Early Mornings

Over the past two days, I've discovered that I'm actually kinda a morning person, once I get out of bed. Of course that means that I become a horrible afternoon person. I discovered this because I've had to come in early for work both yesterday and today. Both days I've had to be in for 5:15. My plans of going to bed at 9 the night before didn't work, so I ended up going to bed around 11. Yesterday was the worst. I slept through half an hour of my alarm going off, and waking up at the time that I had planned to leave the apartment. I still got there on time, but only cause there is absolutely no traffic on the roads at 5 in the morning, which was really nice. The big problems come around 12 or 1. I start getting extremely tired, and coffee only gives me a few minutes of relief from tiredness. Yesterday I got off early at 4, went home and slept for about 2 hours. This was a mistake, cause then I couldn't get to sleep last night! This morning I actually got up in good time, and got here around 5:10. Ive had a couple cups of coffee and some breakfast, so I think I might actually stay till my usual time today!

Your probably wondering why I need to come in so early. We have a new payroll system that we are trying to use for all of our drivers and mechanics. It's a handpunch system that scans the shape and density of your hand. It then sends the information into a time management program where changes can be made if necessary. Then we transfer that information over to our accounting program, and everybody gets paid. We've got the mechanics working pretty good on it, and we've been paying them by their handpunch for a couple weeks now. Now we want to get the drivers paid by it, so in order to do that, we need to register each driver into the system and set up their hand on the handpunch unit. This has pretty much been my biggest project here at work, so of course I'm the one that has to come in and get the drivers enrolled, and because the drivers leave the office anywhere from 5:30 - 6:30, I need to be here early to catch them before they leave.

The system works really well, we only have three problems with it: 1. people aren't punching properly (ie. they come in half an hour early, punch in ten go up for coffee and to chat until they are actually supposed to start work). 2. The managers aren't telling the employees to punch at te right times, so they need to ok the hours that come through the system, which is annoying. And 3. the payroll people absolutely hate the system. They feel it's a waste of time, and they can enter in the hours faster in the accounting system. If we can ever get past those three problems, then this will be a great system. I can see us getting around the first two problems, but the last one is going to be very hard, just cause they hate it so much.