Working Remotely on Christmas Eve
My company usually gives us off on Christmas Eve, but THIS year, we're working so that we can take off Friday instead. Since working in healthcare supplies distribution, the entire planet would suddenly die if we took 3 days in a row off for Christmas. lol.
Mind you, the DISTRIBUTION aspect of the company is the only ones working Christmas Eve. Our customer service reps all have today through the rest of the week off.
To put in a little extra context, my kid's Daycare is closed today, so my partner took off to be with them. I wasn't able to though. So my condo is pretty full when it's normally empty when I'm working remotely.
Since I no longer have a desk (due to space restrictions) I work remotely by spreading out all my equipment on our coffee table. This obviously isn't possible with a toddler running around and wanting to play. lol. So I had to swing by my local coffee shop to get a little peace for a few hours.
I arrived at the coffee shop, ordered my coffee, and was online by 7:30am. My first priority after logging in is to answer any emails to edit orders last minute from customer service, and there were several from the night before I had to deal with.
After this, it's time to import late orders into any days I've already routed. So I can add last minute products to currently deliveries, as well as work in off schedule stuff. There was a good handful of this stuff to deal with being the end of the year... So I did that.
Next, it came time to ROUTE the next day in the queue. However, with so many days off in the next 2 weeks, the schedule is already further out than the system is set up for. So I don't exactly have any orders to route any further. I'm already routed out for the next 2 weeks. Guess I'll skip that step today.
Then it's time to prepare everything I've been working on to send over to the warehouse, where it will be picked, loaded, and finally delivered. Once it goes off to the warehouse it's kinda out of my hands. I did things like assign actual drivers to take the routes, give them all an appropriate amount of breaks for the day, made sure all time restrictions were honored for each of their stops... the final check so to speak. This went pretty quickly since I'm in charge of a small DC this week.
I'm now pretty far ahead since I skipped routing. I guess I could go on and prepare the routes for the next business day. I usually don't do this until the end of the day if I have a little time to kill, since it's considered ahead work. But why not, I guess I can do it at 8:21am. lol.
I finish with all that at about 8:30am, since a lot of drivers are on PTO, a lot of patients dont want deliveries this week (so they ordered extra on their previous delivery) so there were a small amount of orders to work with. So now it's 8:30... where do we go from here?
Well, I have nothing to route, because the work that far out isn't entered into the routing stage yet. That's my biggest objective that I can just... skip today. lol.
Next I have to import again. Orders are getting added ALL the time by customer service, and it's important to stay current on routing them all. But I'm quickly reminded that with customer service not working, there are no new orders entered into the queue... so my import turns up zero extra work, as it likely will for the rest of the day.
The only other thing I do in a given day is screen calls, emails, and instant messages from customer service reps about patient issues. Things like, patients wanting to edit orders, patients needing things rescheduled, adding notes. Clerical crap like this.
Again though, I'm reminded that without customer service working... the inbox has been empty since like 4:30pm last night.... as it will remain.
So my entire reason for being online has been taken away. lol. And all of my other primary job tasks have been completed already this morning....
So I will basically be sitting here, playing video games while playing with my mouse every few minutes for the next 6 and a half hours. lol. But it's a good thing we didn't take 3 whole days in a row off. The world would have SHUT DOWN! LOL.
You can really tell that the choice to have the routing department open on Christmas Eve came from some corpo who doesn't even understand what the hell we do everyday. lol.
Glad to clock my time as the digital wage mage that I am! 🤣🧙🏻🪄
But on the bright side... I was finally inspired to make the most important purchase of my entire 2025. lol.
Amazon.com: AUEDROT Mouse Jiggler Undetectable Mouse Jiggers USB Mouse Mover with Switch Button, Automatic Mouse Wiggler with 2 Jiggle Modes
