The latest upgrade to our workflow here is the Departmental Mailbox. Brokers can now email their submissions directly to the Departmental Mailbox, instead of to our underwriters. When our underwriters receive a submission in their email, they either print them out and hand them to me, or else forward them to my email so I can print them out and process them. Using the Departmental Mailbox eliminates that step, as I can go in and print the submissions in there, and process them without waiting for the underwriters to receive them and forward them along.

A day or two after this system was implemented, there were a few submissions that acted strangely when I worked on them. Between the time I printed them and the time I clicked the "marked as printed" button, someone else had accessed them and made changes to them, and I got an error message saying so. I chalked it up to some bugs in this recently-created system, clicked OK to save them anyway, and kept on working.

On Wednesday, my supervisor mentioned that H (the one who transferred into this department) has been working at her old job upstairs, but processing a few submissions a day just to keep in practice. But H reported the same errors I did, and surprise -- it was on the same submissions that gave ME errors. Well, THAT mystery is solved. The reason that I got errors that someone had changed the file was that *H* was going in there and printing them, too. Both of us trying to mark the same item as printed was what caused the error.

So I thought of a nice little way to avoid this in the future. Now I check the Departmental Inbox *very* frequently throughout the day. I figure that if I get to the submissions ASAP and get them printed, nobody else will have TIME to get in there and cause a conflict by trying to modify the same file. :o) So far, it's worked well.

Besides, what are people here going to say about it? "You're working too hard and getting too much done?"

So what if I'm territorial about my work coming to ME, and double so what if I don't LIKE the idea that the company has been trying to see if I'm redundant practically from the time I started here. Anyone who wants to convince me that my getting a lot of work done in a day is a BAD thing for this department will have a heck of a time doing so.

For the record, by the way, I like H. She's very nice. It's not HER fault that the people above this department are being penny wise and dollar foolish by not realizing that my job needs to be a permanent position. If there's something I dislike, it's the decisions being made by the people above my supervisor's level. The people I work with and for are great.