Handover

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:51:00 +0000

I’m tired. I’m stressed.

I won’t pretend to hide it.

I’m pissed off at the system, thoroughly fed up of how things currently are - in my work, my life, and in many things around me.

Yet, still, most things are going fairly well…

I’m now the “AV manager”, and discovering more and more how disorganised and messed up it is.

We have small forms in the drawer under the computer which are used during the sunday service on board, we give out the little forms, then people can fill them in if they want to, so that they can give to the weekly offering (usually to help a local ministry, or work in India, or similar) direct from their on board account, rather than having to use cash.

Anyway, this morning, the guy running the service came up and asked for them.. We had 10. Not good enough! So, I told him a few ideas of who he could ask for more, but this was at half an hour before the service, on a Sunday Morning. Not the best time to go looking for people to do random work like that.

We need to have once a week or so someone to check how many we have, say on a Friday, and then to get at least 200 before the Sunday morning.

Not a big deal, right?

Well, no, not a problem at all. Just the problem is that there are *hundreds* of little issues like this. Every day. And *NONE* of them are written down. When I started, there were no current weekly checklists or anything.

I don’t want to become a lists and rules based dictator, but how on earth else do you manage to get everything done that needs to be?

When I took over this job, there was maybe 1 hour of discussion between me and the predecessor about stuff, but none of these little details were noted. Each day day I find mord

And it was the same thing when I became waterman, 2 years ago. There’s no consistancy! As soon as people leave, things get dropped.

It’s why ships tend to have such strict and over the top and detailed procedures - everything gets written down.

Anyway. It’s just intensely frustrating. I’m so bad at admin, so weak at organisation, so forgetful about details, so easily overwhelmed by situations, so inexperienced at leadership, so unknowledgeable about everything technical I should know about, so young!

I guess in one way it’s kind of exciting. I mean, whoopee! So much stuff to learn! So much I can improve!

Yet it’s kind of hard to say that and not at least have some irony and sarcasm in it too.

Yes, it’s good to be stretched and have all this improvement to do, but at the same time, it’s “live”. We’re not playing with blank bullets. Every round is for real.

Every time I start a video playing in a programme, it’s not school, not training. People are in the programme, watching, and notice if things don’t work.

Snafu on Madprof's workshop

Handover