The Unpleasantries of Staffing Meetings

I'm not sure how I got roped into staffing meetings in Cube City, but something's gotta give.

I go to these weekly staffing meetings to address the tasks assigned to each person on my team and check on their scheduled hours for the week.

It's always the same story:

• We don't have enough people.
• We have too much work.
• We don't have enough people to handle too much work.

So the game begins. We sit around for an hour and postulate about who we can shove the work onto if their original work schedule happens to shift unexpectedly. It's mind numbing.

For the past several weeks, I've handled a ridiculous amount of scheduled hours due to total lack of resolve in the weekly staffing meeting. I think my work hours last week totalled 102. But does anybody care about my hours? Of course not. What do you do about that extra 62 hours that should be split among two people that you don't have? Hiring more people is out of the question right now, so I'm sucking it up.

I have to go to the staffing meeting today. I'd rather stab forks in my eyes, but we don't even have real forks in Cube City. So I guess I'll be taking a stab at the work instead. It's what I do.