For the past month I have been working at a truck parts/ repair company sorting paperwork and updating price changes. It has been slightly nostalgic. In the years I went to work with Dad on the weekend to get me out of Mom's hair, sorting paper was always a big part of the day. What exactly I did is a little vague in my memory but I remember my fingers being black from the carbon copies. Now my fingers are dried out from ruffling through the paper and a little sore from removing staples to get to all of the copies. It seems that if the invoice bottom line doesn't match the PO bottom line it gets tossed over to my boss who among other things keeps the databases current. Since this is a company that has been on a buying spree acquiring smaller businesses how purchasing is done is pretty inconsistent. Now that the new owner wants to bring order to the chaos they are moving to centralized purchasing. My boss is the person making this happen - but in the mean time someone has to keep the 10 or so different databases up to date. Voila a job for me. In between I get to create mini databases for analysis by the new powers to be. Why you may ask am I doing this and it would be a very good question. It started out as a lark for a good friend who was beleaguered by this huge pile of paperwork growing on his floor and by the constant interuptions from head office for this or that report that was definetly not rocket science and was essentially taking information they had access to and making it pretty and putting it into a format they were familiar with, this while trying to focus on the bigger picture of converting the myriad of systems to a totally new system. I had grown quite lah de dah about everything and needed a reason to get up and put on clothes before noon and needed to keep my mind working. This has accidently turned out to be a huge aha for me. PS. Chickie papers (spelled phonetically) is a term coined by my sister to describe the piles or orders that she got to sort.
If you are only interested in the basic what have I been up to this past month, now is a good time to move on to another blog. It would be an especially good idea to move on to something more interesting if you definitely don't want to read my confession to total ignorance of real life. Come back later and I will write about my thoughts on being ADD and memory, and the link between my obsessive interest in blogs.
What have I learned. I am an hourly contractor and based on wages listed on local job boards am well paid for sorting through invoices, finding discrepancies and updating the computer files. It is 10 miles to work, only a handful of people work at this site, and other than the fact it is the old front office for a still active truck repair place. I think the space I am in was probably a parts store. There is the little problem of ever present fruit flies, don't dawdle when eating lunch if tomatoes are included, and the occasion eau de garbage when a fully loaded truck is towed in but by an large it is fine. Since there are only four or five women in the building and we were a recent addition the ladies room is spacious and always clean. The men's room is in the shop, no more need be said. By unspoken agreement office attire includes long pants, capri's on Friday depending on the weather, and tasteful tee shirts that promote past events like the Myrtle Beach Harley week, or Shag dance weekend are always in fashion. There are three people in office across from my work area, the human resources woman for the stores in our district, accounts receivable, and my boss. Because the company is getting ready to close the books for the year, they are trueing up the inventory and trying to convince stores to get rid of "stuff" that is haunting the dark corners of their shops. Having a father who never saw a still usable part that shouldn't be saved for future use, I have compassion for the store managers. But every time inventory reports are run and corporate sees stuff still lingering there is a barrage of calls. For some reason they think because the databases are managed here, my boss has some magic power to get people to scrap stuff, submit the tickets and take it off inventory. Listening to the calls has been like old home week. I almost volunteered to go to Richmond and tag inventory to ferret out the many, many engine and brake cores that never made it back for refurbishing.
Human Resources is another case altogether. It seems as if everyone is either personally getting hurt, or wife is having a baby or surgery, or relatives are dying. Workers Compensation injuries have a lot of paperwork, and you can't just fax stuff with personal information around anymore. No matter what I am never taking a job that involves Workers Compensation claims. Neither am I ever taking a job that requires me to tell someone that "you know they were close to Uncle Joe six times removed but no you can not get paid leave to drive you and your family to Tennessee for the funeral. You can take personal days if you have any left, or unpaid leave if your boss approves it."
She is also the person who has to fix discrepancies in time cards - as in they marked it as personal leave and they don't have anymore followed "by I know that before you were acquired you let people borrow against future time for something important but we can't do that anymore". That problem seems to take up a lot of time especially since store managers then have to explain to the employee that while it seemed like it was ok, now their paycheck will be smaller. I have now definitively made the decision NO HUMAN RESOURCES jobs ever.
All of this leads me to the big Ah Ha. I have become totally clueless about how the world really works. I have been self employed, other than a few unsuccessful forays into being an actual employee, for most of my adult life. All in all it has been a great life. Sometimes knuckle biting when clients are very very slow to pay, or a big job is wrapping up and another one is not starting. I complain about being at the beck and call of irrascable clients, the sometimes painfully long hours and looming deadlines but the upside has been that I have been able to work from anywhere. The internet and cell phones cut all leashes to having to be in a fixed place. And in the final assessment I have been well paid. There have been some projects where the scope got out of hand and I would complain that I was probably making $5 an hour if I counted all of the hours, but by month or year end our family coffers were topped up. I have never learned to equate hours worked to income. It's a job, you agree on a price and you do the job. Time became irrelevant. I would always say it is only time, it isn't like I have to buy more materials or pay for something out of pocket.
I am now being paid by the hour. All of a sudden I have started equating hours to getting my hair done, or a pedicure, or food, everything. It has been a sobering learning experience. I have not been grateful for the gift of finding work that was a match for how I work. I don't keep track of time, and can fall into a task losing my hearing, forgetting to eat, getting up after hours hunched over my computer stiff and happy that the task is done. There were days when after hours writing reports, I was just out of words and would come downstairs in bewilderment wondering if there is food in the house. When there were lulls in the project I would throw myself into house projects, or cooking inviting friends to be testers for new recipes from the latest southern living.
This whole learning experience has made me realize how hard it is so live with me. I am thankful for a husband who is reasonably tolerant of my foibles, my children who love or tolerate me. Now that I am no longer chasing the "perfect project" and always wanting to be the "go to girl" I am a little easier to live with. Maybe that is what retirement will do for me, I'll be nicer. I still don't go to bed when my spouse wishes I would since he does have a five day a week job where they expect him to log on and start work by 8:30, true it is in his office down the hall. So to my family or children who might have slogged all the way to the end, I am sorry for not being there when you needed me, or being physically there but obviously gone. I know there are many more things to apologize for, but there is only so much introspection I can do in one day.
Posted with Blogsy