Two past students meeting up

I like working with students. It's one aspect of my work that I enjoy and don't want to give up.

Last night, I had a text conversation with a former student. She let me know that she met another student from my program who was there a couple of years before she was. I joked and asked whether they were in therapy together after spending time at the workplace.

She let me know that she was on a student panel, sharing experiences of being in a co-op program at their university. She recognized the other student's name and they met. Cool!

She was kind to say that they both talked about how much they loved me. It's always nice to hear.

Hormones and stress factors

Hormones continue to fascinate me. For years, my menstrual cycle was completely abnormal. I could go a year without getting my period.

It wasn't until I lost sixty pounds that my menstrual cycle became monthly. These days, it's almost predictable to the day, except when there are stress factors.

In the past, if I were doing a major trip where there was a whole lot of last-minute planning, I would miss my period for that month.

Recently, I lost the incompetent colleague and knew about it a day before it happened. I feel that this event caused my period to be delayed.

My two students had their final workday on Friday. It wasn't until Saturday morning when my period came, a week after it should have.

Hormones are sensitive. I don't fully understand how they work, but they fascinate me and I need to live with them.

Work term, virtual reality, and sleep

It has been a great and memorable few days. My students have officially ended their work term. More on all that later. I am still soaking up everything.

The other night, I went to a virtual reality arcade. It was so much fun! I played Fruit Ninja VR and am hooked!

I'll write more when I'm not sleepy. Enjoy your weekend!

Students, plaid skirt, and a spanking

I have spent the last hour putting together farewell gifts for my students. Earlier in the day, I went out to get gourmet cookies that they love. I also gave them a mug with chocolates inside.

It has been great having them on board. I will be sad to see them go. They do need to head back to university. They are in a few classes together this upcoming term.

My guy likes thinking about my playing his student.

"I would spank you for every question you got wrong on my exam," he said.
"I like that. You'd spank me no matter what result I got on it," I noted.
"Yes, that's true," he replied.
"We both win. I need to find that plaid short skirt of mine," I replied.

He likes that skirt. He immediately got hard. I was already wet. It's all good.

Long weekend is over - looking at a busy workweek

The long weekend is nearly over. It has been great as far as my catching up on sleep.

This week will be busy. It is the last week for my two students before they head back to university. I have a colleague who has joined my team for over a month now. Although she is more competent than the one who was just let go, she does have some odd quirks.

Her punctuality needs work. She constantly says that she will get to work by 9:30 am, but it ends up getting worse towards the end of each workweek. Last Thursday, she came into my regularly weekly 9:30 am meeting at 10:10 am.

She also wanted to "hang out" with the rest of the team on Monday. We have some release work and wanted us to work in a room. She completely forgot what I had said last week, which was that we can't be doing all that. My students have a project that they have been working on with our manager. I am doing document migration to a new system. She has two releases to work on, with support form the rest of us.

She is considered a senior colleague as far as years of experience in the workforce. Yet, she doesn't appear to be senior. I did enjoy her odd e-mail that she had sent out to our team last week.

This weekend was short. I have a lot of stuff to do. I will work from home today.

Our manager wasn't thrilled with her response. I had a talk with her saying that she sounded like a high school student who had no clue how to write a decent e-mail and wasted time trying to clarify with our manager.

We'll see how things roll this week.

Bonus pay + interviews = good news

I got a glimpse of how much my bonus pay will be before taxes are taken off. It's impressive! We'll see how much is left after the dust settles on Thursday.

There is a good chance that I will be doing a short road trip to interview prospective students for our next work term. It's exciting.

I'm off to bed. I'm exhausted with all this good news!

Clearance to get a new student at work

Good news! My department has been given the go-ahead signal to hire a student for the upcoming term. Yay!

Things are busy and odd with my team as of late. I love my students who are with me for another five weeks. The two regular employees on my team are nice, but odd.

Anyway, I'm off to bed. I'm that tired. Have a great weekend!

My students do not want to fight me, which is good

My students were chatting with me the other day. We were all in a jovial mood. Somehow, we got into this short conversation, talking about something.

"I disagree. We need to step out and fight it out," one of them joked.
"Um, no," said the other student.
"I can take you," the first student said. "I can beat everyone, except Cutiebootie. I don't want to mess with her."

I have smart students.

Issues with the new employee continue

I haven't talked about the new employee for a bit. She is definitely the most challenging person to understand. This post explores a lot of my thoughts that I have shared with various folks for the past month.

We have a new authoring tool that most of our team has been gearing up to move to. I have said to this person that she is not ready. She doesn't have the basics down with our current authoring tool. My team consisting of this woman and two students are staying on our current tool.

She is stubborn and adamant to learn the new tool. Her reasoning, according to what she told my two students, is that there isn't a relationship between the two authoring tools. Um, that's because you don't understand the existing tool well enough to see that your transition to the new one will be difficult if you don't have a decent foundation on how things work.

Before the Christmas holidays, I had instructions for my two students to look at the training materials on the new tool. I specifically told the new employee that she wasn't ready and to focus on learning our current tool. What does she do? She watched one of the videos on the new tool.

She has raised a number of red flags in my eyes. The first one occurred during her third interview (it was my second one with her) where she said that she was a "slow learner." I brought that up to my manager, but he dismissed it. He thought that the extra time she spends after work to learn would make her catch up.

I was right. Hiring a slow learning in an IT field is bad.

She has been with the company for over two months. She cannot grasp simple things like knowing that the entire team is away on an all-employee meeting, which means that the team will not respond to her e-mails. She couldn't attend because she had a medical appointment that day and worked from home. Yet, she constantly sent out e-mails and even texted one of my students over work when she got to this offsite meeting that was not urgent. She does not take into consideration whether folks are physically able to respond to her e-mails. She is only thinking about herself.

Most of our department has to do a test that grants you access to this new tool, but for the production (live) environment. I said to this new employee that her main focus is to get up to speed with work so that she takes over one of my documentation software release duties. Her deadline is later than everyone else's to do this test. My manager made the same comment in a departmental meeting last Thursday.

What does she do? The following day, she takes this test. She hasn't gone through all the training materials or videos. She just did the test over and over again (you select either one answer or some combination) until she passed it.

I was annoyed. I told her so on Monday. The fact that she just asked for access to the test environment and was absolutely afraid to even log on was a joke. Now, she has access to a production environment where she could mess up everything with her current "knowledge" that she allegedly proved to possess on this test.

I told her she put the cart before the horse.. How meaningful are the answers that she memorized to ultimately pass this test? Not all that meaningful at this stage.

She doesn't listen. She has difficulty comprehending simple concepts. Yet, she does whatever she feels like.

She pointed out that she's not a linear learner. Yep, it shows. She is all over the map to the point where none of us truly knows what she is thinking. She has no sound judgment about much.

I had a talk with my manager on Monday night. I told him that my students and I have been drilling her with exercises and explaining concepts in multiple different ways. It is the plan that he first devised. It doesn't appear to be helping. I levelled with him and said that she wasn't a fit for this job. He nodded.

The problem is that the company is under a hiring freeze. We let her go and I am back to doing everything. I personally don't want her becoming a permanent employee at this company. She is not pulling her weight. I don't always want to be saving the day because we can't get another employee to fill the void.

On Tuesday, my manager wrote an e-mail to her and copied me. It was a snowday. He basically reinforced that she needs to work on understanding concepts and her job. All of us have noticed that she is great at memorizing, but does not understand what she is spewing out. She doesn't have critical thinking skills. She can't think for herself.

I had this chat with my guy when we were in the States. He agrees that it's probably better to get rid of her than having her pull down everyone.

The current plan is to have my students work with her on simulating a documentation release. We are assessing how she will do within the next two weeks. I have a feeling that she will be at the level that she is currently at -- slow and incompetent.

She's a nice person. She's just not suitable for this job.

Thoughts about how a newbie learns

It has been nearly two weeks that my students and I have been training the new employee. It has been a challenge for all of us.

I am still trying to figure out how this new employee learns. It's difficult to narrow down, but here are my notes:

• She is an extremely slow learner. She requires tons of repetition doing the same task before she begins to understand it.
• She is not good at recognizing patterns. If there is a clear example on the page, she does not know how to apply that example to solve her current problem.
• She does not read well. It doesn't matter whether she has a checklist or a procedure on how to do a task, she does not read details carefully. She also does not read e-mails well.
• Her comprehension is dismal. She constantly relies on my PowerPoint slides and treats them as the gospel. When she has a checklist to go through, she is still dependent on her slides and doesn't realize that the checklist takes precedence. When I quiz her on how to do something, she goes to her printed slide notes and doesn't get it. So, it's another explanation, but from a different angle. 
• She says thanks too often. Sure, we are all Canadian. However, saying thanks after every other sentence that we say does not register knowledge that we have passed on to her. It is also overkill.
• She is afraid to try anything on her own. When she had a question on how to edit a page the other day, I asked her to give it a try. She gave me a firm, "No!" Um, okay. Odd.

She does have a cartoon character voice. It's squeaky. One of my colleagues called it cute. I find it annoying the more she talks, which is pretty often.

My manager was impressed by how much information and research she did for her second interview. I didn't feel the same way. I realize now that it was all memorization. The comprehension is nonexistent. 

The red flag that I had during her second interview was that she admitted that she was a slow learner. I pointed that out to my boss. He said that the extra work that she does after hours will get her learning faster. I didn't think that it was the case then. I certainly don't see it now.

It is still frustrating dealing with someone who does not get what she is doing. I have even seen my students get frustrated.

Here's hoping that things get better, although things look bleak right now.

Strong support and laugher help get me through missing my guy

As crazy as work is these days, it's nice that my students and I get along well. We spent the day working on various tasks as a group and got a lot done.

Hanging out with them and being able to make one another laugh was wonderful. We all needed it.

It's nice that I am back to being my happy self. I will always miss my guy when he is away, but having a good support group helps ease the temporary pain.

The network is down - a perfect storm

It all started on Friday. Our content management system to author content was down just before lunch. We got database errors. My department seems paralyzed when such incidents take place. I got one of my students to report the problem.

Unfortunately, our helpdesk support is halfway around the world and doesn't look at off-hour issues. Ugh!

On the weekend, I had to do some preparation work. My team needed to create two documentation projects and requires all folks to not be working. I planned on doing this work on Saturday. Sure enough, I tried doing some copying work and database errors took place.

There errors were intermittent, though. I logged in using my regular account and I got tons of errors. I tried copying smaller sections with another administrative account and that worked. Weird.

Yesterday, I had my regularly scheduled 8 am meeting. I drive to work on the call. This meeting was delayed by half an hour. I called in about fifteen minutes from work. I couldn't connect to the network.

I walked into a meeting room that I had booked for my little team. My students told me that every network connection was down. It now made sense why I couldn't connect to my conference call. 

I walked over to the lunch room to get some hot water for my tea. I found out that there was a Canada-wide outage. Nice.

I headed back to my students to relay the news. I found out later that it was a global problem.

E-mail was down. I loved it. I didn't have any distractions. I didn't have to respond immediately to my manager's questions due to his incompetence.

Slowly, the network came back up. My team was able to log in to most of our applications and continue with our content projects. Others on my team weren't that lucky.

It was a trying day. My team handled it with grace and humour. We are good with teamwork, fuelled by cookies.

A call to set up a lunch date

During the intermission between bands the other night, I remembered that I needed to forward a work e-mail to my guy. He works from home and only comes to the office when he needs to.

He is travelling this weekend and will be away on business for two weeks. I had to let him know that the parking lot is going through a ton of construction at work, which is outlined in the forwarded e-mail.

I also told him that I was in his neck of the woods with my manager the following day to conduct student interviews for the upcoming work term.

On Tuesday, I participated in these interviews. At around 15:30, my cell phone rang. I didn't pick it up in time. My guy had called.

I immediately called him back. I was in a room with my manager, so I couldn't be too mushy.

"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said. "Am I interrupting your interviews?" he asked me.
"Our last candidate is writing a test, so your timing is perfect. How are you doing?" I asked him.
"I'm good. How about you?" he asked me back.
"I'm hanging in there," I replied.
"Just letting you know that my trip is confirmed. I fly out on Saturday at 16:00," he said.
"Cool. Can we do lunch?" I asked him.
"Sure. How about 13:00?" he asked.
"Perfect," I replied.
"I'll let you go, so you continue to grill," he teased.
"I don't grill!" I said.

He's sweet and thoughtful. I like when he calls me. It made my day.

Packed with parting gifts

I am all packed. I am ready for my Labour Day weekend staycation to begin!

Friday was a good day. It was my two students' last day with the company. We went out of a casual lunch. It was nice spending nearly two hours away from the workplace.

They are incredibly thoughtful, creative folks. They gave me thank-you gifts, which consisted of chocolate and tea. I love both.

The quieter one of the two drew M&M's characters that I love on the gift tag. She also made sure that the gift tag's string was purple, which happens to be my favourite colour.

It was great working with them. I get to start the entire process again, but with a single student who starts next week.

It's simply nice to have a long weekend. I get to rest up before the craziness begins!

Stress - need a mental health day

I feel achy. Physically, I feel a dull ache all over my body towards the end of the day. It's such an odd feeling. It has persisted for a couple of days now.

I have a feeling that it is stress-related. One of my students is wrapping up her workterm on Friday. My other two students end their term the following week. I go back to handling everything until folks come and relieve me.

Next workterm, I only have one student. I also have one full-time person taking over most of my duties, but she needs to clear a background check. This check can take weeks.

I am supposedly moving on to do process work. However, my manager continues to dump ridiculous tasks on me. I truly don't have time to do work that he can easily do.

Tomorrow, which is really today, I am taking a sick day. I need a mental health break. I also need a physical one.

It is important to listen to what your body is saying. Mine is screaming for some rest. I can also tell that it is stress-related when the left side of my neck gets tight.

Being compassionate is positive

I am fortunate to have three students this term. One of them, before she started her internship, had indicated that she needed surgery in July.

She had her surgery last Wednesday. She stayed in the hospital for a couple of days and has been discharged. She is resting comfortably at home.

I am a sensitive person when it comes to such matters. When my manager injured his eye, I got everyone on the team to chip in for a fruit bouquet. When another writer on my team got injured in a car accident, I ordered a flower and food basket while I was in Montreal training writers over there on behalf of our team.

With my other two students, I made the suggestion to send her a get-well gift. They liked the idea.

As expected, the one student who started in May took the initiative to look up floral gifts and even order it! The other one, who has worked with me the longest, is the youngest, and doesn't exhibit as much initiative, seems to be more comfortable with these two students than the last one that she was with. I am glad, because the other two are slightly older and are mature beyond their years.

We all corresponded back and forth about the floral gift, how to expense it, what to write, and so on. It was a good exercise in being caring human beings.

They will do just fine in this world.

Gifts and appreciation

I like my co-op students. I have three of them for this workterm, which is a record number for me.

On Monday, I met with them and gave them small gifts from my Shanghai travels. I tried to get a couple of items that were made or from China. We joke fairly often that most materialistic items come from this country. However, I truly was looking for items that they would like from China.

I got them each a bag of loose leaf jasmine tea. From China? Check. It's fragrant and helps reduce stress, among other things.

My other gift sounds odd. I found the Hershey's Store in Shanghai. I got milk chocolate in the shape of small balls. They were housed in a beautiful Hello Kitty tin with no English on it. You had a mountain behind Hello Kitty with Chinese characters on the tin. Perfect!

On Thursday, they mentioned how yummy the chocolate was and how much they appreciated the gifts that I had given them. They didn't see it coming, which is the best type of gift that I enjoy dishing out.

My vacation has started... bon voyage!

I am finally done packing. I leave in roughly twelve hours. I am officially on vacation and it feels great.

I have the sweetest co-op students. Two of them came by my desk before they called it a day on Friday to wish me a nice vacation. The third one, who sits a couple of desks down, also did the same.

My guy travels home today. He chatted with me fairly late his time on Friday. It was nice to hear from him as I was buying Chinese yuan currency for my trip.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful weekend!

My vacation is fast approaching and folks are worried about my being away

I go on vacation at the end of the month. I can see some concern among my colleagues, particularly my co-op students and my manager.

A few weeks ago, when I said that I was going to get my tourist visa from the consulate office, my manager paid attention. Since then, he constantly has the fact drilled in his head that I am on vacation for 2.5 weeks.

He is a worry wart. I gave notice of my vacation time five months ago. Yes, I am that prepared.

My guy says that my manager has every right to be worried. Without me, things will sink. My guy is sweet, but he does have a point. I am the longest serving writer on the team. I am knowledgeable. I am reliable and am good at what I do.

On Monday, one of my co-op students asked me when I go on vacation. I am easing her into some of my meetings. She is a bit concerned, but I tend to ease her mind. Same goes with the new co-op students. I guide them with whatever tasks that I give them. I do feel bad that I will be leaving them after a month since they first joined us, but they do understand that I am busy and deserve time off.

I am not sure whether I will be able to blog while in Shanghai. I do have a VPN, so that would be one method to try. I don't feel like writing a ton of posts before I leave. I like more spontaneous posts.

New hires, training, and my eye

It has been a busy workweek, which isn't surprising considering how crazy my workload can get. However, there are quite a number of exciting changes.

First, my longest-serving student is training two new students and a new technical writer this week. It is odd that I am not fully doing the training. My student doesn't know all her stuff, so I need to fill in the knowledge gaps. As a result, I still need to be a part of the training sessions.

I always find meeting new hires to be exciting. I get to know them and understand how they learn. We haven't scared them, which is great. They are also good at asking questions. So far, so good.

My manager has odd expectations that my student will train and I will provide support, meaning that I don't have to do much. However, we both know that his assumption is false. He is pretty worried that I will be away for more than two weeks. It is new territory for both of us.

My guy and I talked the other day about my being away. He says that my manager should be worried. He is dependent on me. I have hinted that he is far too dependent, particularly being his go-to person for team expenses. My being on vacation for a longer period shows my point to be the case.

Today, I have my second eye injection for my eye stroke. I find that I am seeing a bit better. However, I can't tell if the drug injection is working, time is helping to clear up some of the blood in my central vision, or my eyes are simply adjusting to my eye's current state. I can only hope that my vision improves as much as possible.

The good news is that I no longer get dizzy when I look at objects. When it first happened, looking around made me so dizzy that I would have to either close my eyes or look down. The latter works because I don't see the blood and my vision is clearer that way.

I am working from home afterward my appointment. It simply means that I am on a conference call, listening in on my student training and following her presentation, and my taking over when there are gaps.

There are plenty of gaps. It's not unexpected. I am more a part-time trainer this week.

My student is doing a pretty good job for her first attempt. It simply means that there is room for improvement as she acquires more experience.