Double Your Fun!

Remember the old Wrigley’s Doublemint commercials?  No?  Okay, here’s a refresher because I’m a giver that way.

On one of the multitude of sites dedicated to lyrics I found the following posted.  While these don’t match the song track in the commercial above they were posted by someone who claimed to be one of the early Doublemint twins – for what that’s worth.

Double your pleasure,
Double your fun,
With Double good, Double good, Doublemint gum!
Double delicious,
Double smooth too.
Doublemint’s Double Delightful to chew.
So, Double your pleasure, Double your fun!
Get Double everything rolled into one.
Oh, Double your pleasure,
Double your fun,
With Double good, Double good, Doublemint gum!

Here’s where my analogy falls apart.  Everyone in those ads was always grinning like they were having the best time ever.  Double the fun!  Me, these days?  Not so much.  But there is a correlation of sorts.  Get comfy while I bring you up to date a bit.  Got popcorn?  On second thought, got bourbon?

A few months back I wrote about the upcoming changes at work, how we were going to a “shared services” model of secretarial support for some of our associates and others.  At least I think I wrote about it.  Let’s just pretend I did shall we?  Three of us staffers were approached with a request to join the Shared Services Team for the local office.  (The other two got the impression that it was either accept the request or start looking for another job.  That wasn’t my take and I’m not sure where they got that vibe, but that’s another whole can of worms we don’t need to address now.)  One secretary was already in place and had been providing coverage for all the first year associates for several months.  She would be our team lead.  Ultimately there would be a fifth secretary hired and between the five of us we would cover around 40 people.  Yeah, go ahead and gasp or gape or choke.  That’s entertainment!

We’ve been operating as a team for a few months now.  The first couple of months were a frakking nightmare.  One of us went on medical leave within days of the team starting.  That left three of us to cover everyone.  It was so busy I often forgot about lunch until well after noon when my stomach would finally realize I wasn’t on schedule and go on a rampage.  The local Powers That Be wracked their brains trying to figure out how to help us and finally recruited another secretary from the ranks to pitch in on team stuff as her regular workload allowed.  This helped some.  What helped more was that summer started.  With clients on vacation and some associates following suit things settled a bit.  Then our fourth returned from medical leave and the fifth was hired.  So of course the team inbox slowed to a crawl.  We’re still very slow but I expect that to change as summer winds to a close.

However, those first eight weeks took their toll.  We’d all been ill-prepared for and overwhelmed by the amount of work we faced each day.  People would see our faces as we passed in the halls and ask if we were okay.  Our stress levels were off the charts. Then, just a couple of weeks ago our lead, a firm veteran of 25+ years gave notice.  Maybe you can imagine the shockwaves that rocked our office.  I heard that one person even asked if they “got it” now.  “They” being our home office.  No, they did not get it.  The folks on the ground here better get it…this is the new deal.  This is the only deal.

And guess who gets to be the lead now?

If you guessed Janey give yourself a gold star!  Now if you’re a regular reader perhaps you remember that I was “promoted” late last year to be lead of my original group of secretaries.  So put one lead together with another lead and we get TWO leads!  Double the pleasure!  Double the fun!  Ahh, there it is.

Seriously, I’m going to be a double-lead at least until the HR people figure out who in my regular department might be able to handle taking on that responsibility.  Boy do I feel special!

Not.