Well, the wait is over. My boss went into the hospital this morning and I went into the office for the first day of "helping to take care of things while he is out". And, although I made it through the entire day without any bumps or bruises, the picture does pretty much tell you how much I enjoyed the job today!

All I did in the 5 hours I was there, besides answering phones, of course, was tend to invoicing. (Not a bad job, just not too exciting.) There weren't a ton of them to do, but there were enough to keep me busy. I might have finished them in 2 hours instead of three, but there were too many little discrepancies in things to make things go THAT smoothly enough for me!

Why, oh why, can't information be consistent? Why was it that Clarke was on the work order...so I write up the invoice...then I go to make up the mailing label and see that it's really supposed to be Clark. I go back to the invoice and eliminate the "e", then save it again. Then I print everything out, go make the appropriate copies, and that one's all set.

Next one...there's a company name on the work order only, so I go with that. I plug in the price according to the price chart. I go to make the mailing label and notice that there's a person's name that goes with that company... sometimes that detail goes on an invoice, too, sometimes not. I opt to add it, then save everything again, print it out, and make the copies.

Then another one...very simple looking, but the writing was so light on the work order that I couldn't be sure of one of the job addresses plus one of the addresses was listed twice. Now, these little invoicing "mis-matches" are really starting to get on my nerves! I had no choice but to wait until later to do this one because I couldn't find the paperwork I needed to check these things.

(Anyway, this is an example of the numerous typos, printos, and handwritos I encountered and had to decipher before I could complete anything. Hey, it's a man's office, what can I say?)

My co-worker came in a little later on. Once he was settled, I told him about the discrepancies. He knew where the paperwork was (NOT where it belongs, obviously!) and we checked it together. I corrected what turned out to be two addresses listed incorrectly.

Once I finished all this "fun" invoicing stuff, I went over to the mailing table to get everything enveloped-up, stamped, and ready for the mailbox. Before doing a thing, though, I asked my "helper" to take a quick glance at the invoices. Good thing I did! He had already done two of them and mailed them out yesterday! I pulled those two out and prepped the others.

Finally, the invoicing was finished for the day. I only had to record on a special log the mailed invoice numbers with some corresponding info. This is when I saw that one of the "Amount Due" balances was different than what I had put on the invoice! Why the difference? Who knows! There weren't any notations around anywhere. Even the guy in the office didn't know why, but he said to go with the lower price. Well, of course he did! Because that's NOT the price I had used! So, back to the "drawing board" I went!

(In case you're wondering, I did get all the invoicing done that had to be done. ***I'm so proud, I'm patting myself on the back!*** And, they all got put in that mailbox, just like they were supposed to. I also drew up next week's inspection work schedule for my "side-kick", booked three new inspections, and straightened the bloody computer desk before my day was done! )

Ok, so I only worked 5 of my 7 working hours in the office today and the work really was easy...but I had had just about enough of looking at darn invoices. But, who cares...I got the job done, there were no emeergencies, I remained confident and did ok, and now it's the holiday weekend!