Less Hustle More Coffee

Ahhhhh, I had been awake since 3 a.m. yesterday and have run at full speed for several days. This morning Maisy Dog wanted to get up at 3 and again at 4 and I refused. George thinks she is reminding me to get up. Often on the weekends I can’t sleep in b/c she thinks it is time to get up. However, I must have turned my alarm off (via my Apple Watch) b/c I never heard it again. I have the option on my watch to turn it off or snooze. I have many times missed and hit the wrong one unknowingly.

Have spent the last few days learning payroll and the sequences and steps to getting a person their pay check, the state their taxes, and the federal government their taxes, and how to do manual checks. I have been amazed at the process and check points. A lot of steps built in to check yourself and balances at every stage and that is comforting. It’s genius. Whoever has tweeked the process over the years did a great job.

This is so exciting only I’m not getting time to do much with the other role – there is just zero time. But anything done is mainly e-mail every couple of days or so.

I only have today and tomorrow with the current person. Monday I will gradually begin to move things over. I won’t have time to move much until next Thurs and Friday – after the payroll process closes.

I’m a little nervous (ok maybe a lot) being by myself but there is another person that knows the process if I get stuck or have a snag. I’m both nervous and excited. The biggest confusing factor for me is to when to pay taxes as there are 29 states and some are weekly, some are monthly and some are twice per month. We have 3 payrolls and I report all of those and at different times as some are bi-weekly. So making sure you have all the info and the right info is key.

But I’m going to love it. And a little worried about fitting the benefits in but I think as I get faster, it’ll be ok. Right now I’m very slow and cautious. Probably annoyingly so to my trainer. But I’ve had a good teacher. And she has been patient. I also ask a lot of questions.

George and I are beginning to turn our focus to the weekend. We have talked with friends Don and Lisa and they are coming over and we’ve asked them to spend the night if they will. We are going to have a “German Weekend”. This means we are having German appetizers and dinner along with German beer and wine, and of course we’ll have Alexa play some appropriate background music. We will talk and laugh and catch up as we do. Then we will sleep. Have coffee, chat some more, have leftovers with eggs and grits and talk about what fun we had. I love our time with D & L! Friends that are family.

Ok I’m going to get off of here and then head in a bit early and see if I can get some HR time. I think we pay garnishments today. I really want to type up my notes and put them in order, but I don’t think we’ll have time this weekend. There is already a typed up notebook of instructions but I’ve been attached to using my own notes in my own writing for now. It’s worked but I do want to type them up for neatness and also you “engrain” something within when you write/type it over.

I’m just so excited about the new role. A lot of responsibility to do a Company payroll and the process quite different at every plant or Company I’ve done it for. This one is most unique as it really has a lot of accounting to it and that suits me fine. I considered accounting at one point for a brief moment but decided on management as I was really keen on wanting to hire, set up the time cards, do the orientation, do the schedules, and do the data entry and total the time cards each week. Boy did it morph into more. Back then the applicants came to you and you only had to select the best choices and there were plenty of them. The legal compliance seemed minimal and already in place, the rules were few and established and just changed here and there, and the processes fairly simple, manual, and computers and programs were really just very minimal back then. The screens were dark and I think we called them CRT’s or something. It seemed much less complicated, not as much responsibility and now it has morphed into recruiting needing to be its own FT job recruiting a society that really has no interest in manual labor anymore when they could just go Uber and Lyft their way through life.

The computers which were to make things simple, have often complicated things up. How many passwords does it take now to do a job in HR? I know that even in Payroll there is at least thirty something and since I’m bringing benefits with me it’s going to be 40 something passwords. lol You need an assistant just to keep up with the passwords! ha. And the legal world? Oh my gosh. You have to be so careful. Any way I could go on and on here how the responsibility has continued to mount in the HR field with its need for compliance, training, hiring, coaching, soothing, coaxing, fixing, and just constant fires and interruptions.

So going down this path and working with paper and numbers and processes gets me back to the root of what I had really wanted all along. Anyway I best get out the door on the road. Going to take the leftover chili for lunch today. MMMM. And a caramel shake for breakfast with the Health/ Wellness program I am doing. My trainer asked me yesterday how I had so much energy? Well it’s this system. I am so thankful for it.

Ya’ll have a blessed day. I’ll try to take more pics as time goes on. When I don’t have time I stick a graphic in it and go on. But I love to take pics and share. See ya manana!