I work at a Funeral Home. When I got the call for the interview a year ago, I was confused. I didn't remember applying for a job with a funeral home. I had only applied for a job as an administrative assistant. Oh, wait. Do funeral homes have Administrative Assistants? Turns out they do. And somehow, I am now one of them.
It's been good. I'm careful not to sound too perky when I answer the phone. I do my best to intimidate the female version of Frankenstein's voice. It's an art really to be able to draw out your vowels and find that perfectly respectful low pitch. Normally, it's "dead" and I spend a lot of time building my wedding boards on Pinterest. I faithfully have given up every other weekend for this job, and I've fallen into a comfortable lull. Love my coworkers. Love my job.
And then (enter menacing music) I agreed to fill in multiple extra days during the summer. This leads to today, the WORST DAY in human existence of Administrative Assisting. Come on, Administrative Assistants. How many of you can say that you've seen 4 dead bodies before you finished your morning coffee.
I feel like no one understands what we do - or appreciates it. So today I'm going to share with you my day. Just one day. And maybe you'll understand.
I'm filling in at a location that is completely new to me. This also means I don't know any of the directors or where anything is located in the office. It's 8 a.m. and I've come in early with a McMuffin and Hashbrown and home-brewed coffee in a Starbucks mug. I'm here early so I can get peacefully acquainted with the office; find my office, get logged in, find where they keep the paper, the books, the camera, the thumb drive, etc. The manager greets me and at my request he shows me around the funeral home. As he quickly takes me from room to room, I feel like I have entered a new Super Walmart. I peek in the rooms and can see that instead of the normal 10 or so flowers, there are about 35 flowers. This will be one of my jobs to take a picture of each flower, write down who it's from, and then print those pictures for all four families that are having services today. When I finally sit at my own desk, I'm relieved to have a place to sit still and hopefully get some peace. Not so. I ask the manager where the thumb drive is. He doesn't know. I log in and all of my defaults are messed up. Everything is printing wrong and all the wrong printers are hooked up. My desk is right by a door where grieving families enter and want you to give them a tour of the bathrooms and visitation rooms. The directors swarm in and out with orders of service, changes to memorial books, and "new flower picture needs" -- all which need to be done STAT. This alone takes my full attention.
Then I check my email to see what needs to be done. Immediately I find out that we are short-staffed. There's just two of us Administrative Assistants where there are normally three. And the girl who is filling in with me comes in with a pinched eyebrow and a worried purse of her lips. She is brand new. She immediately skips my attempt at friendly introduction and to my horror I realize she knows NOTHING. I quickly realize that I can't ask questions. No one knows the answer. Meanwhile, new girl asks me to come over to her computer repeatedly because she "can't find a clipart image" and "doesn't know how to download a picture from an email".
Meanwhile, the phones are ringing off the hook. And each time I answer, as much as I want to snap, I need to answer in my slow, quiet Frankenstein voice and have "all the time in the world" to give directions to someone who "might be coming from the north or the south". Meanwhile, I hear a director outside my door promising a family that I will whip together a memory video for them before the visitation at 2:00. Memory videos easily take 2 to 4 hours. This promise was made around 11 a.m. As I'm juggling that video form request, I'm quickly realizing that all the work that was supposed to be done for today's services has not been done. With five minutes to spare, I'm printing 4 books (manually changing the printer location and page pull for every page), CDs, Directors Cards, Double-sided Clergy cards, obituary pages, and I go out and take a picture of every flower and print them all. Then the printer runs out of ink. No one knows where the cartridge is. Someone calls and wants to talk to my manager "now" and when I ask for help everyone says to find someone else. In the meantime, this old man comes in - I can only assume he's a coworker - and he says "You printed this wrong. It needs to be fixed now."
I look at it. I didn't print it wrong. Somebody else did. Doesn't matter - it's got to be fixed. I try to sound cheerful as I promise to fix it as soon as I finish with every other stat request. Then I'm trying to load the video on the player. It works at my location, but here the system needs to be re-updated and it keeps saying that Firewall is blocking it. I'm told to call Valerie who tells me to call Steve who doesn't answer. So, once again, I try to figure it out. I call the front desk and ask what player is being used (so I don't mess up any video). He says he doesn't know but he doesn't think any of the other players are being used. So I try to load the player again. Suddenly the same old guy comes in practically screaming that I've messed up the video for a family who's in the middle of visitation. Confused, I'm like, "You said the players were free." He insists, "No I didn't. I said except for the "H" family." What. Yeah, after you hung up the phone? Whatever. Let me try to fix it. The family comes in and says, "Hey the video's messed up." Long story short, that guy takes off and I never see him again. Turns out it wasn't something I did - it was just the sound wasn't working right. But I spent a good 30 minutes in a closet with equipment I didn't understand trying to fix something that wasn't broken. In the meantime the owner of the funeral home finds me and tries to help me and he is equally confused because he needs me to be working on the other video and not this one.
I get back to my desk and an entirely different director places a brand new file of information on my desk and says he needs me to write two obituaries, work up a DC proof, enter information in TDAW, and upload all the info to Greenville News and our website. The family is waiting for me to do this.
Where is the new girl? She's disappeared for 5 hours to help some families with their music. Yeah, so I'm answering the phones. Trying to handle all these technical hiccups. Writing obituaries and completing an entire families every request. FEELING INCOMPETENT. And knowing everyone else is just as lost as I am. By the time I finally finish that family, they realized they didn't have enough money so I had to go back through and cancel everything I'd done.
I needed to update the First List so everyone can see everything. In the meantime I'm not at my normal desk so I'm calling over at least 5 times to another location to try to get my logins. Finally, the new girl comes back and she swears I messed up her computer because her printer isn't defaulting correct anymore. She is like a "silent angry" and sighs a ton for my benefit. The owner of the building plops down and I feel like I need to be on my best behavior.
A director comes in and just looks ticked at life. She says to me, "How old are you?" "23." "Are you married? Kids?" "No." "Oh. What's your real job?" "I'm a student." "Oh." End of conversation.
The best part of this day? I'm going back over the little bit of work the new girl did. You know, because I finally got breathing time and wanted to make sure everything is taken care of. Because I'm thorough. Quickly, I realize she has not submitted the obituary for the family she worked with this morning and that we have missed the deadline. When I asked her and the director about it, she turns to me and says that she left her password on her desk for me to download the picture that was needed for the obituary. Apparently that was the picture she couldn't download from her email. She never breathed one word about a password or that she was not meeting a deadline because she needed that picture. I looked at it later and she discovered she had downloaded it - she just didn't know where. I found it. Fixed it. And instead of a thank you, she says to me, "Yeah, I wish you had seen the password and downloaded that so you could have met the deadline." To the director I hear her say, "Andrea was supposed to do that for me. I guess she had a mess up of communication."
WHAT. Yeah. This was the day from heck. Silver lining? SO glad it's over. SO glad God helped me keep my cool. Now for some Desperate Housewives reruns and some kind of banana dessert. :)
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