Caught From Behind

… And all of a sudden, it’s enrollment time once again.  How time flies, huh?

As with the previous term, I’m going to have to miss work tomorrow so I can enroll properly.  Though our company obviously has web access, our school website (where we do the actual reserving of classes and stuff like that) is one of those places blocked by the company’s filter.  So everything’ll have to be done either here at home, or at school.  I’m thinking of dropping by, if only to confirm the requirements for the comprehensive exam, and whether or not it’s one there’s a process to it other than selecting it from the list online, and adding it to my adjustment slip.  Mmm.

Work was pretty much routine for a Monday, so nothing much to say there.  Ditto for my visit to the gym.  It started raining just a bit ago, and while it’s mostly petered out by now it’s done its job of alleviating the evening heat somewhat.  I wish it could have lasted longer though.

Going to try to give my supervisor another call before bed.  I already sent an email before I left work today informing him about the enrollment, but a call is also required to seal the deal, so to speak.

Edging So Much Closer

The day went by pretty much as expected for a Sunday, which is to say that the first half of the shift was surprisingly stress-free.  For some reason I was off the CS queue, which was very much welcome, though being stuck with  merchant calls and membership calls still wasn’t easy.

Things only started to get exhausting again once the majority of those on the early-morning shift started to log off in waves.  From ten onwards, the volume of the queue gradually increased, proportional to how many people were left taking calls.  By around eleven, there were just five CS people taking in calls, and two of us on the merchant side.  This meant that we were taking in the overflow from customer service, on top of the merchant and membership calls we’re expected to answer.

This peaked around eleven thirty, when my companion logged out for her forty-five minute lunch break.  All of the sudden I was left flying solo for both membership and merchant lines.  It’s one of those times where I cursed whoever thought it was a good idea to cross-train us part-timers for CS, yet didn’t have the CS people to cross-train in merchant functions.

I literally had seven calls waiting on the merchant queue, and around five in the membership queue.  Given the higher priority given to the membership queue, I couldn’t see to those merchant calls waiting, and as each membership call takes on average two to three minutes, I couldn’t go through the membership queue as fast as I’d like.  Inevitably the numbers on the merchant side started dropping, meaning the store clerks on the other side lost patience and just hung up… which means lost calls, that in turn will affect our performance rating for the day.  Not cool at all.

This went on for as long as my teammate was out on her break.  Stressful?  You bet.

Thankfully when my companion returned things returned to somewhat manageable levels, and stayed that way until the end of the shift.  Amen, hallelujah, and peanut butter.

It rained again late this afternoon, but this time around it persisted  until I came back from church.  As a result the temperatures eased up somewhat, and whats more the humidity isn’t as overbearing as it was earlier.  I’m not sure if it’s enough to sleep comfortably tonight though without having to turn on the A/C.  I’ll just have to see, I suppose.

Oh yeah, I was reminded that, all of a sudden, it’s just five days or so away from my next payday… which means the end of summer, technically, is again fast approaching for me.  Damnit.  I better write something before the heat gets replaced by rainy days by the dozen…  Kind of hard to write something about summer during summer when all of a sudden, it’s over.  Mmph.

A Step Forward… Or Trying

Yet another laid-back weekend for yours truly.  Normally I wouldn’t complain — I was able to relax after all — but there’s always this part of me who’s always nagging me to do something, I dunno, better with the free time than periods of laying about reading in bed intersped with gaming or watching anime on the desktop.  It’s a common sentiment, especially since the free time in question seems to be so hard-earned these days…

Just to make things clear, I would have loved spending most of my day just writing something, but the same old problems make themselves apparent before long.  While I have ideas, I have a hard time starting, or rather, starting in a way that I feel is right.  Then there’s the issue of momentum when I do get something going, and once I get that… You see what I mean.  It’s like a never-ending series of things that sooner would bring my efforts to a grinding halt.

An acquaintance told me that I worry too much, and how there really isn’t a right way to start things.  But it bothers me.

Or maybe I’m just afraid, deep down, that whatever I start might not be liked in the end by anyone other than myself.  Perhaps.

Anyway, there’s still a few hours to go before I turn in for the evening. Let’s see if I can squeeze something from this noggin’ of mine.

Move Along Now

I wish I could say something about today, but I can’t.  I spent literally half of the day in bed (I got up at around eleven), and the other half either messing around with Skyrim’s Creation Kit, playing Skyrim to test the changes I made… and just watching Saki’s first season, before jumping on yet another re-read of its manga, as well as its spinoff Achiga-hen (where we’re given a taste of just how much a horrific and unstoppable monster Miyanaga Teru is).  

Aside from that, very little done, unless you count forgetting to take note of how many calories I ate today, ugh.

Yeah, move along.  Nothing from me worth sharing today.

Small Blessings And Celebrations

As far as week-enders at the office go, today’s shift was kind of okay.  While there were some odd spikes in the call queue, it wasn’t as frustrating or stressful as one might expect, though I did wish that the avail times were longer by the half-way mark of my shift…

By the way, it’s my father’s birthday today.  As with a lot of things in our family, our celebration was a very low-key and small-scale affair, with just the four of us taking part: myself, my sister and her husband, and of course the old guy himself.  There was the usual bilao of pancit Malabon (though I didn’t appreciate that tatay dissed the bilao of pancit Lucban that I bought some time ago), plus cake, soda, and pork barbecue.  

That’s a lot of food for just four people, and I had to close my eyes and forget for the evening that not only was I supposed to be on a diet, but I had just come from the gym a few hours prior, meaning all my efforts (to lose weight and lessen intake) ended up a wash.  Maybe I’ll just fast for tomorrow to compensate… Ugh.

I’d actually forgotten tatay’s birthday was this week, and if I didn’t notice the big bundle of pre-skewered and marinated pork I’d probably be caught flatfooted (we rarely buy pork barbecue, except for special occasions).  After that, it was easy to narrow down what it was for.  It’s kind of embarrassing actually, for something like that to just slip my mind.  I mean, my father and I’ve had our share of arguments, but it’s still his birthday.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how old he is, the family pretty much stopped counting at sixty.  It’s much happier for everyone involved, ahaha.

Nearly Got Away With It, Too

I had a bit of a lucky break during today’s shift, in that without even doing anything I found myself occupied with answering just membership calls for most of the morning.  I said most of the morning, because sometime around eleven-thirty or so I was suddenly switched over to the merchant and CS queues, but by that time the queues had loosened up somewhat, so I didn’t mind the end of my run.  

I have a more than a gut feeling though that my seatmate had something to do about it, as I saw an open chat window and it’s pretty well-known that she has a contact in workforce, but I decided not to raise fuss about it.  All that stress avoided for the morning was enough to ensure my goodwill anyway.

Since it was my right ankle acting up this time, I skipped gym for the day, and spent the rest of the afternoon (and early evening) taking a nap.

Yeah, kind of a laid-back day, but it’s just how I like things to be.

Tactical Redirection

I admit, I wasn’t very eager to answer calls today.  It was a Tuesday shift after all, so it meant that, not only was the queue going to be overloaded for most of the morning, it’s likely going to be filled to the rafters with callers who’d really put a dent on the stress meter.  

It was a good thing then that the guy I’m sharing a system profile was not only in, but tardy in logging out today, and I was able to use that fact to my advantage.  A little mention to the supervisor on duty had me taken off the CS and merchant queue (supposedly until my sharee leaves work), which meant that I was stuck with just membership duty.

As it so happened, said sharee left the office around thirty minutes into the start of my own shift.  It was a fact that I neglected to mention to the supervisor present however.  So I pretty much avoided much of the stress I’d normally get during the shift.

Yeah, it was sneaky, and more than a little unfair to my teammates, but I didn’t feel up to listening to complaint after complaint today.  I had a feeling that I’d just explode on the caller, and that’s something I seriously didn’t want to happen.

On somewhat related matters, apparently the performance evaluation really happened, which meant that all of us part-timers got that longed-for increase in salary.  In my case it was a jump from about twelve thousand pesos to sixteen thousand two hundred forty (a strange value for sure), which while nowhere near my old salary is pretty impressive for a part-timer.  

According to the form I got, the bump in salary was supposed to have taken effect at the start of April, but what I think is that they were only able to get around to making the adjustment this month.  It explains why I was able to get more than six thousand pesos despite it being not the end of the month, where incentives were usually applied.

Normally I should be happy about this, but given the fact that my line of work basically involves me giving out the company line to very disappointed at at times irate US callers, I’m cautious about it at best, as it just seems at this point that the company is trying to keep what part-timers like me (who are cross-trained) they have left.  And with one of our team calling it quits next week, I’m not sure that jump in pay is going to be much of a salve to the inevitable jump in queue volume that the ones left will have to contend with.

Ugh.  Well, at least this means I can actually start saving money in the bank again…

Buffer Day

Today pretty much passed as expected, which meant that it was a quiet start to the week at work.  Not too many calls again, and the avail times were large enough that I was actually able to do some writing (or at least what passes for it, since I was doing it on my workstation using notepad) in between.  It’s not much, just playing with ideas, but it’s the most fiction-related activity I’ve actually done in a while.  It was kind of hard to get a nice rhythm going, especially since my trains of thought keep on getting interrupted every few minutes by incoming calls though.

The rest of the day continued as routine.  Instead of sleeping in (and getting ahead on the week’s sleep debt) I went to the gym instead.  There was a point where I thought it would rain, what with the dark clouds lingering around our area, but that kind of fizzled out by the time I actually got to the gym.  It’s really too bad, as even a little rain might have helped a bit with the humidity.

Oh well, that means some A/C use again before bed.

Incidentally our team coach noted that we should have felt the effect of our evaluations already as of the past payday.  I’m not really sure about that though, unless I’m suddenly earning more than seven thousand pesos per cutoff, but then again getting more than six thousand pesos during the first half of the month is unusual, especially since I usually earn that much at the end of the month, once the employee incentives get applied.  Hmm, I guess I really have to see that payslip somehow to make sure.

Anyway, given the relative lull today, I’m expecting tomorrow to more than make up for it.  Unless the floor gets overstaffed again, and then some people decide to have overtime on top of it…

Far Too Brief

It would be pushing it again to say that my shift at work today was relaxed, but despite the fact that I was once again juggling both customer service calls and merchant calls, it wasn’t as frustrating and stressful, which was how I used to associate my Sunday shifts as.  It’s been a strange month, I suppose, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays taking over for the most hair-tearingly exhausting days of my workweek.  I can’t say that I like the change, but I think at this point I have to live with it.

Related to my work schedule… Apparently it’s the time for a shift bid among teams again, and against all logic the schedules of part timers are thrown into the pot.  Again.  I sure hope that my schedule doesn’t get affected, but just to be sure I emailed my boss to remind him that, yeah, I need the Friday and Saturdays off, more so given that it’s Comprehensive Examination time this term.

So it rained this afternoon, finally.  It kind of petered out though as I was heading to church, but there’s still intermittent drizzling right now in my area.  It makes the evening far more comfortable, but it’s still not enough to dispel the humidity and heat built up during the day.  I guess it’s the airconditioner, set to about two hours again (which is enough for me to fall asleep).

Hmm, what else?  Nothing else to share, I suppose, so I guess it’s about time to turn in.

Movements Of Summer

You know, it’s kind of ironic how I’ve been hoping for a little rain to ward away the heat…  Well it’s raining a little now, but against all logic it’s still uncomfortably hot despite it being evening already.  I guess it’s because, while there’s precipitation going on, there’s no accompanying breeze to seal the deal.  Sheesh.  I suppose it was a little too much to hope for.

Not really much progress on what I wanted to be done, on account of the aforementioned cloying heat.  I was able to get my shoes from Mr. Quickie though, though I did have to quickly run back to the house to get the receipt I left behind at one point.  Careless of me, I know.

Hmm, I suppose I’ll just use up the rest of the evening before I go back to bed on watching the anime I’ve downloaded over the past day.  Yeah.