Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Busy, busy, busy

The Amersons have been Busy with a capital 'B'. Ethan has had a total of one (1) day off in the past three weeks. Not cool. I worked extra Saturday, and will likely work extra this weekend as well. And I have two 50-hour weeks coming up to end the month of August.

Harborview is opening up two new buildings. The 13 story one opens up next summer, but Ethan is quite busy figuring out the keying and getting everything organized for the eventual open. LOTS of work there. The 9 story building was supposed to open up (well, at least one floor was) on the 15th of this month...but it got pushed back multiple times and now MY floor will be the first one to move over. We were originally scheduled to go on the 22nd, pushed to the 29th, then the 30th....now we are opening August 6. If all goes well. LOTS of work to do. Ethan has found multiple problems with locks improperly put together or crappy handiwork that is NOT okay, totally unsafe to have patients around, so he has to run around trying to get the contractors to fix their problems before it all gets turned over and HE is stuck with it. With only a 2 man shop for hundreds of thousands of square feet of space with literally THOUSANDS of locks, he simply does NOT have the time to fix the hundreds of problems the contractors have created.

I have somehow put it upon myself to assist with the move, so I have spent lots of hours over in our new unit. I designed and organized the supply room with its several hundred supply bins, organized by type in color coded bins. I made the units patient list board and labelled it so it won't look crappy like our old one now does. I went around testing electrical outlets and shower heads and light switches and curtain rods, etc in each new room to make sure that everything works (they don't.....got a list to give the construction people!). Still in progress wtih all of that. Little things that NEED to be done before we move over. The computers should all be installed (one in each of the 20 patient rooms, as well as around 20 in the nursing station), and we need to log in to each of them, check a few programs to make sure they are installed correctly, then try to print to make sure that works, too. L O T S of things to still do. It will be fun when we finally DO open. I have been moving my schedule around a bit to ensure that I am here that day, whenever it eventually is.

But, stressful. VERY much looking forward to our upcoming vacation, although I worry that Ethan will not be able to fully enjoy himself because he knows that more moves will be happening throughout August, and likely in September as well, and leaving Eric here alone is just going to dig a deeper hole for the lockshop. Ethan goes to all these management meetings and security meetings and gets stuck with a lot of sort of diplomatic problems. Eric is somewhat safe from those things, but when Ethan is gone, he will be doing his best to handle it all, but I am sure there will be quite a list for Ethan to look forward to when we get home.

All of this madness should be over by maybe February at the latest, but that puts us into the opening of the NJB building (13 stories with lots of clinics moving over). We need to tear down one section of Harborview that was built in the 1950's because it is not earthquake safe--figured that out in the 2001 Nisqually quake when a wall crumbled and the buildings separated a bit. So all the clinics and offices over there need to move out. Ethan's issue is that once people more into the new buildings, other people move into their old places (unless they are in the part being torn down), and he has to figure out who is going where, what they want/need lock-wise, and the timing of everything. Which changes on a daily basis. And when people start ordering keys for Dr Smith, with no first name given, Ethan gets a little hysterical. He seriously has been after one manager who gave him a list of doctors who need keys to an office suite but only gave last names. Do you have any idea how many freaking Dr Smiths there are?!? So he can't do anything until she gets back to him. But people are screaming for keys. See why he is stressed?? THey ignore his emails and phone calls, don't give him the info he needs, then throw a fit when they can't move because they don't have keys. And he can't just say, 'screw it' and let them flounder, because it is HIS shop seen as the one holding up the move. The head of engineering quit, the interim director went on vacation to miss the move (he is retiring in a few months), and the guy covering for him is so overwhelmed and lost that Ethan doesn't want to throw all of this at him.

Stress.

But, it WILL eventually end.

2 comments:

Sabrina said...

Sounds like a break is much needed, even if that break does end up causing more stress. At least you start with a stress free plate, right?

alyca said...

Actually, we start with a complimentary Mai Tai aboard our Alaskan Airlines flight to Honolulu. Should go a long way towards destressing.