So, I’ve spent the past week trying to get a handle on my office’s inventory management system. My counterpart has left and as a result I’m the poor sap who has to take over the system… (On the plus side I’m no longer one of the poor saps who has to babysit a dorm full of 18 to 24 year olds). We have a LOT of stuff that we’re supposed to be accountable for, and it has taken me the better part of the past week to deal locate it.
Then after determining what couldn’t be found I had to week through the paperwork my counterpart maintained to see if it was accounted for there. Now this wasn’t an organized pile of papers - oh no. This was a 5 inch think mess of paperwork going back to 2003 with absolutely NO organization.
Oh, and by the time I got to this point the inventory control folks on campus decided to start breathing down my neck. My boss decided that now I needed a deadline to complete the entire project - he gave me 90 minutes…. A deadline I decided to ignore.
However, after pouring over this project for 4 and a half days, discovering that mixed in to the 5 inch pile of paper was multiple copies of the same document, unidentifiable scraps of paper with nothing more than random serial numbers on them, all of a sudden I hit a dead stop. I still had stuff I couldn’t locate, didn’t have any more paperwork to search, and couldn’t do anything else until my soon to be former counterpart swung in to the office for his last few hours.
It was jarring, literally like the rug was pulled out from under me. All of a sudden I hit a wall and couldn’t go any further. While I’ve experienced it before, it’s an odd feeling to spend several days buried under a project to all of a sudden either complete it or just get shoved in to a full stop. It’s not the first time I’ve een in this situation, and it won’t be the last but it’s always that same odd mix of relief and disorientation as I stagger around going “ok what’s next…”
