12/10/2003 @19:06:55 ^21:35:13

please don't hate me it gnaws at my soul

ROGUE CHANNEL IRC DRAMA

Wages... Must remember I'm getting wages...

Apart from piles of cheques and printouts of transactions (I did three whole sheets of cheques in about twenty five minutes!) four new things emerged to do last week.

• I've put them through the credit card machine, I've checked them, but before this week I had never had to enter any credit card transactions. This was exactly the same as entering cheques only you get about a million bits of curled shiny paper to handle. It was annoying enough, then on Friday they decided to have a fire drill when I was right in the middle of doing a large set of them and I completely lost my place
• There were an enormous batch of PLU deposits to be returned to students who had completed their courses. You get their student ID and use it to get their address, write out an envelope, put in the letter with attached cheque, cover it in stamps and put it in the post. It was dull but easy except for writing out continental addresses. These are weird in both layout and spelling so I had to keep looking back up at the screen to check I was doing it right
• Student status letters. There was an overabundance of "to whom it may concern" letters to be done by the records people and with absences running high they roped me into it. You check the person is fully enrolled then the system generates a letter which you copy into Word, edit a bit so it looks nice, and print out six copies. It was annoying because it was a process that could clearly be far more automated than it was. However, the funniest part is that now there are a few poor fuckers going around trying to claim that they're students using letters signed by "Rob Young, Academic Office". I concluded that the academic office stamp you had to put on each letter was far more valuable than the name at the bottom.
• On Thursday I was given a pile of A4 paper fully five inches high. These were a list of students who had (possibly) paid their fees but the payments hadn't been allocated to the relevant charges. I had to go through them and allocate the payments. As you can imagine this was really repetitive, but also requires extensive use of the mouse which, on the computer they gave me, is rather like a brick with suction pads on the bottom. I'm pretty sure I've made at least one or two horrible mistakes while doing this; not only is it dull and repetitive but just like those student status letters common sense told me it's a job that should be able to be automated. Many of the payments I'm allocating are ones that I've entered in weeks past, and I'm pretty sure you can allocate them as you go along, but I was never told how to, or even that I should.

I guess that whatever gripes I might have, it's the life of a temp. You get told what to do and how to do it and then basically be a robot. In fact I'm surprised I haven't got into more trouble for thinking too much and making decisions (about the purpose of a given cheque, for example) that should probably be left to the more experienced staff. But they're all even busier than I am, so I prefer not to disturb them unless I absolutely have to.

It's got to be said that doing the payment allocations and finding those mistakes in stuff I did, and thought I was doing well, three weeks ago was very demoralising and I found myself really hoping they wouldn't ask me to go back, but they did. Fifth week...

Other shit that's not long enough to deserve its own heading

Poor Towel. Following an accident in which she "poured out her heart and soul" into an update only to have Mozilla eat it, she deleted her site. This made me sad because Entanglement was clearly a site into which a lot of work had gone. We can only wish the Darling of Compsoc well, and hope she puts up a new and improved site with even more gothic sketches and photos of crazily coloured hairstyles soon!

This week's newstuff, number 150, is one of the recent best. In particular there's Fear Complex. Episode 1 style and easy but really large and with over 300 monsters, it has the potential to be, like UAC Experiment, a superlative Sunday Afternoon Drive map. I will report back on it and the others that caught my eye in a later update.

I listened to the football, and was generally pleased with the result. I had been utterly convinced England would lose horribly, and never more so than after the penalty miss. I like how these so-called professionals can hold grudges and act on them even after a period of months; it's fair enough to expect things to get heated during the course of one game but I would have thought that going home and having a good night's sleep would give you a little perspective.

I managed to fix my Christmas lights; as it turned out it was only the fuse bulb that had failed. I replaced it, and also took the opportunity to replace the green one that had never worked in the time I've had the set. However, unfortunately with this and having given my only other fuse bulb away last year I don't have any spare so I'll have to find somewhere from which you can get them.

And finally, I think I made the entirety of the rogue #warwick hate me yesterday! As far as I can tell they take me seriously! Oh dear. People even tell me I shouldn't take it so seriously! I could say that they've missed the point, but I guess as usual I went too far. Sorry guys!