It just occurred to me. (Thanks Nightbug!) I wrote last night about how I was worried about a lot of things going wrong at work were seemingly coming to MY desk. Well, it's TRUE...there are a lot of things that have sort of blown up in my face lately...some of them are legitimately my fault, while some are not. Now, while I am still a bit concerned about looking like a moron at times, I think that in the grand scheme of things, I don't have TOO much to worry about.

                   My boss, however, does. Let me explain. My office is what would be commonly known as a dispatching office. In my office, we have four types of positions:

1. Customer Service Rep: These folks take the calls from hospitals, dr's offices, etc. They find out what is wrong with the machine and then make up a service order. Based on what's wrong with the equipment, the CSR will either send the order to dispatching or to tech support.
2. Tech Support: They handle situations such as software issues, remote monitoring of equipment, etc. These are the folks who make the bucks. They're VERY well educated on all types of medical equipment.
   
3. Dispatcher: For machines that have gone completely down or are about to, the dispatcher receives orders and then sends them out to the qualified repairman.
   
4. Preventive Maintenance Coordinator: This is what I do. I assign maintenance checks to the technicians as well as any kind of upgrades/updates.
   

                   None of these jobs are what you'd call rocket science, but they're most definitely NOT a piece of cake either! Each of these positions are pretty detail oriented and sometimes the

 slightest mistake can make for a very bad day for the person who goofed. Well, sometime last year before I arrived, there was a decision made to COMBINE all four of the above mentioned jobs, with the exception of the tech support role. My company calls it "one stop service"...the goal is for the customer or field tech not to have to be transferred all over the place. In theory, it's a good idea, but it just doesn't work for the type of industry that I'm in.

                   WELL...when the official "job description merge" takes place, the mistakes that *I* have made over the last few months will be NOTHING compared to the mistakes that are about to happen!! See, the CSR side has phones that are ALWAYS ringing off the hook. Disptach has the same issue, though not on the same level as CSR. My job consists of making a LOT of outbound calls to customers and field techs. There are only 10 of us in the building who know dispatch, CSR, & maintenance....everyone else has NO clue how to do what I do...and it's going to be a DISASTER!! Yes, I will be laughing my ass off when the mayhem begins.

                    So now that this has all dawned on me, I'm feeling a lot less fearful about losing my job due to my apparently obvious stupidity.     I just MIGHT lose it due to my hysterical laughter when a 'dispatcher' breaches a contract with a huge customer and costs the company a few hundred thousand dollars!!

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                    When I started my current job back in June of last year, one of my main goals was to make a good impression on the managers & my co-workers. Given the fact that I came into this company with 5 years of previous experience in this field, I intentionally set the bar higher for myself. As time went by, I got to the point where I was doing very well...and very noticed for my work. Yeah there plenty of times back then that I goofed and I struggled with some of the more complicated things about the job, but what --I-- considered below average performance was seen as EXCEPTIONAL performance by everyone else.   Naturally, when it came time to "apply" for a regular position with the company I was pretty much a guaranteed hire...(something I found out WAY after the fact!)....

                      THESE DAYS instead of being noticed for my good work, I'm being noticed for all of the disasters that SEEM to originate from me. The BIGGEST fiasco is of course the fact that while I was in training for a month last fall there was NO ONE doing my VERY time sensitive job. This started a chain of events that THREE months later I'm STILL struggling with! SOME of the little disasters have been partly my fault, but the MAJORITY of them are NOT. Yet I am STILL getting blamed!! The latest case was a very vague email where a manager asked me about an appointment that was made back in late October that showed on a report as having not been completed on time. This report is actually a weekly thing, so when I got the email I thought the guy was saying that it hadn't been completed until January. I tell him that it was actually completed back in October...it must have been a glitch in our program. Life went on as usual. Then my boss comes to me and informs me that the field manager had reamed the person who does the report for not being cooperative about fixing the problem. Long story short, MY manager, the field manager, the girl who does the report, and the boss of my entire floor had a closed door meeting to "discuss" the issue.   The "discussion" ended up getting pretty heated at times, and resulted in the field manager looking like an idiot. Well, THAT resulted in my manager dragging me into the situation. Luckily he was on my side because the original email was very vague and he could see how I would have misinterpreted it!

                   Now I'm shaking in my boots because there have been SO many issues that have a path straight back to MY desk and I'm afraid that even though 99% of these issues are NOT my doing that I'm still on the black list.

                   Ugh.

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                   On to cheerier things:

                   My refrigerator is ALIVE!!! It had gone down...then we fixed it...then it went down again. Finally, Chris had to bite the bullet and call a repairman out. Thankfully his dad paid for it because BOTH Chris and I are fresh out of money! So now the frige has rejoined the land of the living!

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                 I came home this evening to find a stack of envelopes waiting for me from today's mail. I started looking through the stack and saw they were ALL from Reader's Digest. So I open one up and it's a letter saying that the product I'd ordered had been shipped but that they wanted to know if I wanted mulitple products....EIGHT more?? Every letter said the exact same thing! The SAD part is that I don't even REMEMBER what it was that I'd ordered! I guess I'll find out soon enough though...I just hope that whatever it is, it isn't EIGHT of them!!


                Well, that's it for now...tomorrow is FRIDAY!! THANK GOD!!

                    As much as I really did NOT want to go, I went out to dinner with some co-workers, one of whom is one of our field engineers from Texas. I mostly avoid the whole socializing after work with my colleagues. Not that I'm anit-social or anything, but I just want to go HOME after work and not think about anything from the office.   A friend of mine told me that even if it's a chore to go schmoozing, I still needed to go beacuse it helps you "network".  BLECH! I hate politics...ESPECIALLY office politics!!

                   So I went to dinner with them and actually had a pretty decent time. The field guy is really nice..and smart as a whip!! Of course throughout the dinner, we had to contend with the little Chuckies at the next table. FYI...a Chuckie is an obnoxious child..named for the Chuckie horror films. Anyway...these 3 kids are all over the place...the littlest one was actually crawling across the floor! The little guy couldn't have been more than 18 months old. While this was going on, one of the other kids got upset about something and started SHRIEKING!! Would anyone care to guess what the parents of these little rug rats were doing while all this was happening? I'll TELL you what they were doing: NOTHING!! They were acting as though there weren't people throwing evil looks their way and openly sighing!!   At the risk of sounding like a cynical old man: back in MY day, my parents would have slapped the shit out of me if I acted like these kids were! I wouldn't have even had TIME to start screaming because by the time it started, there would be a fork slapped on top of my hand!

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  That's it for now...BryM is going to BED!!!                    

            Remember those cheesy action movies from the 1980s when the hero would get pissed off at the perpetrator of the bad things that were happening to him/her and/or their loved ones? The hero would take a 1974 Dodge Dart and then turn it into a rolling death machine by adding all sorts of gadgets such as steel beams, battering rams, kitchen knives, and spikes on the wheels. This of course was all done with bad 1980s rock music blasting in the background. One the hero's Mobile Machine of Mass Destruction was completed, the hero would then rip his/her clothes to shreds & then dispense with the bad guys.

             I decided on my way home tonight, I decided that I'm going to get a perm in the back of my hair (after I let it grow halfway down my back), rip my clothes to shreds, blare some rock music, and don Christine the Truck with some serious Road Rage Essentials. There are two reasons for this...both of which I think are pretty darn practical:

1. When confronted with a slippery road (such as I encountered this morning), I can ignore the feces rolling from my undergarments as I go careening into a ravine and instead just enjoy the ride until I come to an abrupt halt against the closest pine tree.
   
2. I can merge effortlessly merge into traffic on the way home instead of having to play "Slam Chicken" on the highway. "Slam Chicken" is a game that I invented...it works like this...I accelerate to 70MPH after entering the on-ramp and then squeeze in front of whatever poor soul has seen fit not to move into the left lane to let me in. Then I slam on my brakes to avoid hitting the vehicle in front of me.
   

             As most of you already know, Christine the Truck is now 21 years old, so I might have to deviate from the normal steel beams & battering rams as accessories, so in their place I'd have to use patio tiles & the muffler from a 1961 Chevy Impala. Look at it this way...if I didn't scare the hell out of everyone with all of the destruction gear, I'd at least intimidate them by the sheer ugliness of the truck!! Either way, I win!

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             Fate has a very warped sense of humor. I've been bitching all winter long about not having any snow and/or ice as of yet. So this past weekend, we actually DID get some snow....and it melted 12 hours later. Ha ha Fate...REALLLLY funny.    This was after the experts at our local TV station had predicted at least 4 inches in my area. Boneheads.

            So this morning rolls around and I see the local weather bunny saying that there was a VERY slight chance of some freezing rain during the first part of the day. Since she's wrong 80% of the time, I headed out....but to be on the safe side, I left a few minutes earlier than normal. I wasn't even five miles from home when the freezing rain started. Fate being the little bitch that she is didn't unleash this rain until I was JUST about to start down a hill. Thankfully, I kept my wits about me when the truck started to slide and didn't hit my brakes. I slid about 3/4 of the way down the hill before I finally hit regular pavement! Yeah...I almost crapped my pants!! So much for my whining about not having any frozen precip here!!

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             This afternoon comes and I'm headed out to the highway, fully prepared for the gridlock that awaited me. As I'm coming to the end of the off ramp, this turkey next to me decides that he wants to speed up instead of going to the left lane. The faster I went, the faster he went. Finally, I just cut over in front of him and then had to slam on my brakes to avoid plowing into the car in front of me!!   Guess what....that fucker behind me stopped his little game REALLY quick when he almost slammed into ME!! I hate people who drive like that!!

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                That's all for now! Have a good week! Only THREE more days before the weekend!! Oh yeah....... P.S. I started back with my other blog here called "Writing". It's for general stuff but MUCH shorter than my books that I write here!

            I mentioned a little while back that I've been officially dubbed "Ruler of the Cowsheds", which I translated into being "Leader of the Barnyard"....it's fitting because I'm the ONLY guy smack in the middle of a bunch of women, whom I've dubbed "BryM's Hens". From the time I come in at 8:30am until I leave at 5:30pm all I hear is clucking back and forth! It's all in fun though....my girls have actually dubbed me "Sir Cock".

             So today in the barnyard was quite an interesting one. I started out the day being VERY much "out of it"....I wasn't sick or anything, but I just had no gumption to get things started for the day. Around the time that my first break rolled around I'd made a little bit of progress, but since it was a holiday I ran into the same situation that I always do on a holiday: lack of a decision maker at all the various hospitals and dr's offices that I handle. I did manage to get my "required" appointments made by the end of the day, but it was close!

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              Next up was the great pocketbook & shoes debate. I have been presented with the following rules pertaining to proper etiquette of women's fashion:

1) One must NEVER wear "out of season" clothes, such as a pastel blouse during the dead of winter. This rule also applies to shoes, belts, & stockings.

2) One is most assuredly guaranteed to be the talk of the office should she not have a coordinating hair garment!

3) One must be careful to make sure they have three different styles of shoes: low heel, medium heel, and high heels. There MUST be one of EACH for each individual outfit one owns. NO EXCEPTIONS!!

4) Speaking of shoes....there should always be adequate storage for one's shoes. This rule is the reason that 3/4 of men in this world have NO closet space in their home!

             Failure to abide by these requirements actually CAN lead to revocation of one's "Women for Domination of the World" card!

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             Remember the guy who's been literally ALL OVER my case lately? Well, things had improved a lot lately..I was following his wishes to the letter on each appointment I made for him. I was VERY careful to do everything as he asked. So today, after many emails and phone conversations with this guy, I *finally* got an appointment made at this one place he handles that had been a thorn in my side for a while. I finalize the appointment and then email the field guy with the details. Ten minutes later he's on the phone with my supervisor's assistant SCREAMING about the "fact" that I'd yet again not followed his instructions! I just can't win for losing with this knucklehead!   So tomorrow begins yet ANOTHER round of the war. I can hardly wait...it ought to be interesting to say the least!!

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                And now for some funny stuff:


Well, that's it for now! Have a great week!!