Today, I slept in until 9:30. And yes, it was glorious. Even with the weird dreams (is it from the new Lexapro, the nightly Ambien or has even my subconscious had enough of me dreaming about payroll?). Sleeping in is one of those rare times when I guiltily think “Ya know, if the whole b-a-b-y thing had happened, you’d be awake right now…” and then I roll back over. True story.

Speaking of the nightly Ambien, I am sleeping so well. I have it on good authority from multiple doctors that it is not habit forming to take it every night. My routine is that I take it around 9 or 9:30, then go on Pogo and play a little Twilight Canasta. It’s twilight because I play against a vampire. No, it’s because I’m barely awake by the end of the game. I have also killed a little time linking to people on LinkedIn. I logged into my account yesterday evening before dinner and found that I had a 75% accuracy rate of linking to the correct people. (My only ‘miss’ was from friending the wrong Guy Named Mike at another payroll company. Whatevs, he still accepted me).

Work is…well, it’s work. Nothing new on the new job frontier, but I may change positions at my current place sometime this year. May. I’d rather find a nice payroll manager job somewhere (preferably where I don’t have to actually manage people), but, again, whatevs.

The hounds are lovely as always…Betty, while a tugboat like me, is still the healthiest of the three. Scooby has a permanent case of the Itchies and Sadie has a case of Whipworm. Neither condition prevents them from running around, having fun, and nagging us to death for treats. I’m writing this from the backyard and I just realized I smell something. I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that our neighbors have fertilized something.

(Not that you asked, but our neighbors built a beautiful potting shed in their backyard…it is literally the prettiest structure in our neighborhood. If they had a bathroom and wifi and it were at the beach, they could charge $2000/week to rent it).

Today I turned 35. I’m wearing capris and I just noticed that my left shin looks an awful lot like my Grandma M’s. Off and on, my hands look like hers. I think the lesson here is that I’m finally old enough to moisturize without fear of turning into a pepperoni pizza. Then again, my new bathrobe arrived Tuesday and I was inordinately excited about it. Perhaps I really am just 35 going on 90.

In a little while, Gene and I are going to lunch, then he takes an exam and I go to the Talbots outlet nearby. Then home to chill out for a few hours (perhaps a disco nap?) and then a late dinner and The Hunger Games. We have to get in line about 90 minutes early.

Tomorrow, I have an appointment that I’m looking pretty forward to. Maybe I will update afterwards with a small piece of good news. Then again, maybe I already told you about this and you’ll all think, “What? Your boob job? Yeah, you already told us about this. Loser.”

(It’s not a boob job. If there were a Salvation Army for extra boob I’d be the top donor).

(Also, Hi Dad and Bill and sorry to make you read the last few sentences).

Saturday I’m hanging out with Denise. I don’t know what we’ll be up to but there’s a better than average chance salsa will be involved. Fingers crossed!

(Ha ha. I kill me)

So the new girl @ work…I think I will call her…Lacey. I…just don’t know about this girl. She’s in her late 20s but has the maturity of a 19 year old. Seriously. It’ll be (gloriously) dead quiet in our work area and all of a sudden she’ll bust into a few bars of “Loving You” or, weirder yet, commercial jingles. Who the hell does that?

And a big part of her job is handling shipping…the first half of the week is the busiest time of the week so I tended to start that part of the job around 3 PM at the latest. Yesterday she got in there after 4. The UPS driver comes @ 5:30 and whatever he doesn’t pick up has to be driven to the drop box down the street. In our business, shipping stuff out is not optional.

And for some ungodly reason, Boss Belinda has her answering phone calls. Sometimes it works out…OK…but other times not so much. If she has a question, she’ll ask me but if I’m on the phone she’ll ask anyway which is a ton of fun because my phone calls are generally tough, too.

Here are some other things she’s done: Drafted (but not sent! phew!) an angry email to a high maintenance client. Googled “How do an employee get their tax money back?” Asked me questions like “She wants to know why her bank was charged” without telling me who the hell “She” is. Today was her day to work the “late” shift. I stayed a little late to show her how to clear a client’s calendar and afterwards, I sat down to clock out and go home (only 30 minutes late, wahoo!) and she said “I’m going to the bathroom, I’ll be right back”. Twenty minutes later, she finally returns…during those 20 minutes I had to take 3 more phone calls. The first rule of the late shift is you don’t leave your desk during the late shift!!! (The second rule is that we usually don’t get any phone calls, let alone 3!).

And we have two other new people, right now as well. One of them is just with us for a few more weeks before going to his cushy job elsewhere in the company. Meanwhile, he’s acting like he’s already in his cushy job, spending plenty of time checking his personal email, IMing with his buddies, web surfing for totally non work related things (unless we are now processing payroll for  Theknot.com, I mean). And yes, I know it’s petty but I CAN SEE IT. This just proves to me that our team works our asses off and the rest of the company fucks around all day.

And the other new girl will hopefully work out but I don’t know why she’s not taking calls now. She is seemingly more together than Lacey. She’ll end up mostly working with new clients (which was Broomhilda’s job) so that may be the reasoning.

Seriously. How the hell are these the best people we can hire? HR made a huge deal out of hiring the “right” people…were the “wrong” people toothless hobos?

And now, the backtrack…Boss Belinda has had to talk to Lacey about a few of these things and I honestly feel bad for Lacey. Our job is super tough and Lacey hasn’t worked in the industry before. I once described my job as “out of the frying pan and into the fire, and then someone turned the gas up to high” but at least I have an understanding of how payroll works. I think it’s the equivalent of me getting hired as a rocket scientist at NASA. The poor girl has barely had any training. Maybe with some training she’ll be fixable.

So, all of this talk about Congress continuing to allow the Social Security reduction thing has made me worried. Not because I care if my own paycheck is +/- 2.0% but because they’re talking about continuing this credit for two months.

Two months. Not an entire quarter??? This is going to be SUCH a freaking pain in the ass later in 2012 when all of our new clients are a mess because when we load the previous quarters wages, we generally load it all by quarter (because otherwise it’s a huge PITA) and how the hell do we load a quarter of wages when 2 months of Social Security is 4.2% and the rest is 6.2%?

Congress, stretch it out just a smidge and continue it through March. Or stop it on 12/31/11. Either way. I don’t care. Just please, PLEASE do this one tiny thing to make my life a teeny bit easier.

(American Payroll Association, I think it’s time for your lobbyists to get the eff on this!)

Hmm. Wait a minute…I saw them in 1990, not 1991. Did I just lose an entire year?? LOL. Maybe my 4 days of pretending to be retired has given me early onset Alzheimers.

Long Answer: Here is why I haven’t blogged lately. It’s all just a loooong string of worry.

• Worried about the stupid test (a week and a half to go!), passing it, failing it.
• Worried about work (a lifetime to go!), getting it all done in 40 hours per week. Big boss had a meeting where one of his talking points was “(company) has a negligible amount of overtime!” and I wanted to jump up out of my chair and a) throttle him or b) say “That’s because you BANNED it, you asshat. It’s easy to crow about the lack of something when YOU BAN it! All that means is that some of us are working off the clock!”
• Funny story: Left Tuesday @ 2:50 PM (two hours early and I hadn’t had a lunch that day) and returned Wednesday to find a fat (not phat) stack of shit to do, assigned to me by the recently returned Belinda. OMFG, I’m pretty sure I was being punished for daring to leave early. I’m still working on that stack, BTW, and it’s going to fire off a giant shitstorm on Monday and OH GOD WHY WASN’T I SMART ENOUGH TO GET A REAL JOB???
• WHY?
• Work to-do list has 14 items to do. I’m currently on item #5, I believe. I miss the good old days where my to-do list was “1) Make To-Do list, 2) Read Yahoo! for an hour”. Gene and I watched the season premiere of The Office, and at the scene where Pam’s watching something weepy on YouTube, I said, “Oh, for nothing better to do than watch YouTube at work!”
• I need 4 hours at the office to finish the stack from Belinda, start up two new clients, take an online class in whatever (it was due on 9/2 so I am pretty behind!)*, and complete an exercise from another class that was due today at 7. I’m so embarrassed, but I had to ask for an extension for the exercise as I was too busy doing things that would actually make some money for My Fearless Employer. When the email from our trainer came in to approve the extension I almost cried.
• Ooh, right, been on the verge of tears @ office since Wednesday.
• Belinda said I should take half of today and barricade myself and study for the stupid test. Ha ha. Instead, I spent a little over an hour (half of it off the books) going over one troublesome test related thing w/ a coworker. Time well spent? Who. the. fuck. knows.
• (Seriously, if I’d spent 4 hours today studying, the crap from Belinda from Wednesday would be even further behind and I’d get yelled at for that. The stack is actually 8 smaller tasks, each of which takes at least 2 hours to complete so really, my wish for 4 hours to get all of that done is foolhardy at best. Can I have 8 hours instead?).
• And on the home front…
• Furnace is effed up so we need to replace it to avoid death by asphyxiation (carbon monoxide for the loss!)…
• Which will probably cancel Las Vegas, which is OK, since I’ve only had my motherfucking hopes pinned on it since APRIL. (Not that I planned to strike it rich there, just that no one at Mandalay was going to ask “Hey, Elaine, could you reset my password/answer my question/input pay data for the equivalent of 480 people?”)…
• And tomorrow I get to take Scooby to the vet because his coat (skin?) is looking really awful (and not in a “My dog’s coat is not SHINY” way, more of a “Why is my dog spotted?” way).

2) I was supposed to have my (errmm) annual doctor’s appointment yesterday. The highlight of it (not to say that a pap smear isn’t the most fun you can ever have…) was that I was going to leave the office at 4. Ooh, leaving work early. The sun shining, the highway not a parking lot. I looked forward to that all week! But I got to work and my coworker Mark (who arrives before me) wasn’t there. He was sick (really sick or faking, I’m not sure, but I have a suspicion that we’ll be down one Mark in about a week) so, no doctor or leaving early for me! I called their office and it turns out that the doctor wasn’t going to be there anyway.

(Add that to the “Things I Just Loooove” list: the doctor charges for no shows but I don’t get to charge when HE no shows)

(Ugh, I wanted those two hours so badly).

3) And of course, overtime is banned at the office so the extra time I worked to make up for (theoretically) leaving early ended up as overtime, so I’m going to get my knuckles rapped for that next week.

4) I get my first review on Wednesday.

5) So, well, that’s it. Work, work and more work.

6) Wait! I figured out that even if Vegas is a no-go for November, there’s a cruise to Bermuda that exact week that leaves from Baltimore. Unbelievably, it’s actually cheaper than airfare and 6 days in Las Vegas. A vacation’s a vacation. Mmm, time off.

Hmm. Okay, sorry, I guess that’s it for updates

I don’t know when I’m going to take my Super Hard Payroll Exam yet. I (through the subterfuge-iest of subterfurges) figured out that the exam center in Cheesecake City’s last test date is October 6. I need to get that nailed down ASAP, but first I need to apply for the test. And then I need to somehow get a company credit card to pay for the exam (which is, at $360, at least $360 more than I am willing to personally spend). And then I need to pass a “pre-test” or they won’t let me take the test.

But first I need to study for the exam, which I have only barely started to do in earnest. I spent an hour studying yesterday and an hour or so today, not counting when I passed out while trying to read a chapter about health insurance. It all reminds me why I’m glad I did the college thing when I was fresh out of high school because other wise I wouldn’t have made it.

I hate this stupid test.
I hate studying for it.

I hate that they cancelled my study group so now I’m left pursuing the crumbs of whatever help I can amass.

I hate that it is important to my career in Big Payroll.

I hate that I had to create a fake person to even see the testing schedule because apparently I registered for an ID for the testing company’s website, but I no longer know my username or password and it was apparently vitally important that I know all of this at 11 o’clock at night. (Let’s chalk this up to an “Elaine as I Love Lucy” moment, like the time I tried to fish mail out of the mailbox at work due to being an idiot).

I hate that I’m not disciplined enough to study for this test for real, that I keep  getting distracted by bright and shiny objects like dinner, cleaning up after dinner, watching an episode of Mad Men (on Netflix), etc. I knew some girls in college who went to a full time group of classes, were in a sorority and also on a ton of committees. I envied them, I wanted to be like them, but I am not like them. I’m the girl who (still) says “OMG, Target AND the grocery store? And vacuuming the living room too? In a single weekend? Ugh, better rest up…”

I so need to get my act together. The sooner this all happens the better, but not quite yet. I need at least another couple weeks for studying and cramming and going over the material some more. I know some of this just because I’ve ‘done’ payroll for the last decade, but there is so much! Augh.

And it does. not. help. that I keep getting mixed messages from a coworker. Here’s a conversation we had via IM last week

Her: “How’s studying for the exam going?”

Me: “It’s OK. They cancelled my study group” – I told her this thinking she’d say “Oh no, that’s foolish, you NEEEED the study group – would you do brain surgery without going to medical school first? No, of course not, let’s hold off on this for another testing cycle!”

Her: “Oh, that study group is silly. They go over the entire book and not just the stuff that’s on the test”

Me, dumbfounded: “Well, Coworker J has offered to help quiz me a little, hopefully that will help”

Her: “Oh, she’s the one who wants to go over the entire book!”

Me, horrified and considering smashing head into wall: “Oh.”

And at work itself, where I’m supposed to be able to study for the exam (a little!), they have just decided to start shipping extra phone calls in the direction of my group. Yay.

The good news (says the eternal optimist) is that a month after the exam (win or lose, pass or fail) I get to go to Vegas. Hopefully by then I’ll have sobered up a little because this thing is driving me to drink.

But anyway, this certification is awarded by passing a Super Hard Test That is Very Very Difficult. (Jesus Christ, American Payroll Association, it’s payroll, not neurosurgery!). To pass this test, you must study like you’re preparing for a career in rocket science. To study, you should join a study group, which costs a small ton of money (fortunately, my employer is footing the bill for this).

So I joined the study group, which was slated to start on this coming Monday.

Except there’s a low enrollment (two of which were me and Broomhilda). “Can you attend the class if it was on Saturdays?”

Sure!

“Can you attend the class if we had it online?”

Errm, Okay?

“Never mind, the others can’t do Saturdays. We’ll have it on two weeknights a week, about 15 feet from your cubicle!”

“Great! See you Monday!”

“Oh wait, others can’t make it. We’re canceling the class. Here’s your (employer’s) money back. Good luck with your test!”

So, here are my choices:

1) Try and study for the test by myself and/or with the help of two of my certified coworkers, who have very generously offered to spend time quizzing me, etc.

2) Put off the test until the Spring, when Year End is going on and I spend all of my time a) working b) considering a possible career move to fast food. The study group – if it even happens! – would take place during that time during Year End known as “the time when I don’t have time to even consider food service as a career choice”*

3) Take a class at a local community college, which would be entirely LaineyD sponsored and cost $800.

(yes! Practically a mortgage payment for a class for a certification that I don’t even effing want anyway!)

* = Who the fuck thinks these things up? The entire boondoggle must be from someone who never really does payroll… Sure! Payroll professionals have nothing better to do two nights a week in January (!) than sit around and think about payroll theory.

Arrrrrgh.

Last month, apparently on May 29, I ordered about 6 different kinds of dry dog food. The dog food store that was literally at the front of my neighborhood went out of business (sad), but the puppies gotta eat…

(I ordered a variety because, since we were starting from scratch, why not try to figure out which kind the dogs like best?)

(Spoiler alert: They’re dogs. All three of them liked everything equally)

Anyway, apparently I managed to create an “Auto ship” for 6 small bags of dog food, to reoccur every month. On the 29th.

Fast forward to today. I’m thinking, Hmm, almost out of dog food, gotta order some more. I mention this to Gene, who says, “Hey, they charged us (redacted dollar amount) twice today”.

“Really?” I check my account with petfooddirect.com and, lo and behold, my autoship activated. Twice. Sixty pounds of dog food and (redacted dollar amount times two) …. uh oh.

Fortunately! Petfooddirect.com’s warehouse is smarter than I am and had already cancelled the duplicate order. The good news is, the dogs will be fed for basically a month. The bad news is, it cost about 2x the cost of 1 big bag of food. Nuts. I’m so annoyed when I do something so dumb.

So, the other day I was driving around and one of Gene’s Richard Cheese songs came on the iPod. Let’s agree that it was his lounge lizard version of Baby Got Back (which is a pretty good version, until you get it in your head and your’e at work and instead of payroll, all you can think about is “Skinny in the middle but got much baaack!”).

Anyway, so the song is playing and I am thinking, “Who the hell got the idea to totally change up a song when they cover it?” I have actually suggested to Gene that we put together a playlist on the iPod called “Horrifying Covers” that includes all of the Richard Cheese oeuvre as well as the blueglass covers of Gin and Juice and Centerfold (bahh, banjos…).

Eventually I get bored and turn off the iPod and turn on the radio. And the next song on the station is Eric Clapton’s MTV Unplugged acoustic version of “Layla” (you know, the version that, instead of going “LAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYLLLAAAAAA! You got me on my knees!”, goes “Laaaaaayyyyla, you got me on my zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz :: snort :: whaaa? Where am I?”). I listen to it for a little while (it’s kind of in my DNA) and realize, Oh. Eric Clapton, you have a lot to answer for!

(I mean, c’mon…if he’d recorded that version first, Pattie Boyd wouldn’t have been convinced to change her socks let alone husbands…)!