My Hiatus or why I can't walk and chew gum at the same time

Sorry Readers, its been 17 days since my last blog post. I don't blog when I am stressed and I've been a bit stressed.

I have been filling in at the local GS office for about a year and a half, working mostly the office managers job. Well, she retired suddenly and my boss asked me if I would fill in while they worked at finding a replacement. I told her I would and that I would be applying for the job myself. I think this threw her. She thought I wasn't looking for a full time job because that was what I had said 1 1/2 yrs ago. Well times have changed and I need to work. My long vacation of 6 1/2 yrs is over! My hubs took a cut in pay (as did everyone at the PD) so other officers would not be laid off. Yep, even essential services like police are feeling the pinch.

They posted the job on their website and on Craigslist. They got 150 responses! This is a nonprofit org, it doesn't pay a hella lot but people need jobs. My boss is now weeding thru the resumes and starting more weeding by conducting phone interviews. All this while I am doing the job that I have applied for, which is keeping the office functioning for the rest of the staff. I've been there 2 weeks now. I feel like this is a very long interview. That everything I do now will make or break me. I got to spend one day with the old gal to try and document everything she did so I can do it. Granted, I did do a lot of these tasks during her previous absences but just the things that had to get done. There was very little documentation from her or the main office on procedures and what was available was mostly poorly done. I am able to ask other regional office mgrs about what they do, but it looks like our gal was a bit lazy in her job and didn't keep up with a lot of the work so cleaning things up is job number one.

I decided to look good by taking on the half completed file audit of volunteer files. Turns out it hadn't been purged of old no-longer volunteering files for several years. This was due in part to the poorly written instructions from some VP in the main office that no one called them on to correct. Out of about 2400 files, about 800 were redundant. None of the other regional office mgrs can figure out how to get reports from the new database program (I figured it out and let them know what to do) so they just don't do stuff! Every regional office's files are a mess. I'm out to correct this at least for this office.

I've also taken the petty cash and put it on an excel spreadsheet in a shared folder so the rest of the staff can see what we have if they need it. It was keep on a paper ledger locked in the box.

I'm starting to catalog what we have in our lending library and equipment depot and creating a database to better track where our stuff is and to ensure we don't double reserve things.

I'm working damn hard because I want this job. Even tho my boss says that as a full time employee I would need to give up my volunteer role as a troop leader to both my troops due to conflict of interest. This was troublesome to me, but I can work around this by being an involved parent, a very involved parent!

My boss is getting married June 13th and taking a couple weeks off for her honeymoon. It's a small wedding so she is not too preoccupied but she needs to do all these interviews before then. Also, she was told by main office that we need to move our office by June 30th. She is in charge of finding a new larger space that we can afford. She had 3 good possibilities take she took her boss to last week. Her boss shot them all down. So not only does she have to hire a new office mgr, she has to find a new location. The move will occur while she is gone and while an other staff person is gone. This leaves 3 staff to do the move, one of which may be a brand new clueless office mgr (my hopes is that clueless person is me!)

So wish me luck. I'm just hoping that it doesn't turn out that someone else gets hired and I get asked to train them and to also stay on to help with the move. As upsetting as this thought makes me, I will probably do it. Doormat is my middle name.