work complications
I suppose another update is in order. I don't know that I have much to say this week except that I'm alive and well. I'm having fewer allergy complications since I'm down to just sneezing. It's such a relief to get rid of all the coughing and sinus pressure.
Work has presented a complication recently and I'm not really sure how to handle it. For those of you who are unaware of how postal operations work, there are 2 main operations we are concerned with. One is letters and the other is flats. Letters are your normal-sized personal or business letters, etc. Flats, on the other hand, are larger. They can be magazines, manilla envelopes, flyers, etc. Letter images are compressed as data and buffered. The buffered data is then sent to us and the keyers receive the images on their computer monitors to key in the addresses. Flats is a bit different. We get the images live as they are being run. We have approximately 90 seconds to key these images before they "time out." 90 seconds for an image is plenty of time, but if you are sent 200 images, you don't have 90 seconds times 200 to key it. You have 90 seconds from the time the images arrive to key all of them. Multiple plants (approximately 21) are sending across each system and we have 5 systems in place. So if it takes a keyer 10 seconds to key an image, he or she will only be able to key 9 images in that time frame.
Currently flats happen to be my domain. I supervise it from 3 to 11:30. It is my job to make sure I have enough keyers to key the volume before it times out. The second thing I am responsible for is to not build up "idle time" which means when a keyer is logged on with no images to key. Some keyers cooperate very well by switching their terminals from site to site or from flats to letters. We have both capabilities. Other keyers have to be told repeatedly even though they know that's what you want them to do. In flats you also don't know how much volume you will have at any given second. You could have anywhere from 1 image to 600+ coming across at one time on one system. I've experienced both and they are both very frustrating. My fingernails are proof enough of that! The ideal is to have a steady volume coming across without much fluctuation which rarely happens. Now as it happens, whoever is running the letter operations is the one who takes the attendance and tells people where to go. I have to tell them how many people I need each time a group of people comes in. I have to know when my heaviest times are and I have to compensate for people taking lunches and leaving at the end of their shifts. But if I tell them that I need 10 people, they may not give me 10 people. So your working relationship with the letters supervisor is crucial.
The one I normally work with is great. She has run flats before and knows how essential it is to have enough people. But my problem is that twice a week I have to work with one who has issues. She knows there are certain people I like to have on flats because they are fast keyers, they know what I expect them to do and do it without being told, and they like to be on flats. There are more people who dislike keying flats than like it which is quite opposite of how it was in Bowling Green. Instead of giving me these people, she sends them to letters and sends me the slower keyers who hate to key flats. When a person hates something, they tend not to do their best at it. They may be sulking because they don't want to be there and take a long time to switch over when I need them. Or they may just be naturally slow. I don't know if this supervisor is doing it deliberately to annoy me or to annoy the keyers or because she gets a thrill out of making somebody do something they don't want to do. We had a confrontation over it the last time she worked because I had grabbed one of my usual keyers as they went by to help out because I was experiencing very heavy volume and not nearly enough keyers and she was my fastest keyer. She became quite irrate when she saw this particular keyer in flats because she had sent her to letters. I explained the necessity of it and I thought she was ok with it. But she did it to me again. Not only that keyer, but every keyer I usually had. When I'd ask for 5, she'd send me 3 claiming she needed them on letters. On top of that, the keyers who were going to lunch, weren't coming back to me like they were supposed to. So instead of getting more and more keyers as my volume increased, I was getting fewer and fewer. My direct supervisor must have sensed something was up because of my running up and down the isles constantly moving people around. He came and asked if I was ok. I was a bit terse in my response that I was surviving. He asked if I needed more keyers, and I told him that I was already sent all the keyers letters could afford. He said that was pure foolishness and marched off into the letters office. Soon the supervisor comes marching out and started counting my available flats/letters switchable seats and sent me that many keyers. She never said a word to me and was very abrupt with me the rest of the night. By the end of the night, after she was running out of letters and sending people home, I had plenty of keyers. But the damage had already been done. One site in particular had a 20+ percent time out rate. I managed to get it down to 5 by the end of the night, but that is personally unacceptable to me. Overall, I had a 2.9% rate, but my goal is to have it under 2%. To say the least, I was very upset the whole night. I tried to convince myself that she wasn't doing it deliberately. But my mental state wasn't very conducive to that kind of thinking. To make matters worse, according to some of the other staff, she is the golden child of the manager. I feel a lot better after 2 days off, but I'm not sure what my reaction will be the next time she works. I don't know if I should just quietly endure, or if I should call her out on it. I hate confrontations!
School is going better for me since I got an A on my last Chemistry exam. It made me feel a lot more normal. I did make one silly little goof which cost me my 100%. I sure could have used that to bring my other 2 B's into line. So I'm still coping with a B average since an 89.7 is still a B to the professor. Now if I can just get an A on the next exam and on the final, I'll be fine. I'm not too worried about my final because it will consist of things off of the other exams with numbers changed on the problems. He keeps trying to scare us with it by saying that if we haven't started preparing for it, we're in trouble because it is 9 pages long. I'm more worried about my lab exam which is this Thursday. Our professor told us today what we will have to do. We'll have 25 written questions then we have to do several experiments in the lab. One is a titration to find the concentration of an unknown acid, one is identifying 4 unknown solutions by means of flame tests and precipitation reactions, and the last two are just some simple things like weighing samples and testing for acids, bases, neutrals and electrolytes.
We did another interesting experiment today. First we had to cut and bend some glass tubing in fire then we had to do a reaction involving alka-seltzer and hydrochloric acid to measure the amount of carbon dioxide produced. It involved a lot of calculating to find the vapor pressure of the water it was done in, along with finding the moles of carbon dioxide and the weight percent in the tablet. Then we had to find the weight percent according to the ingredients on the label and from there find our percent of error. My partner and I had a 4 percent error rate which was very good. It was quite fascinating. Tomorrow we get to make soap by mixing vegetable oil and sodium hydroxide and boiling it. We'll then have to do some tests on our soap to test it's acidity and how it will react with hard water versus soft water. And that will be my last lab before the exam. I'm definitely going to miss that class. But I won't miss the chemistry lecture class.
Well since I've rambled on more than I thought I would, I'd better get some studying done before I head off to work.
Work has presented a complication recently and I'm not really sure how to handle it. For those of you who are unaware of how postal operations work, there are 2 main operations we are concerned with. One is letters and the other is flats. Letters are your normal-sized personal or business letters, etc. Flats, on the other hand, are larger. They can be magazines, manilla envelopes, flyers, etc. Letter images are compressed as data and buffered. The buffered data is then sent to us and the keyers receive the images on their computer monitors to key in the addresses. Flats is a bit different. We get the images live as they are being run. We have approximately 90 seconds to key these images before they "time out." 90 seconds for an image is plenty of time, but if you are sent 200 images, you don't have 90 seconds times 200 to key it. You have 90 seconds from the time the images arrive to key all of them. Multiple plants (approximately 21) are sending across each system and we have 5 systems in place. So if it takes a keyer 10 seconds to key an image, he or she will only be able to key 9 images in that time frame.
Currently flats happen to be my domain. I supervise it from 3 to 11:30. It is my job to make sure I have enough keyers to key the volume before it times out. The second thing I am responsible for is to not build up "idle time" which means when a keyer is logged on with no images to key. Some keyers cooperate very well by switching their terminals from site to site or from flats to letters. We have both capabilities. Other keyers have to be told repeatedly even though they know that's what you want them to do. In flats you also don't know how much volume you will have at any given second. You could have anywhere from 1 image to 600+ coming across at one time on one system. I've experienced both and they are both very frustrating. My fingernails are proof enough of that! The ideal is to have a steady volume coming across without much fluctuation which rarely happens. Now as it happens, whoever is running the letter operations is the one who takes the attendance and tells people where to go. I have to tell them how many people I need each time a group of people comes in. I have to know when my heaviest times are and I have to compensate for people taking lunches and leaving at the end of their shifts. But if I tell them that I need 10 people, they may not give me 10 people. So your working relationship with the letters supervisor is crucial.
The one I normally work with is great. She has run flats before and knows how essential it is to have enough people. But my problem is that twice a week I have to work with one who has issues. She knows there are certain people I like to have on flats because they are fast keyers, they know what I expect them to do and do it without being told, and they like to be on flats. There are more people who dislike keying flats than like it which is quite opposite of how it was in Bowling Green. Instead of giving me these people, she sends them to letters and sends me the slower keyers who hate to key flats. When a person hates something, they tend not to do their best at it. They may be sulking because they don't want to be there and take a long time to switch over when I need them. Or they may just be naturally slow. I don't know if this supervisor is doing it deliberately to annoy me or to annoy the keyers or because she gets a thrill out of making somebody do something they don't want to do. We had a confrontation over it the last time she worked because I had grabbed one of my usual keyers as they went by to help out because I was experiencing very heavy volume and not nearly enough keyers and she was my fastest keyer. She became quite irrate when she saw this particular keyer in flats because she had sent her to letters. I explained the necessity of it and I thought she was ok with it. But she did it to me again. Not only that keyer, but every keyer I usually had. When I'd ask for 5, she'd send me 3 claiming she needed them on letters. On top of that, the keyers who were going to lunch, weren't coming back to me like they were supposed to. So instead of getting more and more keyers as my volume increased, I was getting fewer and fewer. My direct supervisor must have sensed something was up because of my running up and down the isles constantly moving people around. He came and asked if I was ok. I was a bit terse in my response that I was surviving. He asked if I needed more keyers, and I told him that I was already sent all the keyers letters could afford. He said that was pure foolishness and marched off into the letters office. Soon the supervisor comes marching out and started counting my available flats/letters switchable seats and sent me that many keyers. She never said a word to me and was very abrupt with me the rest of the night. By the end of the night, after she was running out of letters and sending people home, I had plenty of keyers. But the damage had already been done. One site in particular had a 20+ percent time out rate. I managed to get it down to 5 by the end of the night, but that is personally unacceptable to me. Overall, I had a 2.9% rate, but my goal is to have it under 2%. To say the least, I was very upset the whole night. I tried to convince myself that she wasn't doing it deliberately. But my mental state wasn't very conducive to that kind of thinking. To make matters worse, according to some of the other staff, she is the golden child of the manager. I feel a lot better after 2 days off, but I'm not sure what my reaction will be the next time she works. I don't know if I should just quietly endure, or if I should call her out on it. I hate confrontations!
School is going better for me since I got an A on my last Chemistry exam. It made me feel a lot more normal. I did make one silly little goof which cost me my 100%. I sure could have used that to bring my other 2 B's into line. So I'm still coping with a B average since an 89.7 is still a B to the professor. Now if I can just get an A on the next exam and on the final, I'll be fine. I'm not too worried about my final because it will consist of things off of the other exams with numbers changed on the problems. He keeps trying to scare us with it by saying that if we haven't started preparing for it, we're in trouble because it is 9 pages long. I'm more worried about my lab exam which is this Thursday. Our professor told us today what we will have to do. We'll have 25 written questions then we have to do several experiments in the lab. One is a titration to find the concentration of an unknown acid, one is identifying 4 unknown solutions by means of flame tests and precipitation reactions, and the last two are just some simple things like weighing samples and testing for acids, bases, neutrals and electrolytes.
We did another interesting experiment today. First we had to cut and bend some glass tubing in fire then we had to do a reaction involving alka-seltzer and hydrochloric acid to measure the amount of carbon dioxide produced. It involved a lot of calculating to find the vapor pressure of the water it was done in, along with finding the moles of carbon dioxide and the weight percent in the tablet. Then we had to find the weight percent according to the ingredients on the label and from there find our percent of error. My partner and I had a 4 percent error rate which was very good. It was quite fascinating. Tomorrow we get to make soap by mixing vegetable oil and sodium hydroxide and boiling it. We'll then have to do some tests on our soap to test it's acidity and how it will react with hard water versus soft water. And that will be my last lab before the exam. I'm definitely going to miss that class. But I won't miss the chemistry lecture class.
Well since I've rambled on more than I thought I would, I'd better get some studying done before I head off to work.
posted by Sara | 4:53 PM
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