consuming steps for what should be a simple look-up. Blarg.
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Date: 2017-05-18 08:36 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2017-05-18 08:51 am (UTC)From: