Thursday, February 15, 2007
Wanted: Large amounts of deep sleep
As a part of my careers, I have pretty much always done on-call for those companies I've worked with. Generally, this is not a big deal. One or two weeks a month, you sit by the phone with a pager or cell seeing which jobs would keep you up at night.
But when I became an employee with AFLAC, my situation changed. First, the most experienced person on their billing systems, the esteemed Jennifer Oliver, left AFLAC to complete her study and internship to be a teacher. Hence, within one month of my being an actual employee, I became the most experienced person on these systems. I was asked if I wanted to take part as on-call or just always be the back-up but never have primary support. I thought that would be good.
I was wrong!!!!
What this means in real-world terms is that I'm always on-call. On any and every night, I can be called to work on any problem which might pop up. So for two nights this week, I got to work from around 1am until around 4am working on different problems. As you can guess, this would normally be the time I would be asleep.
So what I am right now is REALLY, REALLY tired. I cannot wait for tomorrow night when I can go to sleep and not wake up for 10 or so hours.
But there was a good thing from work this week. As you know, I am not one to easily give up a fight or to keep quiet when I feel something is wrong. I have been trying to convince AFLAC to improve it's address quality throughout the organization. On that track, there is a new software being offered by the company which created our original address coding software. It is expensive, but would pay for itself in about a year and would make our lives a bit better from a bottom line perspective.
Unluckily, there is a business analyst who would rather stick his head in the sand than look further into how it would benefit the business. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create that study. I sent it out, including my new VP. He actually liked it. He complemented me on it. So now I get to be even louder.
Almost time to watch "Grey's Anatomy" continue to rip off early "ER".
But when I became an employee with AFLAC, my situation changed. First, the most experienced person on their billing systems, the esteemed Jennifer Oliver, left AFLAC to complete her study and internship to be a teacher. Hence, within one month of my being an actual employee, I became the most experienced person on these systems. I was asked if I wanted to take part as on-call or just always be the back-up but never have primary support. I thought that would be good.
I was wrong!!!!
What this means in real-world terms is that I'm always on-call. On any and every night, I can be called to work on any problem which might pop up. So for two nights this week, I got to work from around 1am until around 4am working on different problems. As you can guess, this would normally be the time I would be asleep.
So what I am right now is REALLY, REALLY tired. I cannot wait for tomorrow night when I can go to sleep and not wake up for 10 or so hours.
But there was a good thing from work this week. As you know, I am not one to easily give up a fight or to keep quiet when I feel something is wrong. I have been trying to convince AFLAC to improve it's address quality throughout the organization. On that track, there is a new software being offered by the company which created our original address coding software. It is expensive, but would pay for itself in about a year and would make our lives a bit better from a bottom line perspective.
Unluckily, there is a business analyst who would rather stick his head in the sand than look further into how it would benefit the business. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create that study. I sent it out, including my new VP. He actually liked it. He complemented me on it. So now I get to be even louder.
Almost time to watch "Grey's Anatomy" continue to rip off early "ER".
