Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

As part of my campaign to stave off boredom at the Empire, I’ve been volunteering for several new things and stretching to find out what I was capable of doing, and yesterday someone noticed.  Actually, a lot of someones noticed.  I was given a Top Performer award at the quarterly all-hands meeting—a certificate, an engraved Lucite block, and a $200 bonus.

And now I know how many exchanges it’s possible to dispatch in a week:  at least 180.  That was where my count stood when I left the Empire at 3:00, an hour earlier than my shift normally ends, because I had run myself out of work (again, for the third time this week).  If I hadn’t had to take most of Monday to do the other part of my job, and if I hadn’t had to be my own loader, I probably could have nudged 200.  And yes, I made sure my managers knew I hit that kind of a mark ’cos I doubt that anyone else on the team could have come within fifty dispatches of me.  The only possible fly in the ointment is if I get a bunch of repeat-dispatches hitting my stats week after next because I was going too fast, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case.  I was right about when I’d crack my previous record, too:  tied it at 9:15, broke it at 9:45.

A hundred and eighty.  That’s what I can do if I don’t have to throttle back.

Yet more re-defining of the possible in my job . . . .  One of my colleagues on the used-exchange team has been on vacation this week, and his being out means that there’s enough workload to go around that I don’t have to hold back to avoid hogging all the work there is.  Result: one day with 47 exchanges dispatched, one day with 46, today (a short day; I had a doctor’s visit) 31, and the week’s total at 137 and counting.  Unless tomorrow is just crazy slow, I ought to break my previous weekly record of 150 about mid-morning.  If I didn’t have to be my own loader and enter half my own work into the tool myself to keep the guns firing, I might have cracked fifty in a day again.

Out of curiosity, I asked another of my colleagues, and one of the better ones in my estimate, how many exchanges he dispatches on an average day.  His answer? “Twenty-five-ish.”.

With the used system exchange process up and running smoothly, and with me running myself out of work pretty regularly at it, I’ve started feeling bored at the Empire—and when I start to feel bored is when I start to get dangerous, both to myself and to others.  (It took me getting fired once to learn this lesson properly.)  Knowing this, I’ve been going to both my managers and saying “hey, I want something new to learn to do” and fortunately they had something.  One of the team leads is over head and ears in work, and really needs help with doing quality audits and reporting, and hello, here’s Sam who wants to get into analysis and reporting for his next career move!  Isn’t that nice?

So today the team lead sat down and gave me an overview of one of his monthly audits that he needs help with.  The audits themselves are nothing hard for anyone who can answer yes/no/NA questions and can count to one hundred, and I figure the charts they want are something you do in Excel, so I’ll get practice at that too.  The team lead said he would set up a training session next week when I can see some actual work and start to try everything out.

Later on there may be a chance for me to learn something about another program we do for the federal government, but it has to do with classified information and “. . . and then I’d have to kill you,” so I won’t say any more about it until I know more.