Day of Craziness

Today has been one crazy day. I did a lot of cleaning before I left for work this morning. I got to work and it was complete chaos. The phones were ringing off the hook. People kept screwing up the most simple of things and they had no idea how to fix them. They were calling about stuff that they shouldn't be calling about on a month end. Let me give you an idea of how the day was.  We have had 88 calls today.  On an average day we usually get between 20 and 30.  On a month end 50 is probably normal. 88 doesn't sound like a lot. But keep in mind there are only 3 of us answering the phones. And the calls probably average around 8 minutes each. So that works out to be almost 12 hours of time spent on the phone. So divide that up and that is 4 hours on the phone for each of us.  That is only half our shift right?  Wrong.  We spend at least that off hte phone fixing things and finding solutions to problems that people have called about. Plus on month end we have to run the month end process of 5 credit unions.  That alone takes around 4 hours to do. Needless to say, it has been a very busy day.  I will be lucky to be done with all the month end processing that I have to do before midnight.  Fortunately I can finish some of it from home.

In case you are wondering what I am talking about when I say month end processing, I will tell you.  Month end processing is the processing that credit unions do at the end of the month.  It includes things like paying out dividends on accounts, charging finance charges on credit cards, printing all kinds of reports, and sending out statements.  It is fairly involved and if it is messed up the consequences can be bad and are a pain to fix.  So we get a lot of calls on month end. Year end is much worse.  There are even more processes we have to get done that day. Oh, to run the month end processes the credit unions have to be closed so we have to work late into the night to get them done.  The worst month ends to work are the ones that fall on weekdays.  Like today.  I will be working until almost midnight and then I will be back to work first thing in the morning. It sucks.  But that is life. It could be worse.  We could have to come in and start the processing at like 1 in the morning.