Today wasn’t really what I expected. I mean I expected this day to be really hard as it was the first time for the new system to be implemented under my team. The other teams remained intact with their procedures and mine was to see whether the new system would be feasible.
At the very start of the day, the game plan was ruined. Everything was set until conflicts and conflicts arrive, leading me to the worst case scenario: being undermanned. Undermanned in the sense that all those who have been set to have their own roles have to shift to new roles in which requires quite a demanding number of manpower. We were able to manage it today but I don’t know if the same situation will persist on the second run. It actually left me on my knees and nodded head. But this is for the hope that the system will work and will eventually minimize the volume of people coming here because from what I see, students who come here to school are, if not really in a bad mood, they just don’t like to come here and process their registration and that’s a bit weird for people who signed up for something that would help them. I mean, education ever since nursery was, for me, a very large commitment. You would do literally everything to get it as in this country, having a good education can pull you out of misery. But sadly, the same thing is not the one I see in those people who entered the venue. It’s like being enrolled in their classes is kind of pain in their *ss. I mean, UP undergraduate students suffer more than this and yet they are sooo eager to get themselves on their preferred classes. I just can’t see that commitment I saw in myself from their faces. Probably they expect so much from a so-called renowned university. So back into the system’s aim to minimize the volume of students coming here in school. It really did not help as for one, each and everyone who came into the venue carried quite a number of problems. Mainly in their accounts and their assessment. I also heard that only a fraction of the students paid attention to the new system so basically it did not work. But I think this system is promising. People just have to make sure that the whole system is really going to stay within its theoretical limits. From what I saw, it did not even strayed nearby although it was logical as this was the very first time it was tested. Although I do have few things in mind to which the system could have handled the whole thing better. From day one, I have a number for each team’s population. No changes were made whatsoever since the day I got those numbers for each team. It was not a problem for the undergraduates really but for the graduates, tables turned badly. A last minute request for manpower addition was given, right after which my team’s number was finalized and was passed for accounting on budget. This means that any additional people I will pull will not make it to their deserving reward, regardless of their efforts to serve. Although giving service for free is a remarkable decision, it really did not work here in this place. You know what I mean… Pulling people from undergraduates means that it will take time to teach them the basics wherein at the time of request, I just finished teaching the basics to the new members assigned under my responsibility. Plus, there’s a large margin for errors since graduates assessment is totally unfamiliar to the undergraduates. Also, it will break my simulation for handling the enormous amount of students in two of the areas we’re handling. This simply means that they could have foreseen this demand for manpower. For example, a plan to layout checkers was given: 4 representatives from the office, 3 from the committee, 3 from my team. The committee then requested to have the 6 checkers including the 3 from my team to be fully accommodated by my team. From there, it’s a problem because the remaining members are focused on the remaining jobs in which the new procedures should make it quite tricky, not to mention, untested. If I had more members, it’s fine but in the real world, especially corporate, this should have been predicted weeks or simply even days. Any action like this is quite risky. So what I did? I was not able to give them the other 3 but I promised to give them 6 on the next even, given that I will be able to pull more people during this period. This made me wonder why they asked me to get more people from my team when they just had a recruitment. If I’m honest, I was happy to see them in a healthy number now. I know it was hell to run a semester with just only twenty plus people. So seeing that they grew in a significantly healthy number made me wonder why are they removing their concentration into this arena where we are in. In fact, after lunch, I visited my checkers and they said to me, laughing, “…in the end, it was us 3 afterall”. Amazingly all checkers from the committee slowly vanished and I have no idea where they went but I did not bother and told my checkers “just do their job well”. Another situation similar to that was when the actual run went on. This is where the stir came in. First, the accounts came in conflict with the two jobs one member can do so this means a group of members can only do one job. This then demanded more manpower and the committee asked me again if I can add as of this moment and I told them I really can’t because before everything started, I just followed the assigned number of members for each team and I also told that this can actually be seen beforehand and from there I could’ve accepted the other people rather than tell them better luck next time. On that particular moment, it’s like trying to compensate to the problems with a particular option that is not reachable at the moment. So I have no choice but to tell them this is all that we have and we’ll just try to handle things as much as we could. The problems of the students were so many and was multiplied with the new process. The whole registration process before was chopped into several pieces hoping that it will ease everything but it exactly did the opposite. Sure, the students will now see what’s happening with their registration but after today, we thought maybe it’s better for them, really, to sit down and watch and wait rather than wait while standing or sitting in the venue, getting tossed around people we tell them to go to regarding their issues. It pains me to see them, especially that most of them are old people. We wouldn’t mind having late lunch as long as everything can be fulfilled. The organized system before was ruined. We have no idea at start which documents to collect from the students and more problems emerged. Of course, we share the experience with the committee in seeing the angry faces of the students but from where I’m working today, I don’t think walking around from two points in the room several times will make them happier than just sitting and waiting for their paper to be finished. Eventually everything calmed down and I was able to make rounds for the undergraduates. Hearing some news, it seems that the new system really did not work from a bird’s eye point of view but if you look deeply, some have their process be finished quite fast. Though the margin wasn’t that big compared to before. It’s like chopping off only a second between two lap times and let’s be honest, in racing or time attacks, rarely a second makes a significant improvement. I’m not saying that the system or the committee or the decision to test is a failure. In fact, coping with the situation was quite astonishing. It’s like handling a hostage crisis pretty well but with minor damages. But imagine if this was foreseen, and it can be foreseen, and plans were made firmly, forecasts were near the theoretical values, this could have been better. But of course, I couldn’t blame them as I’m not the only one busy around, they get to do more preps that I do. So things, happily, went well until afternoon. Then bad news came in as I was about to cherish the first idle time of the day. An undergraduate problem emerge wherein a halt on enlistment was given out on a particular subject and yet two made it into the finish line. So I had to go there to investigate. This is a big problem because the decision was to remove the students from the said section and if they have paid their fees, it will be a painfully long way to turn back their accounts to a modifiable one. They were not around anymore so my team decided to make the last resort work: Get into the cashier and flag the said students. At the same time, I asked the committee to look for the names of those who enlisted the students. Thankfully, the students haven’t made it to the cashier and we had to deliver the sad news to them. It’s a good thing that this problem was fixed because if there’s someone to blame, it’s my team and the committee can always and always generate quite a lot of reasons to get things down to us. Now at this point, I don’t want the blame only left to us. It’s just unfair with the fact that I don’t put blames on the committee even if there are things that they are lacking in terms of their specific work. But just to work things out, this is what I got: the two people who enlisted these two students happened to be in the same area. Unfortunately one enlisted in the morning and one in the afternoon. The morning case goes like this, after all asking, the student was enlisted at around 10:30 am and the announcement about the subject was made by 11:00 am. One more thing, it was this area in which the announcement was made last. Which means that the morning case should be valid. The afternoon case was when after the announcement was made but still made it to the goal. The reason was that the person in charge of assessing had no idea about it. Which means that the announcement was not thorough, and it was not even written on the board like they used to do. When you check the other areas, the announcement was not only said orally but was also written on the board. What’s more, the other areas have the announcements in detail on the board. What I am just worried about is that we all take responsibility in errors in which we are not the only ones involved. I personally hate this because this actually happened to me but much worse. An error was recorded but I followed every single instruction and yet a mountain high problem emerged. Then they placed the blame to me. People wanted me to be removed but the team handled things well and retained me, and the reason was it wasn’t my fault. So that was just my only worry about it. But I hate blaming. So if I get a notice that sounded like we’re being blamed, I am not so sure about it. I just won’t reply anymore. I’d just think of a way this does not happen again rather than thinking who did this and that. Although if I am to ask who is really to be blamed, it’s the department for me because they’re the ones who don’t want to get more students in their classes and yet they performed actions that will not be enough to fulfill their intentions.
There’s so much that happened today and it really made me collapse to the ground. My mom was actually surprised to see me like this. I know everyone is doing more things than we do but to be honest, we’re not holding an easy job here as well. If we compare it like this: that they get to be tormented or punished slowly, we on the other hand make a mistake and our heads get bitten off. All of the compensations are successfully holding things up but I don’t think it will last long. I don’t like this and I’m pretty sure everybody else don’t like this also.
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