I’m pretty good at my job. This is because my job is not hard. I answer the phone, put some pieces together, and, voila, you have a visit scheduled. If being the CEO of a company is like putting together a 1500 piece puzzle of the White Album, I’m assembling one of those 4 piece preschool puzzles. You know the kind—where you fit the shapes into the matching holes on a flat, wooden slab. I don’t claim to have the intelligence of a CEO, but I’m not stupid either. I put together that puzzle pretty quickly. This leaves me with a lot of extra time, which is why I can keep a blog, write long emails to friends, and study recordings at work. I’ve asked for more to do, and continue to do so, but they seem to think that they’ve given me enough to handle, and I don’t want them to cut my hours. This is a balance I’ve worked hard at achieving in the 6 months since I started here. And let me tell you, it’s exhausting trying to look busy when you’re really not.
Today my supervisor came over to my desk. This is almost always not a good thing. It means something bad has happened. Something catastrophic. Catastrophic is when you forgot to get rid of the extra spaces and you get a blank page that feeds through the printer after your document. Catastrophic is when a co-worker called the computer maintenance guys without coming to you FIRST (even though you’re not the go-to person when it comes to technology). Catastrophic is when a guest has to wait an extra 30 seconds for a counselor to become available to take them to their appointment. I’m all for efficiency and customer service, but she’s taken heads off over these one-time occurrences. So I braced myself for crisis-management.
“I see we had another record month for visits.” Her opening statement was a surprise. Yes, we did, but she’s never acknowledged that we’ve had record highs for each month since I was hired. She seemed pleased and continued, “I’ve been looking over the reports and it seems like there’s a real difference between you and…another person.” (This would be my predecessor.) “The numbers went up right after we hired you.”
I caught my breath. Was I about to be complimented? Really? I let myself hope for a few seconds. Not that a compliment would change the way I do my job, but it would demonstrate that my boss is semi-aware of what I do and doesn’t think I’m a total idiot (which is the attitude she usually assumes). There was a long pause and then she continued happily, “This is because I fought to have a full-time position. Since you’re working full-time we can get these visits scheduled and now I have PROOF if they try to tell me otherwise.” And then she walked away, content in her self-satisfied victory.
Poof.
So, apparently I am a machine that schedules visits and, because I’m here for a few more hours a week than my predecessor, we are setting new records of visits. I couldn’t help but smile as she walked away. Because, you see, she wasn’t able to explain why I am sitting here, in the middle of the afternoon, work done, writing in my blog.
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