Things are supposed to be getting better – we had a new Customer Service Manager starting – hopefully someone with a lot of experience who’ll help sort us out.  Though I’m not sure how having a new manager is going to help immediately – we’re still down about 4 account manager, which means we’re all looking after way too many clients.

Both of my biggest clients have been affected by major cock-ups this week, and while one of them is really cool, would never raise their voices at me and would never think to blame me personally for what’s happening on the floor – the other (Mr Cheque Man) has been yelling abuse at me for a week and a half.  He screams in capital letters at me by email, and has started demanding that they shouldn’t pay for stuff (in fairness, if it were me, I’d have been requesting freebies a couple of weeks ago).

My ridiculously late payslips that have been held up by the printer hard drives crashing, were finally being printed this morning… and printed all wrong.  Images missing and text misaligned so they’ve needed to be done all over again.  I had more cheques that couldn’t be printed due to running out of stock.  Enquiries about the stock levels in the warehouse got me a singularly depressing response that the cheque stock gets used daily and is supposed to be counted daily, but no one has counted the cheque stock for a month due to being down staff in the warehouse too.   So now, even when the system tells me we’ve got 5700 pieces of stock left – we’ve actually got NONE and that means I’m going to be running out of stock constantly and the Grossly Overdue Cheques are likely to become a fixture.  I’ve got another statement run job with a ‘please explain’ hanging over it because it got sent without it’s inserts.  Another of my end of months jobs has been cocked up with some customers getting two bank statements in one envelope – massive confidentiality issues there.   And there is so much going on, I’m way too busy and I spend so much of my day fighting fires – that I am fairly confident I am overlooking little things that are likely to become massive emergencies for me.  So many cock ups and so much seems to happens each day that by Thursday – I’m unable to remember the minutiae of Monday’s issues.

I don’t know what is wrong with the place.  It takes forever to get anything done and I mean forever – 8 hours for data processing to provide a 4 page stat sheet, without which, the cheque finishers sit on a work order all day.  Three days to get some .pdf proofs out of IT – and that’s three days if you’re lucky.  Forget about getting stock counts – I’ve repeatedly requested a stocktake for one client since about Oct 16 to no avail.  I’ve had enough.  I was so stressed this morning by the Cheque Man yelling at me and the payslip nonsense, that I was literally sick to my stomach.

I’m going to have to resign I think – and I feel awful about that.  It’s going to leave them even more in the lurch, and it shits me that I’m actually good at this sort of thing but no matter how hard I work – there’s nothing I can do to be successful at my job.  My managers are all happy with me, and I’m getting loads of positive feedback that I’m doing a great job under the circumstances – but everything feels like it is falling down around me, and I’m coming home stressed out the wa-hoo (still don’t know what a wa-hoo is).

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800 missing credit union cheques in the system…
800 more missing cheques!
Take another cheque file, don’t process it and what do you have?
                    … well yet another fucking pissed off cranky customer is what you have!

Over it, over it , over it…. la di da di dum!

I’ve been laughing in people’s faces today when informed of more and more problems at work. 

More missing cheque books?   lol
No stock?  Hehehehehe
Files unprocessed?  Mwhahahahha!
Printers still broken?  ROFLMAO

Sigh… We had a meeting today with all the other Account Managers and the acting General Manager to see what could be done to alleviate some of the problems around the place.  Which, as you can imagine, turned into a 2 hour bitch fest with us telling it like it is – constant state of crisis management. 

Over it, over it, over it …. la di da di dum.

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First thing that greeted me this morning was the news that my payslips that should have been despatched yesterday afternoon weren’t even printed yet.  And that was due to a fatal HDD crash last FUCKING FRIDAY MORNING!!!   Sigh…  We have a fatal printing issue on Friday that affects halts all cartridge production, and there wasn’t even an Incident Report raised to let us know so we could inform the clients.  Instead, I find out about it when I go to check that it was despatched on time.  The fun bit is that the customers should have been receiving this stuff today, about now… and instead I am calling to tell them that their stuff hasn’t even been printed and oh… by the way… we’re still investigating the extent of the damage, but we should have total backups of everything we need to recover the setups for your jobs… but no…. we’re not sure when they’ll be printed…

So that was item one.

Item two, involved another messy cheque incident where a job was put on hold because we are missing a stock item.  Most of the cheques we print are done on independent cheque stock that has all the pretty colours and logos for each financial institution on them.  And when we raise a job, we have files printing for numerous different banks etc in the one job.  So we ran out of a stock (which by the way occurred because the warehouse is so grossly behind in stocktaking duties that I didn’t get the automated system email telling me to reorder the stock) on one item for Bank H, and the guys down in Laser held up processing files for every other financial institution as well – even though we have PLENTY of their stocks!  So 18 other banks won’t get their stuff on time either.  For reasons beyond my understanding, no one down there was able to act with some modicum of initiative and just hold back on processing Bank H’s files… but decided instead to throw the whole thing aside and wait for someone up here to tell them to print everything but the Bank H stuff.

Needless to say I found myself in my Manager’s office this morning banging my head against a desk, telling them that it seems no matter how hard I work, I am totally unable to affect any success in my role, and that I am excessively close to handing them my resignation right now.  Which i would have thought would elicit some sort of reaction – but I was wrong… several hours later, and they’ve been studiously avoiding me rather than offering assistance to address problems.

Update:  Oh..  I see now that I was being hideously optimistic earlier to suggest that we had back ups of the data on the printer HDDs.   Turns out that the Laser guys are supposed to back up proformas on these old cartridge printers every week… and the most recent one we can find is from back in March!  Yay!!   And it just goes on and on and on… more cheques from October that haven’t been printed for a different bank this time, no reason… files just not processed as far as I can tell.  More stock issues… stock that should have been transferred onto the new watermarked security stock that we’re still printing on old shit.  Raising work orders that someone else has already raised in a right hand doesn’t know what the left one has done kinda thing.  I am sick to death of the total lack of accountability through my entire company!  It’s truly fucked.

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Okay … they’re not dumb bastards.  Actually most of them are really nice guys…. (and a couple not to bad on the eye 😉 but they’re starting to drive me crazy with stupid little things that end up being absolute emergencies for me due to their inability to monitor the quality of their own work .  MadMark who left last week, said that every chickie who starts working in Customer Service eventually ends up crying into their Work Orders because they can’t handle the pressure… and I’ve promised myself I will not succumb…. I don’t want to be blubbering at work like I can’t cope….. but shit!  I’m just so frustrated with this continutal nonsense that it’s proving harder than anticpated for me to hold it together.

.   Go back to my desk and after liaising with the Business Development Executive on the account what best to tell the client – the same client who had been chasing me all day for the IT quote to alter some other cheques books and who ahd gone over my head to the same Business Development Executive.

.   Call Client, be appropriately apologetic, have no decent explanation, and get yelled at for something that wasn’t my fault.  Hang up phone and decide to start looking for new job directly after Crown.

In amongst all that was numerous calls to other clients, and other people in the building chasing little stuff, and barely time to remember to walk down to the kitchen to get a drink of water.  So I spent my entire day busting a hump, only to have to raise incident reports for two different clients for two different fuck ups – neither of which were directly resultant to anything I had done. 

Am over it ….. totally.
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