I'm liking my new role at work. It's a lot less individual responsibility - as in if I don't do my filing one day, I can do it the next day - which makes it way more laid back. It's less intellectually stimulating, but that's kind of nice as I have seemingly overloaded on my personal life these days.
My goal when we returned to the South from Australia was to actually take part in life here. So that I did. I signed up for a women's Bible study through church. I signed up for a sewing class through Community Education (a fantastic deal that made my Dutch heart swell with pride). Then, my sewing class was cancelled due to funding issues. I then decided to take a Hawaiian class online. Then after the protestations of the community, my Community Education class was reinstated. Yeah. So in a matter of a few weeks I went from being unemployed with few responsibilites to working 40 hours a week, having class two nights a week plus an online class! Holy cannolli! Not to mention CO's basketball team is in the finals of the intramural basketball league (against some underclassmen some 10 years younger) so one night a week he plays basketball. I, the doting wife that I am, go to watch his team play. Add to that church on the weekends, trying to meet up with friends, and trying to explore the region a bit... free time is non-existent.
Anyway, back to my story...
At work, I file reports. And I mail back slides and tissue samples (for lack of a better phrasing) from cases where our pathologists are outside consultants. Today, I learned how to do the send-backs and was given a huge pile of them. In addition, I received 3 packages of send-backs that were returned to us due to incorrect addresses (yes, the send-backs were sent back... to us). I went about calling the appropriate people and getting the correct addresses for the first two packages and then I noticed the last package was addressed to the Veterans hospital. The Veterans hospital on our same campus. Hmm. We had the wrong address on it? I can pretty much see the destination building from my office. We had paid the USPS to take it out of our building and give it back to us, not delivering it some place that we could have walked to.
My response:
1. I need to find the correct address
2. I need to get the package to the correct address
Ok, so I called the number on the paperwork to get the correct address for the Veterans hospital. I waited for the operator to transfer me to the pathology department there. A poor resident answered the phone but had no clue of where to send the slides. She then gave me two other numbers to call to verify the address. I then called one of the numbers and they told me the proper address, but asked why we had paid money and not just used the campus mail system. Oh, because I didn't know that we could use the campus mail system, I replied. (And I didn't send the first package either...) She said that she could send something to us via campus mail, but she wasn't sure if we could send things to her via campus mail.
I then called our post office. The first person had no idea what I was talking about. They put me on hold. I then waited for about three minutes. Not on hold, but where you can tell the person just put the phone down (not hung up, just set it on their desk or chair) and walked away. I was beginning to give up hope, thinking that I would have to call back. Just when I was about to hang up, a postal worker picked up and talked to me about campus mail. He said that I could indeed mail something to the Veterans clinic as long as I put it in a blue envelope and put it in a specific mail box. Cool. Cool other than the fact that what I need to send doesn't fit in the blue interdepartmental envelope. And you know, if it's not in the right envelope it could throw them off. I then asked if I could still put the package in the specific mail box but packaged in a box, not the blue envelope. I waited a really long time again and they finally came up with the fact that I indeed am able to put a non-interdepartmental-specific envelope/box in the correct mail box and it will indeed go to the Veterans clinic.
Yeah. In the time that I spent on hold/being transferred in order to answer two questions about mailing some slides, I could have walked to the hospital and back to my office. I might have been able to have stopped for some coffee along the way.
Oh how I love bureaucracies.
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