I believe that I have two types of readers on this site. One group consists of family and friends who have known me for a while and hardly ever see me. They wish I would generally post more newsy information about what’s going on in my life. The other group consists of people I have met by visiting and commenting on other people’s web sites. These people, to the best of my knowledge, aren’t interested in the Chronicles of Kyle. I assume these people are far more interested in what I have to say. I may be wrong about this. I may be reading my own bias into things, because honestly, I’m mostly only interested in what I have to say. Nevertheless, sometimes I feel that it’s necessary to talk about events instead of ideas. When I do so, it’s my goal to tell things in as amusing a way as possible to avoid boring my readers who, otherwise, don’t really much care. I have no idea how often I’m successful at it. Sometimes life is just… boring.
With that in mind, my mom has been asking about my job. I did get the new admin position at my work. I’m not entirely sure yet what exactly it’s going to entail. The biggest area is going to be “reports,” which basically means taking a bunch of statistics and presenting them in an intuitive manner. We have a program on all our computers that keeps a log of every person’s calls—what phone line they called, how long the call was, how long they worked on the call after they hanged up. Since we are supposed to log into this program when we first get there and only log out once we leave, it also keeps a pretty good record of attendance and tardies. So I’m supposed to keep track of all that data. Additionally, I’ll be in charge of tracking schedules: vacations, emergency time off, and who worked what shift for whom. I think I’m also in charge of the department supplies. I’m the post-it note dealer on the block. I give you free samples, but then I gouge you once you’re addicted to the things.
I’m not sure about this, but I believe the second part of my job is going to be to create a standard practices handbook, so people can look up how to do their jobs. Right now the sum total of our understanding resides in the minds of the two people who were part of this department before they moved it to charlotte. Ever see what happens when 2 people know how to do their jobs, but the 30 people around them really don’t? It ain’t pretty. We do have a few people who’ve been there for over a year, and they pretty much know what they’re doing, but they all have different habits of doing things. Quite a few of them rely more on their experience working in other centers more than they do on our actual policies. We don’t have a record of our policies, so why shouldn’t they?
The great advantage of my new job will be normal working hours. Up until this point, I’ve gotten enough money to live on mostly by making sure I was on call at the drop of a hat. As a result, I’ve been able to keep my hours up nearly around 40 a week on average. I’ve also been getting up at 9:00 at night and going to bed at 2 in the afternoon, missing church services and sleep like crazy. You have no idea how much I now appreciate a nice 8-5. (Although, I suppose Valerie might.)
Other than that, I really can’t tell you much about my new job, except that it starts after the 4th of July. I haven’t started working it yet, so I really don’t know.
In other news, I’m going to a wedding in West Virginia this weekend. I’ll be getting off work at 8:00 am and leaving immediately for all parts north. It’s a 7-8 hour trip, so I expect to get there between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. I then expect to be very sleepy. This is why it is so darned all-important that I get some sleep right now instead of writing a bunch of things on my weblog. (sleep! Macbeth hath murthered sleep! Macbeth shall sleep no more!) If it weren’t for the whole sleep thing, I’d be really excited about getting to see two of my friends getting married. But all I can think about right now is how much frappuccino I’m going to have to consume to avoid causing a major traffic event on I-77 North.
And lastly: my roommate confided in me that he’s having some major difficulties with his job. I completely understand. He’s essentially the lowest paid executive in history. He gets sent all over the world to arrange million dollar deals (this is not an exaggeration) and gets paid essentially the same salary as me. Me, I’d be having a problem with the wages. He’s having trouble with the work.
The long and the short of it is that he’s good at the wheeling and dealing part, but he’s completely lost when they ask him a technical question. He usually ends up being the middle-man between two engineering companies that speak two different languages, who are trying to trade a massive piece of machinery (worth, I assume, millions of dollars). He’s a businessman pinned between two engineers throwing technical jargon at him in two different languages, and they get all snappy when he can’t talk like an engineer.
All this is another way of saying he doesn’t really understand his product very well. When it comes down to it, he just doesn’t like hugely complicated machines. He loves everything about the job, except the product.
So now he doesn’t know quite exactly what to do. He’s working a full 80+ hours a week and he’s still not able to make any headway. He’s gotten very flustered, and feels his efficiency is way low. He doesn’t know if he needs to stick it out, go ahead and ask for a reduction in his responsibilities (very shameful for a Japanese), or start looking for a new job in a different industry. Personally, I’d be asking for a responsibility reduction and start looking immediately for a new industry. I’m not too keen on the idea of trading huge machines to factories either. But that’s me, not him.
I told him I would pray for him, and he was really happy about that. He’s not a Christian, and he essentially has no real religious belief. He’d honestly like to be a Christian, but the whole “God not intervening while his dad died of cancer” thing was a huge blow to his ability to believe. I think this would be an excellent opportunity for God to make a difference in this man’s life. (If He’s so inclined, but I’d be willing to bank on what God’s inclinations were in that respect.) I’m going to pray for him. I’d be grateful if you would pray too.
neumatikos 
consider it done.
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