Recognition
So, a lot of things have been happening, but due to my weird schedule and general meh, I haven't much talked about them. Every once in a while, something will come up, and I'll think "I should tell the Interwebz!" By the time midnight rolls around and I'm online, though, that impulse tends to evaporate. So, here's a random update I've been meaning to mention:
I was employee of the month last month. My facility actually hasn't had an Employee of the Month since August; when I started, I overheard a supervisor say that management could never agree on a nominee to recognize. Therefore, logically, I consider myself Employee of the Half A Year, Give Or Take.
It was quite nice, especially since there had been a while there where I wondered if I was going to keep my job at all. Apparently, my employers had much lower expectations for me than I did.
What's more, I heard from one of the second shift supervisors that the general manager of the facility (with whom I've spoken maybe three times since starting in December) originally wanted to put me in for the company's Pride Award, which is basically like "Employee of the Quarter", working up from the national to international levels. Apparently, you have to have been an employee for at least a year to qualify, though. Still, it's the thought that counts, as far as I'm concerned.
In related news, my dark and eldritch 1 Excel-amancy was put into use again. Last week, I had to take over a task from a coworker. This task involved taking a printout of an excel spreadsheet, and hand-copying 5 of the fields into different fields on another spreadsheet and making a single printout, line by line. As a lazy computer scientist, I found this unacceptable. I did it, because we were in a rush, but it rankled, and it took like 2 hours. Since this week was slow, I decided to employ the mysterious art of the Mail Merge - which, admittedly, I'd never used in my life. Still, in less time than it took me to do the work the hard way last week, I built my coworker a tool that will spit out the dozens of necessary sheets in about a minute, automatically, and emailed it to her.
Then, today, having realized she had access to a Mighty Wizard, said coworker mentioned that she also spent an hour or two a week going through another spreadsheet, summing up weights from different orders going to the same destination, and weights for hazardous materials likewise, and then filling them into a different sheet, and could I do anything about that? So, again, in less time than it had taken her to prep the numbers for this week, I emailed her a sheet that automatically filled in the form she needed to fill out with said data.
So, in about two hours, give or take, I saved us a man-day's worth of wasted work per month, or more, in perpetuity. And these are both tasks that only get harder and take longer on our busier weeks.
This is why they give me the parking space and free company apparel. Or it should be. I'm not sure what I did the exact month in question; I think I just put in a lot of extra hours doing way too many things and coming in on weekends, working with different supervisors and such. I did save the company a hundred grand or more in potential fines by catching an error in our database, gathering a list of everything affect to pull aside, and poking Central until they fixed it, but that happened a week or so after I got the award, so it wasn't that.
I mean, if I'm going to be recognized for something, I would rather it be for my incredibly honed lazy nerd abilities than for being dumb enough to work the weekend. Maybe next month I can get a shirt to go with the jacket. ;)
1Add to the "shibboleth" file - eldritch is not in the spellchecker dictionary. Shibboleth is still OK.
This blog post originally uploaded at Dreamwidth. I would quite appreciate it if you would comment there, either with your own DW account, or OpenID.
others already have.
I was employee of the month last month. My facility actually hasn't had an Employee of the Month since August; when I started, I overheard a supervisor say that management could never agree on a nominee to recognize. Therefore, logically, I consider myself Employee of the Half A Year, Give Or Take.
It was quite nice, especially since there had been a while there where I wondered if I was going to keep my job at all. Apparently, my employers had much lower expectations for me than I did.
What's more, I heard from one of the second shift supervisors that the general manager of the facility (with whom I've spoken maybe three times since starting in December) originally wanted to put me in for the company's Pride Award, which is basically like "Employee of the Quarter", working up from the national to international levels. Apparently, you have to have been an employee for at least a year to qualify, though. Still, it's the thought that counts, as far as I'm concerned.
In related news, my dark and eldritch 1 Excel-amancy was put into use again. Last week, I had to take over a task from a coworker. This task involved taking a printout of an excel spreadsheet, and hand-copying 5 of the fields into different fields on another spreadsheet and making a single printout, line by line. As a lazy computer scientist, I found this unacceptable. I did it, because we were in a rush, but it rankled, and it took like 2 hours. Since this week was slow, I decided to employ the mysterious art of the Mail Merge - which, admittedly, I'd never used in my life. Still, in less time than it took me to do the work the hard way last week, I built my coworker a tool that will spit out the dozens of necessary sheets in about a minute, automatically, and emailed it to her.
Then, today, having realized she had access to a Mighty Wizard, said coworker mentioned that she also spent an hour or two a week going through another spreadsheet, summing up weights from different orders going to the same destination, and weights for hazardous materials likewise, and then filling them into a different sheet, and could I do anything about that? So, again, in less time than it had taken her to prep the numbers for this week, I emailed her a sheet that automatically filled in the form she needed to fill out with said data.
So, in about two hours, give or take, I saved us a man-day's worth of wasted work per month, or more, in perpetuity. And these are both tasks that only get harder and take longer on our busier weeks.
This is why they give me the parking space and free company apparel. Or it should be. I'm not sure what I did the exact month in question; I think I just put in a lot of extra hours doing way too many things and coming in on weekends, working with different supervisors and such. I did save the company a hundred grand or more in potential fines by catching an error in our database, gathering a list of everything affect to pull aside, and poking Central until they fixed it, but that happened a week or so after I got the award, so it wasn't that.
I mean, if I'm going to be recognized for something, I would rather it be for my incredibly honed lazy nerd abilities than for being dumb enough to work the weekend. Maybe next month I can get a shirt to go with the jacket. ;)
1Add to the "shibboleth" file - eldritch is not in the spellchecker dictionary. Shibboleth is still OK.
This blog post originally uploaded at Dreamwidth. I would quite appreciate it if you would comment there, either with your own DW account, or OpenID.
others already have.