Week 30

This week I've mostly just focused on staying on top of my work and making it to physical therapy.

Things I did during my mission assignment:

• Lead a discussion on the talk "The Love of God" by President Uchtdorf. This is a must read. Studying this talk has really strengthened my testimony of Heavenly Father's love for us and the love that I want to have for others.
• Attempted to sort through all sorts of ridiculous charges on someone's tuition receipts.
• Asked lots of questions.
• Tracked down mystery employees and then terminated their records when they proved to no longer exist.
• Restocked the NOB workrooms with just about everything (hand sanitizer, 5 different kinds of pens, 2 kinds of pencil, notepads (2 colors), highlighters (assorted colors), sticky notes (If they want fancy colors they can go find their own), tape, paper clips, binder clips and elastics. The only thing they don't seem to run out of regularly are staples and folders. At least I didn't have to order more tissues. Seriously, how can they go through so many tissues?
• Tried again to convince managers that they have to submit a Workfront request to have an employee terminated instead of forwarding me an old e-mail. We have a process for a reason... so I don't have to e-mail you five times to get all the information I need and then forward it all to five different people.
• Attend a meeting to discuss how we get new employees set up with everything. Apparently we all thought someone else was doing it when the managers were having to call all the departments individually. Whoops.
• Added up the years of work for temporary employees. Temps or Contingents can only work for two years and then they have to quit for 6 months. (Otherwise the Divison of Labor comes down hard on us for not providing the same benefits we would a full-time employee.) But certain managers (cough, cough) keep trying to move their employees around so that it looks like they haven't been here two years. Which 1) does not work, 2)means that we can't help them or the employees much when the suddenly all their temps have to leave, and 3) makes my job a lot harder.
• Worked on an article.
• Attempted to sort through hiring rubrics that declined to provide either a) the number of the empty position or b) the name of the person who once had the job. Oh I'm sorry, you wanted a new language designer because someone is retiring? I'll just guess out of your fifty employees which job it is... (In case you were wondering, the phrases "That's so helpful," while dripping with sarcasm; "why would you do that?" "what were they thinking?" and "No." are very popular in our little portion of HR. Even if we don't say it to anyone else).
• Make emergency phone calls because someone's phone was not set up on time, and oh the horror! Turns out the guy has a cell-phone anyway and totally could have done without a desk-phone for a while. Why do I always get the weird assignments?

I did get two great quotes out of lunch this week.

1) When I asked an elder about his blood-sugar-tester-device another Elder exclaimed suspiciously, "It's a vampire in a box!"

2) In answer to a question, Sister Gowans explained, in the most perfect terms I've ever heard, that "

Roots Tech is like ComicCon for Family History nerds." All they need to do now is come dressed up as their favorite ancestor...