"French kittens! And you know those are the worst kind!"

This was in response to my query about whether a client was having kittens. Upon hearing this, I opined that I thought German kittens might be worse, but this reflection had no effect upon my interlocutor, who promptly replied: "Well, he might have a few of those in there, too!"

The rest of the conversation consisted of my telling this otherwise very nice lady that, much as I wanted to help her ship her product to her client, it could. not. be. done. No, it's not because we're a bunch of jerks who want to make your day worse. It's because we physically don't have ANY trucks left in the yard to take your freight. Simple as that. I cannot wave my magic wand and create vehicular transportation, sadly.

Week has been brutal thus far. Seem to be working increasingly long hours for the same pay. Am unhappy but resigned about this. This will not change until such time as I become a permanent employee, and actually punch in and out, thus having a machine log my time. Right now I have to write my hours manually, and I'm not "allowed" overtime because I'm a "temp." A full-time temp, but a temp.

Supervisor is also making it increasingly difficult to even take my lunch break. He gets annoyed if I don't hurl myself at the phone the minute it rings or someone pages either me or Nat, even going so far as to reprimand me once for letting Nat be paged *twice* for a phone call. For crying out loud! It's not like we're in the office painting our nails! If the phone isn't being answered, it's because we're putting out three other fires in the meantime. :P Unfortunately, I can't say boo to him right now.

How does this affect your lunch breaks, you ask? Well, let me explain. Nat and I have different lunch breaks, now that our schedules are different. Makes sense, right? So, whereas before we both had a strict "no phone calls" policy during lunch, the phone now rings during our breaks, because the other one is supposed to answer the phone.

Now, imagine this scenario: Phnee is having lunch, at her desk because she's trying to catch up on the mountain of paperwork that always seems to accumulate while she's putting out fires elsewhere. Nat is taking care of a driver on the radio, and fielding a phone call at the same time, because she's freaking superwoman. Nat gets paged for another line. Phnee has two choices. 1) Leave the phone alone, because she's on her break. If she does this, and Nat doesn't conclude her stuff fast enough to get to that call and gets paged again, Phnee gets into shit with her supervisor 2) Pick up the phone, thus abandoning any pretense of actually being on a break, but guarantee that her supervisor won't be swooping down on her like a passive-aggressive bird of prey.

Yesterday was especially harrowing, as poor Nat had to leave three hours early to fetch her son from camp, because he was sick. She left *right* as my lunch break was starting, so I again had no lunch, because I had to cover for her. I didn't mind, because, hey, you know, small child being sick is no fun at all and definitely trumps anything work-related. However, covering for Nat means doing the work of three or four people, because she gets *so* much done by herself. I ended up staying nearly an hour over, on top of not having a lunch, on a day when I had in fact come in early to get some details on something else sorted out.

So, yeah. Stick a fork in me, I'm done. Golden brown and buttered.

Today was Crisis!Day. There was not a single God-blessed hour that went by that didn't involve some kind of crisis. We forgot to book some PO's for Distal (the French kitten client), and thus spent the day sorting out that mess, had improperly palletized product at Sobey's which had to be brought back and organized, then Provigo went and *lost* all their Parmalat bills, which we had to scramble to get replaced. I won't go into how three separate orders got mixed up between two trucks and how I spent twenty minutes on the phone with a Romanian man named Benjamin who was nigh incomprehensible between the hysteria and the poor language skills.




A word to the wise? If you call me at work, don't just tell me your first name and assume I'll remember who you are. I barely remember my own name while I'm there after a while. Like this interesting conversation.

:::phone rings:::

Me: Go away! I'm busy!

:::phone clearly doesn't understand English:::

Me: :::answering phone::: Daphne speaking, how may I help you

Chirpy woman on the other end: Hi Daphne! This is Beverly!

Me: Oh, hi! :::to self::: (Who in blazes is *that*?)

Beverly: Could you give me two POs, please? Here are the invoice numbers: [number] and [number].

Me: :::finally connecting the dots, realizes this is a person she knows from Company X with whom she speaks every week and gives POs to on a regular basis, except that this time so much has happened that the POs aren't ready::: Oh! Uh, sure. I haven't had time to get to those last two invoices, though. Could I call you back in ten minutes?

Beverly: Um, yeah. No problem.

Me: Great, thanks! :::hangs up, faceplants:::



Add to this the guy who calls four hours after his product has been delivered and wants us to "investigate" why it was several degrees over the norm. Why the client couldn't have told us this at the time is beyond me. :P


Okay, bed now. I shall bitch less in my next post. Well, I should say my next update, because my next post will be a brunch reminder. :D

I am actually still enjoying myself tremendously. So hopefully I will find the energy to post about all the things I'm enjoying about my work soon.