don't worry - I'm alive

But just barely. As I indicated in a previous post, work is strangling me. I shall briefly re-cap:

-In April, we had a second round of layoffs. On that oh-so-fun day, the secretarial and document services department assistant was let go. Also on that day, someone had the brilliant idea to suggest me to pick up her assorted duties.

My official title is Attorney Recruiting Assistant. This means I do a hell of a lot with the recruiting, retention, and development of attorneys at the firm. I help with the summer program, candidate interview scheduling, am responsible for their orientation to the firm, their training programs, and any and all logistics associated with it. Why someone thought I could also take another person's job over is beyond me. My manager and coordinator were not too thrilled about it, either.

Anyway, I've been trying my best for the past six months. And it's been draining. If it wasn't enough of a stress to move the entire building in August/September and get switched over to Office 2007 this week, juggling two jobs has pushed me over the edge.

It's easy enough stuff, but there are simply too many things to accomplish in not enough time. Even though I get OT, with my paltry base salary the extended hours and pressures are really not worth it. Oh, and I have two managers in this department, and they aren't fond of having to co-manage together (awkward....).

Here's what I'm supposed to be doing:
1) Updating attendance records (fabulous spreadsheets) for 40+ employees (entering lots of requests, making several changes, following up to correct mistakes, etc)
2) Managing coverage for planned and unplanned absences, and booking covering secretaries (involves so many emails it makes me cry)
3) Multiple IS-related requests to our main office for access to a variety of things for secretaries(like the ability to enter reimbursements for their attorneys)
4) Distributing and collecting evaluation forms from attorneys for their secretarial support (and sadly, we are so behind in the times these are all hard copy forms- gah!). Oh, and did I mention my office has approx. 175 attorneys? Yeah.
5) Assorted special projects

So right - I can't do all those things AND my recruiting stuff. And I came to this realization late last week - why am I killing myself at work? I'm not advancing my career by caring more about it, and they aren't paying me more to care so much. I spent most of the weekend fuming and being in a rotten mood (which has been carrying over to work, especially the last several weeks). On Monday, my recruiting team met at our weekly check-in meeting and my manager asked how it was going with the secretarial department.

My response?
"I hate it."

The three of us talked it out a bit, and we came to the conclusion that I was splitting my time 80/20 - not the agreed upon 50/50. This is a problem. My recruiting manager wants her 30% back!

Soooo I wrote out my beef this week, and my recruiting manager is on board to fight for that 30% back. She looked at my updated job description and scoffed, as did I. It's impossible.

One of my secretarial managers is aware of what's going on more than the other. Unfortunately she's frequently MIA which makes my job all the more frustrating.

Oh well. We're all going to meet about it today and hopefully clear the air and get all this responsibility off my back.

Doing all this extra work isn't exactly advancing my career in recruiting and development per se. But after we get this resolved, at least I'll be able to use the experience to my advantage. It made me realize that I can't save the world by taking on too many things. It taught me how to manage upwards, and deal with multiple managers and priorities.

The irony of it all? I'm going to a day-long seminar on Monday that I really pushed to get approval for: Managing Multiple Projects, Objectives and Deadlines.

Awesome.