Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 January 2007 22:37:42
To-day I received an email from a colleague, complaining that I hadn't carried out something he'd requested on Friday lunchtime. The difficulty is that we pass requests to each other via a call management system, but if I don't regularly check my box, then I don't know that a call has been passed to me. If I do check my box as frequently as it appears that people want me to, then I am prevented from getting involved in tasks which require concentration over a period of time.
On Friday afternoon I went to see someone who had a problem which they'd told me about when I was on the helpdesk earlier in the week. For the rest of the afternoon, I'd set aside time to spend on improving my Mac skills (an issue highlighted by the same colleague who was later to complain that I hadn't spent the time seeing to his request (which at that point I didn't know about)). I'm not sure, looking back, exactly how I spent that time - I think that for at least some of time I was working out how to connect to a new calendar server - I'm on the project team, and am expected to keep up with what's happening.
Monday morning, I tried to make some progress on a project - we have to move people's roaming profiles off a server which is now both full and out of warranty - but how do you do that when nobody is prepared to accept the idea of downtime - they expect to be logged on whenever they like 9 to 5 - we also work 9 to 5, so when is the thing going to happen? And then I was on duty Monday afternoon. I had expected to be sharing duty with a colleague who is learning to do the kind of server-related tasks that my other colleague had asked to be done - I had been hoping that if the desk wasn't too busy, we could have worked together on any outstanding tasks - but to my surprise, I found that my duty partner was the colleague who to-day complained - why couldn't he have said that there was a job that he was hoping I could do?
So I am now thoroughly despondent.
This evening was a bit different, though. Daughter is going to have to start receiving nightly injections of growth hormone, so to-day we were visited by the endocrine nurse, who demonstrated the various devices, one of which we had to choose. It was fascinating to see how each device worked slightly differently to the same end. Eventually, we made our choice - a good one, I believe - and within a few weeks will be adding a new activity to our evening routine.