Welcome To The Real World She Said To Me...

This week at work has been crazy so far and it's only Tuesday. My job consists of writing quotes. No, not literary quotes like my friends sometimes think but lighting quotes. This is the easiest way to explain it. An engineer calls, saying that he has a job and he needs prices for lighting. He sends us fixture schedules and prints and we, being me and my supervisor, Linda, take that schedule and send it out to different manufacturers who sell and price the lights for us. They give us their prices and we write up quotes before sending it back to the engineer. Either we get the job or we don't, based on whether we had the best price. If we get the job, then we put in the orders with the manufacturers. I know. It's a lot of fun.

There was a job due today, a bid due at noon that turned into a hellish nightmare of a job. It was for a new addition to Community Hospital in Munster which is already a monstrous building. I worked on it all day yesterday, writing it out, putting the prices together, and wound up working later than usual, something Baxter did not seem to appreciate for he was wild when I finally got home to let him out of his crate. And he did not appreciate the fact that I had to go in early this morning again to finish up this quote. Linda and I are tired and frustrated considering that the engineer is insane with some fixtures listed as Q5AD and AT12D. He is the only engineer who writes fixture schedule quantities out like that, making it all the more fun to write a quote. We got the quote out, two seperate quotes for two seperate areas of the new addition, by 11 a.m. so at least now, we can breathe a bit easier. Although it's good that it's done, it's also like "oh my god, was that right?"

I can no longer see my desk, covered in papers and prices and fixtures and quantities that are confusing to me even though it's my responsibility to sort through them and organize everything. Linda did make me feel good though saying after it was faxed out that she couldn't have done that without me. I suppose being in the real world with nice people isn't all that bad.