Working my butt off

Holy cow, summer is a busy time here. My department is just hopping, and will be all summer. It’s usually vacation time, but that’s pretty much why my department is the busy one.

Because the workload has increased – like setting new record for people served on a daily basis – we have gotten a lot of temporary help. Some are what they call “summer hires,” and then there are interns and people on temporary assignment from elsewhere in one way or another, along with temporary local staff, which comes about down a different pipeline.

Plus, it’s also turnover season for the regular staff, because we normally rotate in two-year cycles. Last week, four people left and next week, we have two new people coming in, plus more later this month.

As a result of this influx, I am super busy because I get to process a lot of paperwork on each one of them. Yay! Paperwork! It’s as much fun as it sounds, and I’m already tired of crossing Ts and dotting Is on all the stuff.

In all, Tuesday, we will have a boatload of new faces. (Monday is a holiday.) And I just hope they all make it into the building and get logged on. If not, I am going to be scrambling again.

The interns have already started arriving. This program is an unpaid, 10-week internship. The students, who I guess get college credit, also have to foot their own plane tickets, but they do get housing while here. It would be complicated for a U.S. college student to come over and pay for just 10 weeks of housing in a different country, so I guess this is how it’s done, but the kids are at the beck and call of our housing limitations. They can get housing, but they have to move several times to accommodate incoming and outgoing regular staff members.

In order to fill the gaps, a call went out to host a few and stupid me volunteered. I do have to extra bedrooms, right? So I’ve had two kids all week. The girl left on Friday, so it was nice to be down to just one extra person (times like this make you realize you really do like living alone) and the guy, who really is a nice kid, will leave tomorrow.

That’s just one of the things I’ve volunteered for lately, and I think I might have to step back a bit. It’s sort of hit me that I’m doing this, that and the other in addition to the regular job and while it looks good on my evaluation – a necessary thing for promotion and advancement – it’s kind of insane.

I’m on the housing panel and the WMD team, and I do the monthly outreach things and am on the awards-proofing panel. I’ve also volunteered for additional outreach stuff, mostly because it’s easy OT.

We also have a few elected people who organize the entry-level staffers group. Most posts don’t have this, I don’t think, but since we have close to 50 entry-level folks (meaning in the first or second post), it’s best to have a smaller group disseminating the information to them. This smaller group is of, I think, four people who are elected.

I’m not sure how long the term is, but there’s been one vote so far for two people and now there’s been another call for nominations. I missed the first call and remember thinking, gee, I’d be good at that. So on this one, I pondered it. The email said you could self-nominate but I kind of thought it was bad form.

Last weekend in Hong Kong, my colleague and I talked about it and she said I should be nominated and would do it. And earlier this week, we got a reminder email to nominate someone. Well, I couldn’t find the person to ask if she was going to do it (we switched all the desks around – I cannot find anyone!) and just said what the heck, I’d do it myself and sent the email originator a note that just said, “I’m in.”

Later, I found the email sender and asked if she’d gotten it. She said yes and then kind of chuckled and said, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this or not, but six other people nominated you, too.”

It’s nice to know that people recognize the folks who get things done! And it’s nice that it seems I’ve cultivated a positive image. I mean, I know I work my tail off, but it’s still flattering when someone comes to you and says, “Can you do this? I know you will know how.” And I can’t tell you how many people stop by my desk and start a thought with something like, “I know it’s not your job and there’s no reason you should know this, but can you tell me how …” And then I know.

So that’s cool, and it’s also cool to have colleagues recognize other efforts, too.

I’ve still been madly working out every evening after work and weekend mornings, and one of the guys I work with – he’s in a completely different department – is in there frequently. On Saturday morning, once he was done and I was still on the elliptical, he said, “Do you like compliments?”

Well, who ever says no to that?

He said that he’d overheard some people in the elevator talking about how I’ve lost weight since I’ve been here. I’m down about 35 pounds thus far, and it’s noticeable even to me. I’ve worked my butt off.

My normal clothing is LL Bean perfect fit pants, which I pair with a long-sleeve shirt that I do not tuck in. As much as I like the pants, they do not have belt loops and keeping shirts tucked in isn’t possible so I give up all pretense of it.

On Friday, I opted to wear completely different pants – some black with pinstripes – with a purple LL Bean T-shirt. And damn, I looked good. Several people told me so throughout the course of the day, but it was totally from left field that people were talking about me in the elevator.

Definitely nice to be noticed when it’s in a good way.