Waiting, waiting

I wrote the other day about my upcoming redundancy.

Today was the day we were hoping we'd get our form A, the official notification that we're no longer required. Because of problems getting access to certain computer systems for our replacements, we knew by about Wednesday that we probably weren't going to get our forms today.

I'm on RDO today, so I wouldn't have got mine anyway, but I just got a call from a colleague to tell me we'll probably get them next Friday now... maybe. We're pretty used to this kind of thing by now, in fact we've come to expect it. We're not complaining too loudly though, as I wrote in my previous post, if we go in the new financial year we end up paying less income tax on the leave that's paid out. To put it another way, the longer we stay, the more money we get.

In the mean time, some of us are training our replacements. I've been sitting with them for the past week and a bit, helping them get the hang of our databases. I've been doing the job for eight years now and I can complete most simple orders in under a minute. Watching a new operator, especially one who's keyboard skills aren't very good, can be really tiring. I sit there willing the cursor to move to the right place on the screen and willing the operator to ask the tech the right question. The sound of relief in the tech's voices when I drop into a call to help out is really noticeable. The relief when I get to take a couple of calls myself and do it at full speed is also noticeable.

The new operators will mostly handle the job okay I think. Some are already doing pretty well and are ready to fly solo so to speak. They'll be calling for help a lot, but they won't be tying up an experienced operator all the time. I know from experience that they'll all be calling for help occasionally, for months to come. I've trained people that have come to me for help a couple of years after they started. Unfortunately, the help won't be there for the IBM people, because we'll all be gone.

I could always give them my mobile number and charge a consultancy fee every time they ring I suppose. When it comes right down to it though, I learnt the job from scratch without any training. We made it up as we went along in the early days of our department. There's no reason the new people can't do the same. They'll make mistakes, we did, as long as they learn from them.