Pick up the pace

Training the new hire is going ummm... interesting. We know he isn't available mornings as he has classes, but he also didn't tell me Friday when he'll be available to train next on Monday. But he did message me later Monday morning and said he would be able to start at 2pm. Later my boss sent him an email, cc'ing me, telling him she needs him to give her his schedule of when he can work/train for this week and next. She had called me just before that and I did say that Thurs and Friday last week, he would say he was going to start at a certain time and then not show up, sometimes 2 hours later. Or once we had been started for about 30 minutes and then suddenly he remembered he had a meeting to do and had to leave for a half hour. Boss said that telling me a time and not showing up at that time doesn't work. He needs to learn the value of other's time, etc. That's not how it's going to work once he's in the workplace.

And then yesterday he doesn't show up until 2:40, so 40 minutes later than he told me. I'm done for the day at 3:30, so that didn't give us much time, but I left him with plenty of work as he said he was working until like 6pm. I see he worked until 5:50, so just about 3 hours. I'd say about 20-25 minutes of that was me showing him something, the rest he was working on the tasks. This morning I looked to see how much he got done and boss asked me how much he got done in that time. I told her it's hard for me to judge how long it should take someone new to do this, but it kind of seems pretty slow to me. Basically in 2 1/2 hours of time he posted 19 lines of payments, taking him approx 10 minutes per line. It takes me about 30 seconds per line, LOL, but even if someone was super slow, I wouldn't think it should take more than a few minutes to see the invoice# on the report, find the invoice number on the order screen and type on the payment amount next to it. While I know I've been doing this for years, I would have had those 2 reports, with 19 lines total, done in less than 10 minutes, not 2 1/2 hours. I think next training session I'm going to estimate how long a payment report should take and then once I get him started on it, say ok, I'll check back in x amount of time and see how you're doing with it. Maybe that will spur him along to work a little faster. Also, in the 3 hours he worked yesterday he apparently never checked his email, as he didn't reply to boss's email request for a set schedule. Also, when he was hired she told him he needs to do a minimum of 24 hours per week. She was kind of surprised he didn't log in and do some work over the weekend. If he's working M-F then he's going to have to do almost 5 hours per day.

I went to submit my tax return yesterday and it got rejected. It said that I did not enter info for a 1095-A form (marketplace health insurance) that the IRS has on file. Ok, this would be for dh who had marketplace insurance for the first 5 months last year (then I switched him to my insurance through work). I looked through my manila folder of tax forms I had gotten in the mail and nothing for that. The Turbotax instructions to fix my issue said the 1095-A would have come from either the gov marketplace or the state insurance plan. I tried to log into his old insurance plan but could not get it to work now. Tried resetting, tried asking for my user name. Nothing. Then I remembered I had logged into healthcare.gov when I signed him up for this, so I did an email search for that and found an email in January where they said the 1095-A was now available to download. Whew! Found it and got that info entered into Turbo tax and it actually reduced my fed tax by $185 and my state tax by $153. Now my tax returns have been submitted and accepted.

My cat is not feeling well. He seemed fine in the morning, but then spent the rest of the day sleeping in my office and wouldn't even come down when I was done working for the day. Finally he came down just before 9pm and got in my lap to sleep. Well, then I couldn't go to bed because I didn't want to disrupt him sleeping in my lap, LOL, so I stayed up until 9:30. Now this morning he has not wanted to go outside either and is back to sleeping in my office. He hasn't eaten much of what's in his food bowl, but he did eat the few treats I always give him in the morning when I get to my desk. He always jumps up on the corner of my desk and I give him treats. Hopefully he'll bounce out of it today.

While dh was outside yesterday burning the last of the scrap wood he decided to cut down 3 small trunked trees. They are a bit too close to the firepit. One he left the stump up high, as we had bought this cute little wood birdhouse awhile back and he affixed it to the to of the stump. I said umm...won't the birds get smoked out from the fire? He said they come in summer and he can't do fires in summer, so no worries. Makes sense. Then he had 2 other stumps he was about to cut all the way down after he cut most of the tree down. He made it into a cute hitching post! haha.

Cute yard decor. He was pretty proud of himself, LOL. Our backyard lawn starts to the right of that big tree and you can see it hasn't started turning green or growing again, yet. And this morning it's covered in snow again.

I was able to get a hold of my mom on the phone again, so it's good that her phone is now staying plugged in. She's doing well and able to chit chat pretty convincingly, until she says again "it's almost Christmas time". Plus, I can't really ask her about anything. I can't ask her what she just had for lunch or what she was doing, etc. But, she does sound very good and other than not knowing what time of year it is, she sounds like she's doing great. I think when I chat with her she sounds better than she did when I used to call her at her previous apartment.