I’ve been thinking a lot about how and what I write. I’m not big on grammatical accuracy. It’s not my main focus when I come here to express myself.
I tend to write the same way I talk. Pause here, pause there. I put things in bold, caps or italics to stress a point. If I were speaking the same sentence to you, you would hear the urgency in my voice.
I emailed a friend earlier today after she asked me how my day was going. My response was “it’s going quickly and stressfully.” And I realized my job really does stress me out. Sometimes I talk about it, in the password protected posts of mine. But I don’t talk about it on a regular basis. I only talk about it when someone pisses me off.
I’ve decided to change that today and I’d like you to know my job is hard. It is very hard. I’m really not stupid, I’m fairly smart when it comes to administrative duties and what not. Payroll and personnel stuff is hard. Posting vacations is time consuming because we still live in the archaic world of not knowing what a spreadsheet is. Until it comes to my desk, of course, and then I’m the one putting it into a spreadsheet after having to read whatever they wrote.
Once it’s in that spreadsheet, I then have to go back into the database and post all these vacations. I worked on nothing but the vacation database today. I had finished transferring the information into a spreadsheet I could actually fucking read and then started on the posting a little bit last night before leaving at 5pm and then I’ve been doing nothing but for the majority of this day.
Tracking all Worker’s Comp and OSHA cases is time consuming and inconvenient. It’s also hard for the simple fact I don’t understand all the OSHA rules and regulations yet. Nor do I understand the claims people’s line of thinking. I think all that will come with time at this job.
Tracking sick leave balances, vacation balances, personal time balances and personal days (because there IS a difference) balances, can be overwhelming and down right frustrating. These have to be accurate, no matter what. Whether someone reports they took time or not, I psychically have to pick up on it and know that they took that time.
My job is hard in the fact that I have to be 100% ACCURATE. I have no room for error.
If I mess something up, I’m going to mess up someone’s paycheck. If I make an error that is not caught in time, I will screw someone’s life up for a day. While that sounds very fun for some of the people I’ve met in my life, we all know how important my paycheck is, so I’m trying to treat this as if I am on the other end of this. I want it to be accurate and correct the first go-round.
Yes, I know I’m only human. Yes, I know mistakes will be made. Yes, I know all the mistakes I make in this job are fixable. However, I’m also looking at this from an employee side. What would happen one payday if my check was fucked up and I was missing two or three days (24 hours) of work on there? I would feel panicked and upset and angry. I’m trying to make sure no one feels like that under my watch or if I can help it.
This is what I’m trying to avoid in this job. I am trying to learn this job well enough to where I will not make an exorbitant amount of errors on any given day.
There is so much to learn and remember. We have four districts, with three district chiefs per district. DC’s are Majors in the big scheme of things.
Within each district, there are 6-8 firehouses in each district. Each firehouse has three platoons of firefighters, sergeants, captains working out of it. Each platoon is on one day and off two.
We also have the communications, arson, fire prevention, training and auto service facility. We have over 530 employees that we do payroll and personnel for.
We are the repository for most records reference the fire department. In the basement is the personnel file for every single retired, deceased or resigned firefighter from 1858 until today. Uh-huh, since 1858.
I wrote this sometime last week and forgot to publish it.
