Status Update...
This is a status update on the random cougar. I'm working overnight (or graveyard or third or whatever you wanna call it) shift now. New job. New department. My dream job, really. Or at least the one I've been trying to transfer into for years now. Small dreams, I guess. I dun really know what I'm doing yet, a feeling which I hate, and it's gnawing at the back of my mind a lot more persistently than it normally would because my coworker who is supposed to be training me doesn't know what she is doing, either. She has been there longer so she has seniority. Normally I wouldn't mind this, but to her mind, she's training me, therefore I know nothing and she has to know the answers to everything. A step further, anything I do is automatically incorrect unless proven otherwise (by someone with more tenure authority than her). The front desk doesn't really have that strict a hierarchy, but to her mind, it does. And since she and I are the ONLY ones on overnight, well, lets just say it hasn't been fun.
I'm trying not to be angry or hold a grudge against her or anything, and I do my best to swallow my frustration, because I realize I'm a bad leader, too. I step on people's toes all the time and tend to take over instead of sitting back and taking a more laid back approach or allowing the people I am training to make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons. I also admit that I am somewhat ageist, and she reminds me a lot of a senile relative I had to care for the last few years of her life. My coworker is about the same age as she was. So I'm trying not to let my prejudices influence my view of her. But sometimes it's hard, and sometimes there are a lot of similarities. Neither of them ever heard a word I say....
See? There I go. I'm a cub jumping up and down yelling "Listen to me, listen to me!" even though I don't have anything to say. The problem is I have this little pent up ball of frustration and anger inside me that I can't seem to get rid of. That I can't figure out any way to get rid of without getting fired. Yes, I've been neglecting my prayer life. That's perhaps the one thing that can help me right now. Seems like I never really have time for it, even though it doesn't really take any time. I need to work on that.
Flip side of the same coin, it's nice to be in a job position with a future. The only way to advance in the gift shop was for the person above you to die/not come back. In my case, they call had, as unbelievable as it might seem. That left me as one of the three more tenured cashiers in the gift shop. That's it. That's as far as you can go. Five years as a gift shop cashier and the only thing that changed was that I had a little more seniority than I did when I started. The next step up from there was Supervisor, which is the equivalent of a store owner anyplace else. The one person over me. I'd rather shoot myself than take that job, and even if I did want it, it was as unattainable as the galaxies so long as Lana lived.
So now I'm at the front desk where I have a paw on the pulse, the lifeblood of the entire lodge. Where I get a nice, close-up look at the unmitigated disaster-in-progress that is the Princess's lodge at McKinley. And I'm not just a clerk at the desk. I'm the Night Auditor. Which basically means I'm a clerk at the desk. Except that I'm also on the overnight shift, I get some extra options on my login screen, and I get a crazy coworker (who is also a Night Auditor) at no extra charge.
This job has also taught me a lot about myself. It's been building for a while, and I've been becoming more aware of it, but now that I get a waaay-too-up-close-and-personal look at the 50 thousand different completely incompatible systems running across the lodge, it's no longer possible to ignore that I absolutely despise unnecessary work. In other words, yes, I am indeed feline. :-3 90% of my job is taking data from one source and typing it into another. I hate busywork. Anything that has to be done more than once is busywork and can be done by a machine. I am not a machine. I am a cat. Cats lay in sunbeams. Making a cat, or any paid help, do busywork is inefficient and costs money. I guess you could say that I hate inefficiency. I'd been working at the desk for less than two days before I started formulating a system-wide solution for the majority of the lodge's problems. Not just the lodges, but the Princess's entire system.
Maybe that's what I'm going to be when I grow up. An efficiency consultant. Or whatever you wanna call it. Someone who streamlines your work, improves your processes, and makes your job redundant so you can be replaced by a robot. I can be evil and eliminate busywork at the same time!
But it seems all such dreams start with baby steps Mine has. About a week ago my manager was fed up with staying up past midnight working on reports and made them part of the night auditor's duties. It's a series of color-coded tables showing the luggage crew when and where to pick up luggage and where to take it, and to show housekeeping when rooms will be freed up to be cleaned and when they have to be cleaned by (that is, when the next people in the rooms arrive). Stuff the computer should already know. Stuff the computer DOES already know. Stuff the computer doesn't know how to report to print reports about because it's STUPID. So, yeah, it takes about three hours of looking stuff each room up in various reports that the computer DOES know how to print, then coloring the appropriate box. For EACH ROOM. All 500 of them. The ultimate in repetitive, completely unnecessary work. Except that it's extremely necessary. It just shouldn't have to be done by a living creature. So I designed a spreadsheet that reduces the work load to simply entering the significant information off the various reports into a table and it colors and completes all the forms. Which takes about 20 minutes. I even built in error checking, something the old method didn't have (and I'm not a terribly precise cougar, so the old method was dangerous, not just stupid). So yeah. If the spreadsheet could talk to the (pertinent) computer system, the entire process would take about 20 seconds. But this is a tiny first step towards automation. Today the housekeeping reports, tomorrow the world!
I've learned a few other things about myself as a cougar, and one of them is that, well, I'm heterosexual. As much as I like cuddling online, as much as I just don't care about gender in 95% of the situations I encounter in everyday life (online or offline), it seems there are some things that just can't be reasoned through. They're simply true because they're true. And one of those is that Jari doesn't feel comfortable anywhere beyond basic cuddling with someone of the same gender. And sometimes not even then.
I've also discovered that I am contrary by nature.
I'm also not really interested in anything beyond friendship. Still. That hasn't changed much for a long time. I am, however, finding myself becoming more and more comfortable with it. I don't know if that means that still nothing has changed, or that I'm getting older (and possible more set in my ways).
I've rambled long enough. I really, really miss all you kids. We should totally hang out sometime. If you feel like swinging by the lodge we could do lunch. The burgers are pretty good if you drown them in barbecue sauce. This offer extend to a certain fox, too. :-3