This is my day at work, as transferred over from IM. (pharminatrix, you get to see the good stuff twice, but hopefully with more context/smoother wording.)

Today I was check-in, which means that I have to make sure that all the phone goons are in the right seats, and then I keep track of who's present and absent, and how many person-hours we're logging per job we're contracted to do. There's a new seating procedure, which means I have to deal with learning that and getting up to speed keeping track of who's in, who's out, and what who's on. This is stressful enough, because as it stands, the check-in job is sufficient to cause pretty much everyone headaches, and any change to procedure is an extra layer of stress syrup on the pancake-stack of OMG LOTS OF WORK. Old seating procedure: all phone goons file in past me, they tell me their names, I tell them their booth number, circle them on the seating chart, high-light them on the people list, and they sit down. New seating procedure: copies of the name/booth number list are posted. Phone goons read their assignment, walk in, sit down. I follow them around with the seating chart and verify that a) the seats are occupied, and that b) the butt in the seat matches the name on the seating chart. (I start looking decorative and official in the lobby at 2:55. Door closes at 3:05. I stand in the lobby catching stragglers for a few minutes. I go in and check things after that.)

There are new hires, so in the course of walking around with the goddamn clipboard and paper to see who's in their seats and who's out, I have to seat no less than six new hires, all of whom need help logging the fuck in. It's not that I don't like helping people, it's that I hate it when I have to choose between helping people (not my direct job, but my responsibility) and actually doing my direct job, which is keeping track of attendance and hours. All phone goons are supposed to be in their seats at 3:05. By 3:23, I had only walked 2/5 of the floor to see who was actually in their fucking seat. Note that me getting the phone goons logged in was mostly accomplished by their supervisors, not by me. And it still took that long. Adding to the doom was that we've recently changed servers, and there was considerable time lost because the old way to log in for a training survey is not the new way to log in for a training survey, and I have not had to log in or help anyone log in for a training survey since we swapped servers, so the old telnet does not talk to the new server and I did not know this.

At 3:23, and I know the time because it was at that point that a panicky figment0 catapulted into me, I was doing fine, if stressily. But at 3:23, the second most loud broadcasting empath in the building walked up to me to get seated, in mortal certainty that she had just lost her job. One of my friends, of course. Accompanied by her boyfriend, in similar attendance danger, and also accompanied by the loudly broadcasting reason they were late, the frantic carpool driver figment0, my bondmate. This, of course, was both a timesuck and an emotionbombardmentdrain. I was torn between conflicting impulses: "Hide! People loud!" "My friends are in trouble and anguish! I must comfort them!" "I must calm down the distressed employees and get them to work on their jobs quickly." "I need to get back to my actual task of seating people and verifying butts in chairs vs. names on seating charts."

It was near unto 3:45 by the time I collapsed into my desk to verify on the computer who was doing what where and how they were logged in. And issues kept coming across my desk, so it was 4:30 by the time I got the seating chart and everything copied and out to the supervisors. Which, of course, they need ASAP, so lo verily there was much bitching at me until I got it done. When Cute Geek Super asked me what was taking so long, I actually snapped that I'd be happy to explain as soon as I got time. I don't tend to do that.

To add to the general chaos and turmoil, the company is getting reorganized and squashed together with two other companies (7 call centers in all) of the same parent company. This is causing much upset at the phone center, never mind that all the theoretical disruption to the day-to-day activities of the company is the removal of the old company name from all signage and so forth and the posting of the new signage with the new unified company name. Unfortunately, this also means that as well as just a new nominal company, it's a new administrative company as well. Therefore, we need to get paperwork together as if everyone was a new hire again, which means an assload of packets to distribute, which is theoretically my job... It was five, and I still wasn't caught up on the notes for the swapping around of people on the hours chart, so I near-tearfully pleaded with Rev. Nice Super to start handing out the paperwork update packets. There were people leaving at six, after all... I was so behind on my paperwork that I did not even start getting the bulk of the ordinary stuff done until 8:00. Most days I have that polished off or at least started up nicely by the middle of the shift around 6:30 or so.

At 7:00, one of the newer girls came up with a packet that had had its front pages torn off (they're supposed to be unmutilated so they can sort 'em) and I had no idea what all was supposed to be in them, and I knew we had to do some stuff, and I hadn't yet been schooled in exactly what stuff I was supposed to do. I told her to hang on to it, I was not prepared to accept those at that point in time. Fortunately, Stressy College Chick came up and backed me up on the "not touching that with a ten foot pole until I figure out what it is we're supposed to do with it" front while I was talking with Rev. Nice Super; the phone goon had gone and talked to Rev. Nice Super wondering wtf she was supposed to do with the packet because the check-in girl had "had a nervous breakdown when I tried to turn it in to her". I did not scream at her when she acted smug at me, and I did not cry, and I did not hide under the desk. I was merely very stressed and told her that I was not about to even think about touching her paperwork right then. It isn't due in until July 01. I wound up printing out the e-mail that had come around about said packet and posting it around the bullpen, with some of the crucial stuff (need photocopies of ID, make sure the whole thing's filled in) high-lighted in blazing pink.

Cute Desk Guy offered to trade jobs with me. I considered it for a bit. But then, he's on the wrong side of $ISSUE_SIDE_JOB for me, so I had to say no. I told Junior Check-In Princess that we needed to cross-train Cute Desk Guy as a monitor, that was what. (She'd fallen short of monitors today, and needed one, but all the available monitors but figment0 were on jobs we couldn't pull them from, and we weren't so sure about that job either, but fortunately Phone Call In Super let her borrow him for an hour.)

...and I have to go back and do it all again tomorrow.