Long Solo Day

Our first of 2 full days of working solo in the office at Bridgecreek was long and mostly boring. Neither of us has the passwords to get onto the local versions of the applications we normally work with, like A/R, Deposits and Petty Cash for Josie, and the Payroll system for me. I was able to do my normal sales calls though since Arlan, the manager here, gave me his pass code to get into the local version of the sales data base. The best part though was that there were no ecalls. We are nervous about locating the apartment that has a problem in the case of an ecall. The building is constructed with lots of turns and bends in the hallways, plus 3 different levels in the building split by the dining room. We have a schematic of the building, but in an emergency, it may take some extra time to locate the source of the problem.

The way the schedule is laid out here, we have almost 3 full days of  coverage. Starting with 7 PM on Saturday night, we work straight through to 3 PM on Tuesday. That includes all the ecall times during the night hours. Essentially, we are married to the building for 68 straight hours! The Managers do have an advantage, besides the extra money they make. However, the Managers have to take the heat when the sales lag, so there is that trade off.

We sent an email to our Regional Director yesterday afternoon to try to find out where we are headed, and when we will leave here. No response has been received yet, so he is probably trying to finalize his plan. We originally heard we would be going to the community in Palmdale for 2 weeks, but we have to wait and see. So far, the reaction to our being here has been positive.

Another big difference here is that the kitchen staff relies a lot more on help from the managers. We had no part in busing and/or serving at Arcadia Place, but the managers here have set a dangerous precedent by helping the kitchen staff in those areas. We have helped somewhat but it is sad to us to see the kitchen staff taking their time to complete their tasks because they have become dependent on that help. That's what this "floating" assignment does for us - it allows us to see how different the communities run their daily operations. Some of the different things are positive, and some are negative. It will be nice if we can take all the positive stuff and implement it someplace where we have that option.

Finally, the weather has turned beautiful, and we have to work for 4 more days...