Round and Round the Bend

I'm already bucking the system here... and I love it. Well, receiving and processing a gift is a big long process believe it or not. It begins with me. I open the thing, and stamp it with the date. Well, after that, it goes to the project coordinators who separate them by code, and labels the insert with check numbers, dates, amounts. So it's crunch time, and I learned how to label them yesterday, so I go to one of the PCs and ask her if I could help by separating the gifts when I go through the mail. Well, she FREAKS OUT that my supervisor would get all pissed if she asks me to change protocol. I'm thinking to myself, why are we handling these pieces of mail 10 different times when it can be all done at once (with me, since I have to open it anyway). Well, she explained that one of her coworkers got chewed out for something similar (asking for help from an admin) and she doesn't want to get involved. THat really pissed me off, because I'm not some kind of moron who can't handle this (especially if I have nothing better to do). So I took it upon myself to do it anyway. I brought the gifts in to the PCs and whispered, "don't tell anyone, but I coded, labled and separated all these for you."

I mean, it only makes sense. First, why is more than one person doing the same thing over and over again? Oh, and also, I found out that we're saving the envelopes these gifts come in because they must be postmarked by 12/31/04 in order to get tax credit in '04. So I really don't HAVE to stamp all these friggin things either. The postmarked envelope gets stapled to the insert!

Well, I really want to learn this stuff so I can be in the position to move up to a project coordinator. They certainly need another one. They're constantly running around like chickens with their heads cut off... there's ALWAYS an appeal coming in - they get mailed out every other month to different audiences. So anything I can do to help these ladies, I'm happy to do. So long as I'm getting my other crap done, who should care???