no, i didn’t get the boot from work. in fact, things have been going pretty awesome at work, but even though the economy is in the dumps i still feel like finding a different job that gives me more of a challenge and less monotony than my current job, and hopefully pays me more too.

see, the reason why i say work has been pretty awesome is because i just realized today that i’m saving the company a boatload of money, where by “boatload” i mean “dinghy-sized amount”. $90,000 isn’t a lot compared to some things at work, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, either. here’s how i’m saving that much money:

a few years ago i put together a spreadsheet to help myself do account reworks. basically this thing takes certain inputs (bill cycle dates, dates when changes were requested, price plan details, etc.) and does the calculations by itself. it’s great, instead of taking several minutes to find the information and then do the calculations all by hand and possibly get them wrong, this thing takes easy-to-find information as inputs, does all the math, and spits out what the bill should have looked like.

well, i had created this thing as a personal tool to help me, myself and i with my reworks. i never intended for other people to use it for their own reworks because 1) i didn’t want to have to teach anybody else how to use it, and 2) i didn’t want someone to get a failing score on an audit because they used my calculator incorrectly or it had an error that i didn’t catch – because i knew how it worked, i knew how to tell when i was getting crazy results that didn’t make sense.

so fast forward a few years and i’ve sent it to a few people who needed to use it, and they gave it to a few more people, and now it’s such that my boss has asked me to make some changes to it so folks can do certain tasks easier with it and so on and so forth. so i make the changes and send it out and now my whole team is using it (9 people), another team that audits us is using it (4 people), and there’s 1 person in the quality team who audits both my team and the team that audits my team who’s using it too, and folks really like it once they’ve gotten used to it because it gets rid of a lot of the issues when doing a rework.

so today i was thinking about the number of people using it, and figured “well, what if it normally took someone 5 minutes to do the calculations after finding the details, and this sheet made it so it only took 1 minute instead?”, did some math, and figured out that by saving each person 4 minutes per item they process, and if we should be processing about 20 items per day, that’s 80 hours in one day for one person. multiply that by 5 days in a week, by 52 weeks, by 14 people using it, and take that number of hours and multiply it by $18 / hour (at least) and you get about $87,000 saved over the course of a year, and that doesn’t include the savings from people not making mistakes when calculating rework totals. i sent a message to my boss and copied her boss on it and she was so impressed about it that in exchange for me saving the company about $90,000 a year i got a gift certificate for $25.00 and team recognition. whammywah says that i should use it and buy a t-shirt that says “i saved my company $90,000 and all i got was this lousy t-shirt”, bahahahahaha. i haven’t decided what i’m going to do with it yet since there’s a ton of stores and restaurants and such i can choose to use this with, but knowing me i’ll probably just use it for stuff at amazon.com.

but so that part of work is awesome, but the rest of it is dull and boring. same ol’ same ol’ every day, so i’ve been keeping my eye out for positions opening at other companies. i saw a position for an information technology specialist with the department of energy open up a week or two ago, and i just finished applying for it a few days ago. i should really call the HR recruiter for that position since the usa jobs site says my application status is unknown, so either the agency’s application system doesn’t report back to the usa jobs site, or there really was an error when i tried submitting my application and it never arrived. today i got an email from ibm about a job as an “entry level strategy & change senior consultant”, which also seems right up my alley, and if the information at glassdoor.com is any indication, it pays much better too.

i’ve made some updates to glennfitzpatrick.com, posted up a few videos there (they’re also at my youtube page, my user name is fitzpatrickglenn but i’m too lazy to make a link there right now. just go to the glenn fitzpatrick times and click on “tv listings” at the top to get there).

i feel like every time i post on here now it’s involved me moaning on and on about how i never post on lj anymore. mostly it’s because i don’t really feel like i’ve got that much to say nowadays, and if i just post about what i did that day it’d be boring to read. i recently listened to the audiobook of michael palin’s “around the world in 80 days” travel diary and that was really good journal writing – it’s made me think about how i could write journal entries about daily life better, but at least he was going around the world and doing exciting stuff while mine would sound like “today i went to work. my coworkers kept asking me what to do about how they should use my rework spreadsheet, and even though i don’t mind helping, it’s a pain in the butt for me to stop what i’m doing every 30 minutes to answer another question about it.” i’m also in the middle of reading “on the road” by jack kerouac, and it’s hard to get into… i was into it for a while, and now that he’s in denver everything is all blending into each other.

plus i’m writing this post in writeroom on the mac, which was once described in a review i read as being just like kerouac’s taped scroll of paper he used for writing “on the road” since the current input line is always right in the middle of the screen and all the text i’ve typed just scrolls off the top of the screen, and the whole bottom half of the screen is blank. i don’t know which style i’d use if i did get back into journal writing — palin’s daily-segmented “here is what i did today” writing, always in present tense? or kerouac’s rambling more conversational and raw style where everything is always what is happening at that exact moment? either way, i don’t know, but i hope i can remember to write in here a bit more often. then again i said the same thing about trying to take pictures every day for fitzpatrickphotos.com, and see how well that worked out for me. 😛

maybe in the end it’ll be like kerouac, but with paragraph breaks thrown in there.

so lately i’ve been dealing with this escalation at work, here’s the basics:

– customer sends an email asking for a 900-minute global plan, a plan which doesn’t exist

– customer receives an email back saying that plan doesn’t exist, but we do have 300, 600 and 1000 minutes available, so please specify one of these plans instead

– customer is upset, says that it wouldn’t have made much difference to their agency since it’s just a small difference in the amount of minutes, so we should have just changed the plan anyway (which is totally non-compliant). customer says the request was for the president of their company and that we shouldn’t bother with making the change anymore since the president won’t need it by the time the plan itself is changed.

– employee gets the email that says don’t bother changing the plan, and processes the change anyway.

– sales representative sends the customer’s upset email to me and tells me to change the plan, and i tell them i can’t because a) the customer said "don’t bother changing the plan", and b) the customer never specified a valid plan, and i can’t pick one for them. i tell the sales representative that even though the change isn’t valid, some other employee made the change anyway.

– sales representative calls me up and says that we should call the customer about all this, but they can’t do it because they’re just the sales rep and someone more managerial should contact the customer instead.

– i tell my supervisor about all this, and she tells me to call the customer because "you’re management." (my response: "i AM?"; her reply: "you represent management." *sigh*)

– i figure it’d be best to tell the management of the employee that made the change about the issue so when i do call the customer i can honestly say it was escalated up to the employee’s associate director for his review. i spend the next week trying to track down the associate director, but he’s never in his office when i need him.

– i finally track down the associate director today and fill him in.

– not even 30 minutes after i fill him in on the details, he brings over the employee who made the change along with some other guy (the employee’s manager?) to my cube so i can personally coach them on the employee’s error. both the employee and her manager seem very upset at me. (hooray for my supervisor for quickly coming over and asking if anything was wrong, though!) i totally did NOT expect to be confronted at my desk about this issue, much less have to defend the fact that processing this request was not correct. my coworkers around me after they left said that if anything was going to happen, they “had my back”, bahaha…

tomorrow: call this customer, tell him that even though he specifically said not to process this change, it was done anyway, and to try to get him to send me documentation to advise how he wants to proceed. i have a feeling he’s going to flip out. take this situation and repeat it 3 or 4 times and you’ll have an idea about how my work has been going lately.

i found out a week ago or so that the guy who had my job before i had it, basically he went crazy dealing with the job. i’m not sure how “crazy” he went, but i definitely could tell that something wasn’t quite right with him and the way he was acting. i just hope that i’m not starting to turn out the same way, because right now i really and absolutely don’t care what coworkers and customers think of my responses/reactions to their requests. if they don’t like it, oh well.

i’m trying to find something more interesting and appealing to me, but thanks to the shitty economy i’m not really finding anything. i had a good time at this unconference this past weekend (“transparencycamp”, basically a lot of think tank sessions and presentations from various groups – technical, industry and government – trying to figure out how federal, state and local governments can operate a lot more transparently and provide greater access to government data). wonder if i could find some sort of a consulting role in that area elsewhere?

plus, it’s a lot of other work-related bs going on. i’m tired of people who should know better (upper management, for fuck’s sake) sending requests to me that clearly have nothing to do with my position, let alone the federal team as a whole. my supervisor says we should try to be a bit more accommodating when working with upper management since we are executive relations, but i say they should know what their teams actually do and route their requests accurately. i mean, really. i’m fed up with sales reps getting paid bank yet not be able to submit requests accurately (let alone compliantly), and generally support staff being treated like second-class citizens… folks are so eager to give away free credits (another compliance issue), and whine and bitch and moan when we tell them “no, because that’s not a valid adjustment”, and then we’re overruled.

for fuck’s sake. i could complain all night, but it’s almost 2 am and i need to get some rest. also: i am fucking sick of the cold, my bedroom is freezing. and my cousin’s surprise birthday party is saturday night, and i totally forgot to rsvp and am not sure but it might be too late now, but it’d be in new jersey going until late at night and even though i want to be there i don’t want to drive there and back and ARGHHHH.

i’ve just been feeling so stressed out over work lately that i feel like i’ve been super busy, but when i try to think of what it is that i’ve been doing i can’t really remember.