A Restful Day at Home
Sometimes the key to life is not to do anything. I’m not sitting here like a bump on a log, but by no means did I strain myself in any way, shape or form. That is a good way to end the week.
I see Monday as the start to my week. Mondays are funny days. Some are excellent, some are horrendous – the life of the Payroll person who runs that special function on Monday! It is all dependent on how that goes. The last two Mondays were perfectly awful. The ones prior were all fine. You just never know.
The Monday of two weeks ago saw no Internet connection. I was ready to run payroll by 1230 or so, but the Internet and e-mail was down, so the system was not. I ended up not having to go home to do it – I was able to find one computer that was hooked up to the Internet at work. Another department, who has two computers, was able – through their own network – to connect to the Internet. So I ran it from their office, for which I was very grateful to them. Still, it made for a longer than normal day. It was not a terrible, terrible Monday but it wasn’t a great one, either.
Last Monday was far worse. The punches of the weekend were all jammed up in the time clock in the Grounds Administration building, and we could not connect them at all. Not even a little bit. It turns out that lightning struck the building and one of the many things it fried was the Ethernet card that connects that time clock to the Internet to connect to my computer. It might as well have been sizzling. So it made Janet’s day hell – she had to get all the times for me – and for me as I had to manually enter them all. The grounds department is only my biggest department, with a headcount of approximately 70 in season – and this is the height of in season. So that was about 64 people missing times that I needed to input Saturday and Sunday hours. No small task. Payroll, normally a fairly painless task, took hours to run – and that was the time keeping part. Normally, there is maybe an hour’s worth of work, sometimes 90 minutes if I need to really go crazy tracking down missed punches. Otherwise, that is it. Then it is a few minutes to run the reports needed from GenPro and then about an hour to actually upload the file, then go through the Ceridian side (the actual payroll program) and check the hours against the reports and enter in any extraneous items. That is all that takes. (Unless I have a holiday. Any one given holiday can add as much as an additional 300 minutes to the process. It is a pain in the ass. But it is nice to pay people for holidays. They deserve it. So it is worth it.)
Tuesday is simpler, but for some reason, Tuesdays are not as extreme as Mondays. I normally love Mondays, except for those rare ones where the payroll process goes awry for whatever reason. Tuesday is a normal day (inasmuch as I have any normal days), but comes with fires, emergencies and unplanned issues and headaches. OK. But if I can manage the insanity, I can also do the payroll reports on Tuesday, as soon as Ceridian delivers the payroll to me. Once I have those reports, I can do the ones I need to do (taxes, schedule vs. expense, Driving Range costs, Insurance payback, and various things like the 401(k) and deferred comp files). If I can get that out of the way on Tuesday, the rest of the week should be fairly simple.
Wednesday through Friday is… everything else. Insurance things, employment things, setting up Orientation, putting together information for different things such as reporting to the government, other clubs, communication with management and/or employees, and on and on and on. There are so many things that I do it is hard to quantify it or put into a regular list. There are regular things that I do on a daily, weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis. But then there are the multitudes of things that I do that are special event type things – investigations, employee issues, disciplinary things… that list is truly endless and a total unknown until it lands on my desk. There is no way to know what will crop up at any given time. Well, other than the clear and unwavering knowledge that it absolutely will crop up regularly.
Saturday is not very scheduled; Sunday is not either. But certainly regular things do occur. Laundry, cleaning up, and seeing my parents are always – almost always – on the docket. Other than that, it is whatever I may need to do and at least one of those days I prefer to do nothing – except what I want.
Today, like usual, I was up at 0730. I ate breakfast, then cleaned up the kitchen and sunroom, then wrote to Molly, then cataloged some of our millions of books, then lit candles in every room, started the whites, cleaned the kitty litter box up here, did some minor straightening up in the bedroom (more is needed), ate, read, watched some telly. All in a day’s relaxing.
I see Monday as the start to my week. Mondays are funny days. Some are excellent, some are horrendous – the life of the Payroll person who runs that special function on Monday! It is all dependent on how that goes. The last two Mondays were perfectly awful. The ones prior were all fine. You just never know.
The Monday of two weeks ago saw no Internet connection. I was ready to run payroll by 1230 or so, but the Internet and e-mail was down, so the system was not. I ended up not having to go home to do it – I was able to find one computer that was hooked up to the Internet at work. Another department, who has two computers, was able – through their own network – to connect to the Internet. So I ran it from their office, for which I was very grateful to them. Still, it made for a longer than normal day. It was not a terrible, terrible Monday but it wasn’t a great one, either.
Last Monday was far worse. The punches of the weekend were all jammed up in the time clock in the Grounds Administration building, and we could not connect them at all. Not even a little bit. It turns out that lightning struck the building and one of the many things it fried was the Ethernet card that connects that time clock to the Internet to connect to my computer. It might as well have been sizzling. So it made Janet’s day hell – she had to get all the times for me – and for me as I had to manually enter them all. The grounds department is only my biggest department, with a headcount of approximately 70 in season – and this is the height of in season. So that was about 64 people missing times that I needed to input Saturday and Sunday hours. No small task. Payroll, normally a fairly painless task, took hours to run – and that was the time keeping part. Normally, there is maybe an hour’s worth of work, sometimes 90 minutes if I need to really go crazy tracking down missed punches. Otherwise, that is it. Then it is a few minutes to run the reports needed from GenPro and then about an hour to actually upload the file, then go through the Ceridian side (the actual payroll program) and check the hours against the reports and enter in any extraneous items. That is all that takes. (Unless I have a holiday. Any one given holiday can add as much as an additional 300 minutes to the process. It is a pain in the ass. But it is nice to pay people for holidays. They deserve it. So it is worth it.)
Tuesday is simpler, but for some reason, Tuesdays are not as extreme as Mondays. I normally love Mondays, except for those rare ones where the payroll process goes awry for whatever reason. Tuesday is a normal day (inasmuch as I have any normal days), but comes with fires, emergencies and unplanned issues and headaches. OK. But if I can manage the insanity, I can also do the payroll reports on Tuesday, as soon as Ceridian delivers the payroll to me. Once I have those reports, I can do the ones I need to do (taxes, schedule vs. expense, Driving Range costs, Insurance payback, and various things like the 401(k) and deferred comp files). If I can get that out of the way on Tuesday, the rest of the week should be fairly simple.
Wednesday through Friday is… everything else. Insurance things, employment things, setting up Orientation, putting together information for different things such as reporting to the government, other clubs, communication with management and/or employees, and on and on and on. There are so many things that I do it is hard to quantify it or put into a regular list. There are regular things that I do on a daily, weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis. But then there are the multitudes of things that I do that are special event type things – investigations, employee issues, disciplinary things… that list is truly endless and a total unknown until it lands on my desk. There is no way to know what will crop up at any given time. Well, other than the clear and unwavering knowledge that it absolutely will crop up regularly.
Saturday is not very scheduled; Sunday is not either. But certainly regular things do occur. Laundry, cleaning up, and seeing my parents are always – almost always – on the docket. Other than that, it is whatever I may need to do and at least one of those days I prefer to do nothing – except what I want.
Today, like usual, I was up at 0730. I ate breakfast, then cleaned up the kitchen and sunroom, then wrote to Molly, then cataloged some of our millions of books, then lit candles in every room, started the whites, cleaned the kitty litter box up here, did some minor straightening up in the bedroom (more is needed), ate, read, watched some telly. All in a day’s relaxing.
Which is as it should be!
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