01:36 - 31.08.05
Collywobbles
After work yesterday, I rode home on the bus with one of the children of the neighbour I used to commute to work with. He had just had major reconstructive work on his knee(sports injury a year ago)the week before and was on crutches. Long wait for the first repairs to heal before this final round of stitching. He was asking about the bin in the backyard of my home. Said he had noticed it a couple of weeks ago when he was skateboarding down our back alley. Likes to live dangerously I guess, jeopardizing that long awaited surgery. Could be that young adult belief that they're invulnerable all evidence to the contrary, I suppose.
Work was quiet until just before noon. The counterpart from Texas had said yesterday that she wanted to spend some time going through my project with me today reviewing the work to date so that we could discuss the next phase. Made me nervous because of course my contract hangs on those decisions and I have almost no control over how that plays out. Meant I was edgy alright. That got ramped up when the yung woman who had been being harassed by two of her three supervisors early on when I first started stopped by my workstation. She handed me a reprinted copy of the confirmation that my faxed timesheet had been sent last Friday morning. She commented that I shouldn't be so forgetful about leaving personal information like that out in the department's work room for anyone to see. As I recalled it, I waited until the automatic confirmation had been produced by the fax machine before I left the area. That confirmation is a header that indicates the success and time of transmission as well as a copy of the face of the document sent so one can check for readability of the transmission. After she moved on I decided to verify my recollections. This isn't the first time there has been a second copy produced. Sure enough I had the original timesheet and the confirmation notice both still in my backpack. The confirmation notice indicated no trouble with the transmission and a time of 7:39 in the am. The "confirmation" that the coworker had brought by was stamped with a time of 7:56 am that day and indicatd that the transmission had failed. So I wasn't losing my marbles but I was now feeling very uncomfortable as my mind went back to the day when the perfumed co-worker was quizzing the coworker who I switched workstations with about who paid me, when they paid me and ho much I got paid. I can't think of anyone else who would be interested aand I don't understand her fixation with my personal affairs. I took all the documents to my supervisor to register my concern about it. If my timesheet can be reproduced at will like that then so can any confidential or protected information that is sent through that machine. My supervisor was showing signs of stress before I talked with her and it increased even moreso when she heard what I had to say.
Her stress level seemed even higher midafternoon when I needed to ask her for some feedback on tax issues. I've had to reference the Income Tax Act and the regulations - several thousand of those - using both hard copy and online resources extensively the past couple of days. It took nearly an hour to research one single term in order to code some boxes for destruction. I still wasn't certain I had the correct data so I just wanted the name of a contact person in tax who could be used to help me so that less time was spent on research. I explained that I loved that type of research but that I knew it was a barrier to finishing off this phase of the project in a timely fashion. However, with documents related to government reporting, I am also not willing to risk miscoding something for destruction at a certain date and then find out the definition used was incorrect so the destruction happens in error. The taxman/woman isn't very forgiving about those kinds of things. She replied that she would get back to me then followed up with an email that provided that information but also stated that it was important to get this work done quickly. Reading between the lines and not having met with the coworker from Texas as she had promised made me wonder if they had come down hard on my supervisor about the time and the way the coding was being done. The Texans have had access to my weekly reports and other spredsheets for a few months now on the shared drive and we have talked by telephone onseveral occasions. None of what has been done can be deemed a surprise. However, budgets tend to be times of power plays and it has been obvious for a hile that there is a fairly major one going on between the two offices. It's a bit selfish maybe but I've already exxpressd the concern to you that my work had become one of the "footballs" around which the power plays are raging and I'm the one who will likely be "punted" should someone see their political advantage sitting in that. Made my head ache.
Added to that stress was the discovery shortly after the email from my supervisor of more tampering with the coding that had taken place in early June. My supervisor had sent me an email last week clarifying the coding on one class of documents and had asked me to ensure that all those records were dealt with accordingly. I finished the last in the series of records I had been working on around 3 pm so I decided to clean that up before going on to the next series of records to be coded. The records to be "fixed" had been recoded by someone else saying there wasn't enough information to designate the records or code them. Those records had very clear descriptors and all pertained to some very "hot" real estate in the industry. It is an area where I have a great deal of expertise and I would not have dealt with them that way - I knew exactly what I was looking at. Decided not to react to what I found until I had more time to review some of the entries tomorrow - track back a few things too. I make mistakes too but those were pretty serious. I don't believe the coding was done by me but I want to be certain before I say something that upsets my suervisor even more. When I checked back in my posts to you at that time, dear diary, I found I had noted some anomalies in the database with respect to tampering that was evident and noted then. That was the day we had the presentation from the security specialist from Texas. Uh huh - this is just a test right?
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