About those TPS reports …

Every new job is an adjustment. The job I’m in will be new every two years or so, so I need to get used this whole “deer in the headlights” look that I’m bound to have, like clockwork, as I try to get the feel for a new post.

Even though, bottom line, the job description is the same, the description as mentioned in the job add is so all-encompassing I don’t know that everybody does everything in a given two-year post.

A colleague of mine here, for example, just went to a three-day training seminar. It was for some software program I’ve never even heard of. Another college in the same position but a different office was messaging me the other day during some training that she had. Again, I’d never heard of the program. And I’m probably doing stuff neither of them has any clue about, but in two years, I might be in a position that requires the knowledge they are gaining now and they might have to learn about the stuff I’m doing.

My job right now is looking like it’s going to be very HR-heavy. That’s fine by me, and it seems fairly straightforward. One of the things I’m going to be doing a lot of – will be what we call “pushing through” annual reports each person has to do. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them ABCs.

Each person’s ABC is due in April and they’re dreaded about as much as taxes. There is a loophole to that in that if the person is new, they are due on the person’s anniversary. In my office, almost everyone is new.

For me, that’s fortunate, because a lot of people in my position have horrid springs, I’d guess, because they are frantically trying to help people push these things through. They’re something like 10-step processes that involve, at a minimum, three people – at least on paper.

The good news to quicken the pushing process is that you can gain “proxy” for someone to help push it, like if the person is out of the office but has already approved what’s to be reported.

It sounds simple, but it’s a PITA. I need to figure a way to help track where we are (I have about 50 people I’m helping) but the thing is, except for the very beginning and the very end, there are no incremental “due dates.” The whole ABC report is supposed to encompass a year and in theory you’re supposed to be working on it through that time period. In reality, it’s possible to do the actual computer part in a day.

This is assuming all the reporting part is done, and that part is not my job (at least for now.) Now, what I am trying to do is get people who supposed to have been doing this all year through in a day, using proxies for at least two people. The people need to get done because the stuff is either due, past due or coming due in a week or so.

This one person asked me to help, and gave me her proxy plus I had the proxies for the two others. So we’re on our way, right? Well. Not so much.

I’m still bad with names and I went to the proxy person’s queue where the report should have been. In it, there were two ABCs, one for J and one for A. J was a guy, and I knew him because we’d been putting out the same fire for a day. So, under the watch of the person, I “sent back” A’s report to the beginning because the first step had to be altered.

And then I realized the person standing in front of me wasn’t A. Holy crap. I’d sent the wrong person’s report back. Plus, we had no idea where K’s report was.

So upon realizing this little snafu, I immediately contacted A, the management person and the HR person, telling them what I had done, apologizing profusely and trying to figure out how to get A’s report back to the point where it had been.

And then it’s demonstrated that I work with the government.

I got an email from the HR person, who is new, who told me “never” to send the ABC thing back to step 1. She then attached the standard operating procedures of the ABC report.

Sigh. That wasn’t the problem. I KNOW what the procedure is. The whole point of what I was doing in the first place split from “standard” procedure, because procedure normally goes from 1 to 10 or however many steps there are in the darn ABC report.

I replied, saying I had done what I intended to do, but for the wrong person. Sending the thing back to No. 1 wasn’t the error. My bad was that I did it to the wrong report.

She then called me to tell me the same thing – don’t send back to Step 1. I’m like, look, I understand what you’re staying but that’s not the point. K *wanted* me to do this. It wasn’t that I did it, it’s that I did it to A instead!

And she went on and on about the SOP. It was totally the TPS reports from “Office Space.” I wanted to jab a letter opener through my ears.

Anyway, in the end, I think it sunk in to the HR person what had happened and she was able to find where A’s ABC report was and put it back.

We never found where K’s original one went. HR tried to blame that on me, but I never saw it, which was the problem in the first place. And apparently this had happened to another guy earlier in the week, too. He somehow got DC involved, but since we’re 13 hours ahead of DC time K couldn’t wait and we just re-created it from scratch. She had everything saved on a backup, so it was fairly easy even though I had to keep going in as one person, coming out and then going in as another.

This is what my life’s going to be like for the next two years. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s good or bad, but here’s what I do know: Payday is Thursday.