My brains probably look like a bowl of oatmeal.

Sometimes I really hate my job, and it's never the regular stuff that I'm doing, it's the extra stuff that stressed me out.

This week was Open Enrollment for our company, so despite my best efforts to get ahead of the game, I am just a peon and the work waited and waited until Friday afternoon. I would have liked to have everything done by Friday afternoon, but whatever. So when I hurt my foot last Thursday and went to the doctor Friday morning, calling out sick was not an option for me. My boss wanted it to be one, but I saw the reality of the situation. I wouldn't be able to walk much but I couldn't sit at home knowing that two people would be trying to piece together 172 notebooks. So from my crutches and my leather conference room seats (one for my foot and one for my derriere) I became supervisor, or overlord as I prefer it. I told them where the forms should go and made sure that no one messed anything up. I stayed an hour late too but Boss lady finally had her way and sent me home. I insisted that I was fine, my foot wasn't even bothering me, but she insisted that since all the covers were in the binders I would just get in the way (gee...thanks).

Monday night (sans crutches because really, it wasn't a big deal) I stayed until 7:00 p.m. stuffing the rest of the notebooks (or rather, putting in all the paper we didn't have on Monday.) This is my second year with Open Enrollment, I knew that no matter what typos would arise, document shortages would occur, and as we like to call them - step children (by definition, those notebooks that are missing sheets of information because either the broker didn't send enough or we ran out of the type of paper the information was printed on) would happen. Exciting, thrilling, exhilarating huh?

The meetings began Tuesday morning. My job was to bring the envelopes for each employee signed up for the meeting, set up chairs, place a notebook in each chair, take attendance and then learn the most I could about the benefits being offered this year. Easy enough. In the first class a woman noticed a typo. That's great, so Boss lady being a perfectionist (not a bad thing but out of 172 notebooks maybe 5 people would have noticed that) we printed off more, quickly tore out old sheets and put in new ones before the afternoon meeting and then I got the lovely job of walking around to the people in the morning class delivering the new sheet. No one noticed anything different and everyone had smart-a remarks which I tried to appreciate rather than roll my eyes. Because you know, we should laugh when things happen rather than waste the energy of annoyance.

Dang-it...that revelation just a millisecond ago is really going to detract from the venting. I hate when good and pure thoughts enter my mind in the middle of a rant.

Ugh...so the next morning another typo was found, a far bigger one than the one on Tuesday. We corrected it and changed it in the notebooks for the afternoon but nothing was said about my making a trip to each and every employee that had been in the first three meetings, and I didn't bring it up. The odd thing is, I'm in Human Resources but I really don't like people all that much. I like the people who I interact with on a more regular basis, but suddenly interacting with 40 employees that I don't always talk to is not my favorite thing and I usually walked away from each interaction rolling my eyes (at myself, not necessary at them).

Pointed out in the last meeting was a smaller typo on the sheet that first had a typo. We still haven't told Boss Lady about that. Boss lady is taking a day off today...good idea.

So we have two employees that don't work in Virginia and we have 4 employees who are sick or on short term disability so we needed to mail their information to them. I won't even get into the intricacies of that pain in the butt, but I had the packets almost ready to seal and send when I got the envelopes with postage on them so that the people could send their information back to us, one person had come in to the office so I had given the receptionist seven envelopes to meter and now I only needed 6. I called her to see if she had already done it and when I found out she hadn't I told her to just meter 6 not 7. She brought back the 7 and had done it correctly (only 6 metered). I started to put the envelopes into the packets and seal them. When I got to the last one I saw that I had one envelope left and it was metered. I wondered if 7 had gotten postage or if 6 had and one of the 5 sealed packets behind me contained the rogue envelope. I shut down at that point, I didn't move, I just stared at the packet in front of me. Finally I decided that I thought I knew which one had it and if I was right then I could just get a new shipping packet, print a new label, and do it right. I cut it open, pulled out the envelope and my heart dropped to see that it was metered.

I taped it back up, hoping UPS wouldn't say anything about it. I turned the packet over and shook it just to make sure that in the rough delivery process it wouldn't come out....at least not easily. I cut off a smaller amount on the top of the next one, metered envelope, I grabbed the envelope on the opposite end of my pile and it had a metered envelope. It was the next one I found the blank envelope in (yes, I kicked myself because I could have cut open 3 rather than 4). I have now sent them off to their respective places and hope that by this time next year I'm either in a new career or have an assistant because my patience can't take that kind of stuff again.

Before the meetings were even over I was scheduling 401k meetings (that's special and new for this year because we are changing our provider and don't yet have the information, so in two weeks I get to do this again). I have people's paperwork to organize and record but the spreadsheet doesn't make any sense and I'm trying to keep track of the Angel Tree. I just don't want to be here today.

I know in retrospect and to the outside reader it probably doesn't look like much, but this is the kind of work that leaves your brain feeling like mush by the end of the week, and my brain feels like mush. I still have to go to the courthouse today to become a Notary Public (p.s. I don't even want to be one). Anyway, that's my story. I could share with you basketball last night (yes I played and no I'm not crippled today) but it's probably more boring than this post...though it does involve boys, one of my favorite topics, so maybe if I'm still bored this afternoon I'll write a post about it.