Woes of a Temp

I'm still temping, and still feeling an increasing pull. I got to work at 8 this morning. Not easy since I'm used to the 9 am start in the corporate world. I worked much earlier than this many times during my previous positions, but it was always for a specific reason - I had to get my billed time up to par or I had a specific project that would take me a long time, so I knew that the earlier I got there, the earlier I could finish and go home for the night. This is a little different.

Put it this way - what is backlogged right now feels like it will NEVER get done. It's basically a million years worth of paperwork that needs to be brought into the 21st century and organized into the system that we have in place already. Some of this never got done in the first place, and some of it was casually tossed aside by previous people who just didn't care. Personally, and I know some of you will laugh at me when I say this - I need to know that when I need to find something at work, I can find it. If it entails knowing how to navigate a voluminous shared drive, that's fine, I'll learn the system. I can handle that. But this is...sometimes just insurmountable. What should only take me a minute to find ends up taking much longer, if it's findable. In this paperless world, it's easier to go back to the hard files. Which also have a backlog. Of at least a million pieces of paper.

I finally started to take it upon myself to organize things as I go along. Creating folders, grouping files in the folders, and establishing a system that anyone would be able to keep up with, even if I or anyone else in the place got hit by a bus tomorrow. I actually like this part of the job - I'm challenged, I know exactly where to begin, I am free to run with it and set it up in a way that I can understand it, and every time I spend five minutes organizing one little part of that system, someone sends me an email thanking me profusely for it. I don't know if they're overworked and can't find the time to do that sort of thing themselves, if they can't see the forest for the trees, or if they've just been working within the current system so long that they can't imagine it getting any better, but it's nice to be praised for something that you don't even consider to be that difficult.

Right now, however, is where I feel the anxiety just bubbling up. I'm getting more and more of the things that are in the day-to-day aspect of the job - responding to immediate requests, getting things done on current items, and looking ahead to anticipate future items - and now I see where getting things organized could be tossed aside forever. I looked up tonight and realized it was 5:30, and since I'm not getting paid for overtime here (or at least I'm not going to get a job if I'm billing for it), I had to stop. I considered staying and billing the day at 8 hours anyway so that I could wade through more of the mountain of paperwork that I have to check and see if it's scanned, efiled or filed.

For about five seconds. Then I realized that I didn't eat lunch today. I quit and went home. Anxiety starts tomorrow at 7:50 am.