Knackered

We're understaffed at work at the moment. A couple of our operators in Melbourne have cut back their hours to one day a week. They're contractors, so they aren't obliged to work a full week like the permanent staff.

They're both good operators, both have held the record for the most number of calls taken in a day, but if they're both cutting back to one day a week I don't know why they don't just go and work for MacDonalds or Coles. It just makes it harder on our team leader down there to organise staff.

All the calls that come into our department first go through Melbourne. If all the operators are busy down there they come through to Brisbane, which is kind of the head office for the department. If we're all busy the calls go to messagebank and that's where the performance of the team is rated. Calls through to messagebank are supposed to be below 5% of the total number of calls. Of course, not all calls that reach an operator are logged as they may only be an inquiry. Only calls where we do something in the database show up in the stats.

Up here in Brisbane we have a team member that's retiring soon, so the rest of us are taking over her duties. It saves the company money if they don't replace her. Heaven forbid that we cut into those billion dollar profits.

What this means is that between phone calls we're getting more and more work to do and that work frequently gets interrupted by the next phone call. We're getting heaps more calls now because of the shortage of operators down south (we've had one of sick for a couple of days as well). We can't dial out of the loop (to stop calls coming through) while we're doing the other work otherwise the number of calls to messagebank will go up.

As you can imagine, we don't get much time to relax.

What with the extra stress at work and studying three uni subjects at home (and in my lunch break and on the bus) I've been finding it harder and harder to sleep over the past couple of weeks. So this morning at 5:30 when the alarm went off I thought, stuff it, I'm staying in bed.

I was already awake before my alarm went off. I lay there trying to decide whether or not to go to work or to stay home. It's my RDO tomorrow anyway, and I was going to try and hang on until then, but I think I would have nodded off at my desk if I'd gone to work.