So I finally have something worthy of blogging about!

This past weekend, a co-worker (Annette) got married. Congratulations to her. She's nice enough, but she isn't very dedicated to her job. She doesn't really do much, she doesn't even handle that many accounts, and some outside salesmen don't even want her handling any of their accounts. So she was off on Thursday and Friday right before her wedding, and I believe the wedding was on Saturday.

She was due back to work on Wednesday with the rest of us, only she didn't show up. Now, our boss took that day off, so she could have left a message on his voice mail, and we wouldn't know it. When I arrive at work today, my boss is already there, a couple other people in my department are there, but no Annette. When someone calls in sick, or will be late, or out for whatever reason, we have a big dry erase board so other people in the office know who will not be in that day. There was nothing posted about Annette not being in today.

About 9am, I was walking past the fax machine that sits behind my cubicle. I saw some faxes on it, so I pulled them off and started looking through them to distribute accordingly. The first few were for one person, and the last two were for my boss. One was a typed letter from Annette, stating that she is officially resigning from her position at the company effective yesterday July 5. Who would FAX in their resignation? No phone call, nothing in person, just the fax. And she knew she was doing it; She took all her personal stuff home with her last Wednesday. Either none of us realized it, or we refused to acknowledge the possibility of her quitting. We all knew it was coming eventually, she's going back to school, after all. I guess she's going to be a Napra Path, but to quit over the fax?

I show it to one person, to see if she knew anything about it, she didnt. Then I quietly put it in my boss's in tray. About 9:30 or so I see him get up and go talk to his boss. I, of course, know what they're talking about. Then we all get an email, stating they'd like to have a short meeting about 10:30. I know what this meeting is about too. At 10:30, we all assemble in one of the conference rooms, and it is revealed to the rest of the department that Annette has chosen to burn her bridges and her friendships, and resign with no notice or instructions to anyone regarding her accounts.

My boss then proceeds to begin discussing the few accounts she handles, comparative to the rest of us, and offers his suggestions as to who would be able to handle some extra work. The two obvious people are myself and Mike, who sits next to me. We are the lucky ones. Everyone else gets to go back to work, Mike and I are kept to go over which accounts we'd get, and what mill's we buy from for those accounts. Like I mentioned, Annette didn't do much, so the accounts that Mike and I got aren't HUGE, but it will be extra work. Coincidentally, just this morning, Mike mentioned to me how slow he is right now. Perfect timing!

I will be handling two service centers/processors that are owned by the same parent company as us. They are like a sister company to us. They have several locations in the U.S., I will be handling the one in Alabama, plus one specific end user that is supplied by both the Alabama location and the Illinois location. Not a lot of work, but enough to make me busier than I have been. And I don't mind the extra work. Unfortunately, I would have liked to have gotten the opportunity to get caught up on my filing that's been piling up since last year. I've gotten some done, but there is still a lot left to be done, and as I file more, I pile up more, lol. So really, I'm not getting anywhere at all with it!

At 11:30, my boss and I went over to Annette's desk and started going through everything to sort through what is now mine, and what is now Mike's. I walked back to my desk with a stack of orders, faxes, invoices, product certifications, etc. Where to put it? Not on my desk! No room, lol. Onto the empty desk it went, the one Linda used to sit at. Once I could get a little more caught up on my own stuff, THEN I'd look at it. But it had to be today. If there was stuff in there from June, today was the last day to do it.

Finally about 2pm, I started going through it. I found some duplicate faxes, pitched all but one, sent the answer back to the mill. I also had to send them some shipping notices that we never got invoices for, dated 6/1. Who would wait a freaking month for invoices? We normally get them within a week! Got that all sorted out. I filed some stuff in my drawers that I don't really need to do anything with. I also put away some recent status reports that have been sent to the customer. That's one of the services we provide...once a week we print out status reports from the mill and send them to our customers so they know what's on order, what stage it's at, when it will be due, etc.

Glad tomorrow is Friday, it should be interesting!