Looks Like a Rainy Day Today

I'm glad to be out of admin and into production.  It's been good working the late shift.  I definitely have more energy to do things in the morning.  I would come home exhausted, too tired to do much of anything when I worked the day shift.  However, I'm not sure how much of that exhaustion was due to stress from being in admin.  One thing that I really enjoy doing is to find more efficient ways of working.  For example, an SF-50 is printed for each personnel action, such as an extension of appointment for another 2 months, conversion to another position, termination, etc.  When I got there, many people were printing them one at a time.  The process for printing them is to first enter the person's employee number, select the latest personnel action, run the report, then refresh the screen until the report has been processed and distributed.  This can take anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute.  Then a few more clicks, and seven pages are printed, three of which are thrown away.  Well, I saw that you could show all personnel actions done in a day, sort in alphabetical order, then chose the ones you wanted to print, and print just the pages you needed without having to throw any away.  It takes the same amount of time to print them all at once as it does to print one report.  So, when you have 50-100 reports to print, you can save a lot of time and paper.  Such innovation was not welcomed in admin. 

I found some fans of Douglas Adams, a humorous science fiction writer, whose books I had read in the 80's.  He had a unique sense of humor.  People who like his books are usually big fans of his writing.  His first book was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Anyway, we started talking about our favorite lines from the books.  The funny thing was that these were young guys who had just discovered his books in the last couple of years.  It was so nice to have a friendly conversation. 

So this has been one of those instances where I didn't realize just how stressful admin was until I left.  Conversations in admin were mostly speculations about who it was that was messing up, who was trying to sabotage whom, or the OOS loudly talking about whatever was on her mind at the moment. 

Anyway, I've been up since 7:30.  When I woke up this morning, I had no idea what time it was, and I wasn't sure if I had gotten enough sleep.  I wasn't fully awake, so I stayed in  bed for about 15-20 minutes, half-awake and half-asleep, until I felt ready to get up.  I've dressed, went out to get gas in my car because it looks like it might storm at any time, and done some laundry.  So, my day has gotten off to a pretty good start.