the saga begins.

I haven’t got the time or energy lately to sit down with a real journal. most of my days are spent in front of a computer now, anyway; I figure at least now I’m keeping track of my life online. and I feel like being quasi-anonymous for a while. I can suppress the english major within me, ignoring all the rules I know about grammar and punctuation. …actually, all I’m doing so far is not capitalizing the beginning of sentences, but trust me — it’s a big step.

tomorrow will be crazy at work. the girls will be back from the san luis job, and I think mick wants me to give liz and patricia something to do. I’m not sure if amanda will be here or down at pacific again. if she’s staying at the office, I’ll have her start indexing the pec stuff that heather ruined. liz should have plenty of her own work to do. I need to get the rescans from pacific incorporated, but I can’t really have someone else do that. it will be interesting, to say the least. I have an idea how to do this though.

here are my thoughts on all the employees and managers at mha:

adam – I can’t quite figure him out. mick says he’s learning a lot and doing much better as production manager down at pscu. it was insightful, though, to happen to see his notebook while we were in a meeting last week. perhaps I shouldn’t have, but he was sitting across from me and it was open to his list of new year’s resolutions. they were good resolutions, and I hope he keeps up with them. probably two of the reasons I’ve never really warmed up to adam are (1) he’s turned his back on the church and (2) he has an illegitimate daughter. those go so much against two of my strongest convictions that I’m having a hard time not holding it against him. I know it’s incredibly judgmental of me, and now that I’ve quantified it, I’ll work on stopping.

amanda – she’s known mick for ages, and he trusts her; she’s apparently done really well down at pscu, although she was just on qc. I can have her index pacific redout bins because she understands the job. I could also have her work on pec, because I need it finished way sooner. I don’t know amanda at all, since she was hired on for the pscu job and was only in the office for about 20 minutes every morning. but if mick is right about her (and he usually is right), she’ll be good help for me.

daryll – I think they picked the right person to move into liz’s position with qc, and to also take over bernard’s sales position. daryll is confident, organized, and always follows through. he’s been so good about giving me details, and checking in with information that is important from a data handling point of view. I don’t really have any connection with him on a social basis, but I’ll probably get to know him better in these coming months as we work closely together.

diana – I’ve only met her once, but she’s way high on lauren’s good list.

heather – not a good employee; I know we aren’t going to keep her, and I think I’m going to be the one who lets her go. that’ll be new. she really messed up on this pec indexing, and while I realize that I gave her plenty of instructions (both written and oral), I’m still afraid that it was a shortcoming on my part that made her misunderstand the project. now I have to completely redo all the work she did — granted, it’s only 26k images, but I was hoping to have this completed and ready for billing by tomorrow afternoon. now it doesn’t seem so likely.

irma – when she first started working at mha, she knew absolutely nothing about computers. she’s come so far since then. even though she isn’t entirely comfortable with everything, she can keep up with the expected hourly scanning rates. plus she does really good work with prep. she’ll probably do the entire batch 04 prep for pec herself. irma and I had a fun chat on friday during lunch. I like her. she’s about ten years younger than mom, but it’s interesting how age doesn’t really seem to matter with a lot of us at work.

kristina – very little interaction with kristina. she tends to go through mick jr. instead of coming directly to lauren or me.

lauren – she’s been so good at training me. every time I had a question this past week she’d walk me through it over the phone; she called to check up on me several times, and was very helpful. her confidence in me has been tremendously encouraging. in fact I don’t think I have any complaints about lauren.

liz – not really under my command. I don’t know what she’ll be doing now that daryll is taking over qc. if she’s free, though, I can put her on indexing either pscu or pec. liz isn’t much older than me — only about 6 months, I think — but she’s so much more confident and outgoing that I tend to think of her as being 24 or 25. I do like her, though, and I guess I’m just intimidated by her.

matt – lots of experience with scanning. the problem is usually that he forgets one or two important settings… like scanning images as bmps instead of tifs, or naming erros. they’re fixable, of course, but it’s time-consuming. matt was planning to propose to his girlfriend yesterday, so he should announce his engagement at work tomorrow. that means he’ll only be working with us until the end of the semester. he (unintentionally, I’m sure) helps me realize my inadeqacies by asking questions that I have no answers to. this past week while I assumed the role of production manager, he was scanning el dorado dot; I’ve never made so many quick and uninformed decisions in my life as I did with that project. he kept coming in with folders that didn’t have permit #s or that had four permit #s, wanting to know how he should name the files. I hope I didn’t give him answers that will cause me a lot of grief in the next two weeks. (or ever.)

matti – it’s so weird being in charge of someone from my ward. and who’s a generation older than me. I have to admit, though, that he’s done a stellar job so far. I gave him a target hourly rate and he exceeded it, and I’m very impressed. I’ll probably keep him on indexing for as long as I can. he asks a lot of questions, which is good, except that most of them have to do with certain levels of incompetency on his part. he doesn’t really look at the full file name and location, he just makes assumptions based off a quick glance. oh well. he’ll learn.

mick jr – it will be extremely strange to be on an “equal” level with him as a manager. he’s the one who hired me back in may. apparently he’s changed a lot since then; it will be interesting to see how he adjusts to married life. mick is quite a character, but has a few more points in his favor than against.

mike – big no. he seems to be a decent employee, but I dislike him very much as a person. why? good question. perhaps because he always smells like he’s been using drugs of some sort. (c’mon, I have no experience distinguishing between what different illegal drugs smell like!) I honestly don’t think he’ll do well with indexing, so I’d like to put him on the sample stuff I picked up from chris fisher on saturday. if he’s in the office tomorrow, that is. adam will probably keep him down at pscu until they’re finished, though.

mindy – never met. lauren trusts her, but then again, I trust my mom, too…

patricia – I’d feel completely awkward giving her work to do, since she’s been working at mha for so much longer than I have. that’s a big problem I have with this new position — I don’t feel like I really have the authority to be managing people like veronica and patricia and soli. that’s probably compounded by the fact that none of the people I most definitely have authority over (think matti) go to lauren when they have a question. I’m the manager, people, I’m the manager! I’m in charge of you! oh well. so that’s the deal with patricia. she’s changed a lot since this summer; all of a sudden she started wearing fishnet stockings and knee-high boots and skirts so short they hardly count as clothes. and everything is always black. I haven’t yet figured it out. maybe she’s trying to not seem as old as she is — and I don’t mean that 30 is old at all, it’s just that she has 3 kids, and she acts more like a teenager than an adult who has children. hmm. beats me.

sean – I’ve felt stupid around him ever since the mixup with whether he was going to pscu or not. it was my very first day being data manager without lauren around to help, and I had been told sean would be staying in the office and I could use him for indexing; but no one told sean. technically I could have told him then “you’re staying here today,” but like I said, it was my first day, and I didn’t have the confidence to do that. it was kinda embarrassing, just because all the other pscu folks were standing around when I asked, and I looked awfully incompetent. I’ve post-prepped his pec work, and it was pretty good, but I don’t know about anything else. I’ve never worked with him on any other jobs.

soli – somehow he makes me feel a little more comfortable with my new position. he’s one of the most experienced employees we have, but maybe he isn’t enough of a leader to be a manager. I can’t say that I entirely like soli as a person. he’s good to have at mha, though, and I can put him on just about any job I need him for.

teresa – one of the best indexers we have. I’m sorry to lose her for a while, but hey, if I was about to have a baby, I can’t say that I’d be feeling too bad about having to stop indexing. teresa is really good about keeping in touch and giving me updates.

veronica – she became a production manager while I was in utah. and she’s definitely competent. as I was talking with mick on friday he said there’s a language barrier problem with both veronica and irma that is holding them back from further positions in the company. I think that’s bull. veronica is just lacking confidence; she speaks english fluently, and I don’t know where she comes off saying that language is a problem. irma has never acted like it’s an issue. anyway, aside from that, veronica is a good manager. sometimes she and I will have a long conversation about all sorts of random stuff, but for the most part we’re both pretty reserved. I’m glad she and irma are good friends, or else they might both be silent at work.

then there’s andy, and tim, and mick; oh, and gloria. but they seem to me to be on another level of the hierarchy, so I won’t go into any detail about them. besides, I have to leave some observations for another day.

I ought to get to bed, but I’d like to talk to ryan before then. and he may not call for another hour. of course, he may not call at all, but chances are he will.

I wish jarom were coming home sooner. well, at the moment I do. tomorrow I may be glad it’s still another 4 months. to tell you the truth I’m superbly nervous about seeing him again, after so long. but I think things will go well… hope so…

more later.