Forms

Wow, I just realized tonight that I have not been very active in my blogging attempts. Perhaps my lapse was caused by verbal constipation. Most likely, I just had nothing to say.

I have been sorely disappointed by the actions of our President as well as the actions of our Congress. It would appear that the incoming President and those likely to trail that individual into office will not be of much sterner stuff.

Anyway, today I want to complain about something closer to home.

Forms.

I took stock of the number of forms I complete in an average day, assuming I actually perform any work. Oddly enough, not doing any work at my job also generates ...you guessed it, more forms.


Today, I arrived at work to realize that I had neglected to update a form detailing my current enrolled student status. I then reviewed a listing of students I was expected to phone and schedule campus visits for. Upon somehow convincing these recalcitrant potential students to schedule an appointment with me, I was to add their names to a form. This form was to be added to daily then emailed to my boss at the end of the day. I didn't do either.

A student I had scheduled for an appointment arrived today and did not apply for school thus saving me from adding his name to the first form I completed upon arriving at work. Then I noticed that a student with whom I met who had arrived for Financial Aid needed to be added to that first form.

I then had to prepare the first form for a weekly meeting where we review another form and match it with form one which must be printed out and carried along to the meeting. I suggested emailing it to the boss but he prefers to have the written document. Probably because he cannot create file folders. I had to show him how to turn on a computer last week. Tricky job too, the monitor was unplugged.

While all of this is going on, I attempt to phone potential students and when I reach one, I log the conversation on a form. I then enter the same information on an internal form. The interview is then entered in duplicate into an Outlook Calendar (which is technically not a form but the emails that are generated if this is not done are a sight to behold)

We are tasked with scheduling a preset number of appointments for the previous week as evidenced by the form we completed prior to the start of the next semester. If we fail to meet this imaginary and completely arbitrary number, we then complete daily forms to track the number of people we attempted to reach that day.

Sometime this week, I need to complete a leave request form for the remainder of the year with expected days of sick time I plan to take. I have also been given the nickname FormBoy by my co-workers because I know how to create forms and am partially respnsible for creating at least one of the dreadful forms we must complete.

In my defense, the form I created was better than the one that had been proposed. Besides, i would have thought that the average short attention span would have kicked in and this particular form would have been forgotten by now.