Day #666 of Pandemic #Journal

“#NumberOfTheBeast”

Friday, 14 January 2022

I almost didn’t write in this journal today, just because of the journal entry number. But I’m not a superstitious person, and I didn’t want to kill my streak, so here I am. Besides, whatever comes along couldn’t possibly be any worse than what we’ve all been dealing with over the last two years. I defy the Celestial Design Committee to send a demon who’s worse than the one that defiled the sanctity of the White House from 2017 to 2021.

I had upwards of about 200 pages of shipping documents to process that I had scanned into a folder on my laptop while I was in the office yesterday. I had to match and attach them to their respective orders in the system, and then determine if the order had been assigned a matching purchase order from the client. If so, it then got sent to accounting to be invoiced. If not, I dragged that document into my “problems” folder so I could deal with the arduous process of contacting the client to get them to send a PO to authorize billing. Sometimes that can take several days or more.

Several of them had already been billed and closed earlier, because I figured that since the client brought back the same amount of gear that we showed as shipped, I didn’t need a document to tell me that it was okay to send it to invoicing. I attached the signed contracts anyway, just to humor the need for a paper trail. You never know when your business practices might be audited, so always dot the I’s and cross the T’s, even if it feels superfluous.

The last part of the workday was spent working with one show that had suffered multiple production interruptions due to multiple COVID outbreaks amongst the crew. They’re more than three weeks over on their shooting schedule, and I’m sure they’re just hemorrhaging money.

Part of me feels that they could be playing the system and are just trying to get extra rental weeks for free, but I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m not a monster, and this show has spent several hundred thousand dollars already, so I don’t feel too put out by allowing them a couple of dark weeks in case their crew is really having to quarantine.

I’m just glad I’m not on that crew.