When 25 hours isn't enough

My job should be a piece of cake, right?  A little copying, a little pasting, smile and answer some questions.  Nothing I haven’t been doing for years.  Even doing it onboard ship in heavy seas shouldn’t make it impossible.  And yet…

There is no copier.  The printer has to be tricked into making double-sided copies, and the odds and ends of paper are different sizes.  Not like American size and not-American size:  there are about 4 different sizes.  There are piles of paper which will never go through a copier successfully and a lifetime supply of scrap paper. The whole office looks like a dumping ground, full of stuff I can't use and lacking basic necessities.

And I know no answers.  Not how you can get a room with a window (find someone who wants a room without one) or where the smoking deck is (take the opportunity to give up smoking) or what you should do about two classes scheduled at the same time (pick one).  Certainly not where Tom or Jim or Joe or Mike is.  I’ve figured out how to make them disappear (ask for something), but not how to make them come back.

There are no computer archives of work done last year, just bits and fragments.  One folder marked “Specific country info” has a single document--on tourism in Costa Rich, a country we will not visit.  I have outdated instructions in a form I cannot update.  I have no rosters telling me who does what and no list of birthdays, although I am supposed to announce them.  The one thing I did find, quotes about sailing and the sea, is organized alphabetically.  Fortunately, an A quote neatly captured our rocking, rolling sea today.

The only thing that saves me from feeling like a complete dummy is that a lot of my questions don’t have answers, even when I find people in the know.  It’s not terribly reassuring to hear “this has never come up,” or “maybe the folks in Charlottesville can tell us,” but we sail on.

The challenges of getting 800 or so people sailing smoothly are massive.  Charlottesville sends a host of people to the embarkation point and a few have stayed on through Hilo.  Even though many of us have sailed before, each voyage brings new challenges, on top of the obvious issues of orientation to the boat, adds and drops, and ...

My instructions for the daily Dean’s Memo say it has to go out by 5 PM.  I finished it before then, but it took another 45 minutes for the IT director from Charlottesville to get it to print as a pdf. After changing fonts, tinkering with settings at all levels, and moving it to another computer, he found that some areas of the word document—although showing up in black on the screen—were printing in white.  Not all.  Just the important stuff.  Just the stuff I put into the template.  And that hard and fast 5 PM deadline?  It’s because that’s when the workday is supposed to be over! 

Meal times are not flexible, and without snacks, I am hungry when they come.  So I do take meal breaks.  I finished pinning the Dean’s Memo to the bulletin boards at 8:30. 

Tomorrow, they tell me, I’ll REALLY get slammed.  Lucky for me it's a 25-hour day.